About the event
9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday, Feb. 28 and 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday, March 1
Center for the Arts
9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday, Feb. 28 and 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday, March 1
Center for the Arts
The School of Visual and Performing Arts is delighted to bring the Creative Imperatives festival back to campus with ADAPTATION: TRANSFORMATION, RESILIANCE, AND IMPACT. This year’s event will celebrate the constantly-evolving nature of the arts: finding inspiration in one work of art to create another, reconfiguring ways of work to embrace technology or survive a pandemic, and reinventing itself to help engage the community in conversations around social and cultural questions. To complement our featured guests: composer Steven Bryant, artist Leslie Iwai, and Minneapolis-based Theater Mu, the festival will showcase the idea of adaptation-- in all of these forms—through workshops, presentations, open studios, and performances from faculty and students in Art, Communication Studies, English, Music, and Theatre Arts.
“Wake-Up: The Earth Is on Fire!”
This Concert is presented a short distance from campus at Viterbo University Fine Arts Center at 6:00 PM. This prelude to our festival features live music celebrating our planet and exploring the continued climate crisis.
Winter’s Spring: An Ältere Garten
Middleton, Wisconsin artist Leslie Iwai explores the connection between elders and children with vibrant colors, materials, and sculptural creations, which unfold a joyful metaphoric garden. While kindergarten recalls stories and images of burgeoning children, blossoming gardens and childhood adventures, the Ältere Garten contemplates the re-emergence of innocence and childhood wonder that comes in the later decades of life.
From 20’ tulips to a cluster of rabbits, Iwai creates an exciting and reflective exhibition to be enjoyed by children of all ages and the young at heart. During Creative Imperatives 2022, Iwai will be creating a new installation for Winter’s Spring with assistance from UWL students, faculty, and staff. Additional drawings and sculptural works enhance the exhibition showing her long-standing fascination with the intimate and her tender, caretaking perspective.
Moving painting from an easel or wall into three-dimensional space creates a transformative interactive experience for the viewer. Experience this impactful installation featuring color and light. To explore the process of creating these works, be sure to put the open studio in Painting on your schedule. It takes place on Monday at 4:45 pm in CFA Room 204.
Three-dimensional printing has changed the way we think about creating and making ideas come to life. In theatre we often design environments and objects in them you cannot purchase from a local or online store. With a tool such as a 3D rendering software that can then translate to a 3D printer, we can make these theoretical spaces and ideas a reality. A working 3D printer will be on display creating transformative items, and there will be a sample to take with you.
Photographs typically come to me with urgency. Often while traveling, in places that inspire and lift me, photos demand to be taken, to capture a feeling, an expansion of my soul, some beauty or curiosity or detail. During the pandemic, so much of what I normally found regenerative and restorative was unavailable, and I searched for ways to reinvent inspiration. These photos represent a quieter process, a reflection of an inner quest for gratitude and abundance when it sometimes seemed quite elusive.
Join intermediate and advanced ceramics students as they demonstrate their techniques and describe the process of working with clay. Get answers to questions, take a tour of the studio, and try your hand at throwing a pot if you’d like!
Festival Guest and Composer Steven Bryant will join us for a conversation moderated by Dylan Findley of the Department of Music on how he has adapted his music to be more accessible for socially distant performances. Bryant will also discuss his shift towards addressing issues including social justice and climate change in his compositions.
The path from preliminary sketch to finalized costume is ripe for change—due to tight budgets, unrelenting schedules, and even last-minute inspirations. Join designer Joe Anderson for a demonstration of how to create or adapt existing costumes or clothing, and how to create pieces from easily obtained found objects into dynamic looks which help tell the stories of the characters onstage, staying true to the original vision amidst other changing variables.
Many musicals today seem to be adapted from movies, books, or borrow numbers from other productions! “Jukebox musicals” adapt songs from popular culture or from a specific artist and weave them into a plot to create a full production. We'll explore the possibilities with musical performances of different pieces in this recital featuring students from the Department of Theatre Arts.
Come visit the UWL Art Gallery to witness the installation of the Cloud Mobile, created by Leslie Iwai and art students in Print Media and Sculpture during the first part of this semester. This is the final component of the Winter’s Spring: An Ältere Garten exhibition.
In this session participants will become familiar with a brief history of Dada Collage and engage in collage-making to explore self-reflective narratives related to experiencing the pandemic. The goal of this session is for participants to consider their own transformation and resilience while being able to express the impact of the pandemic on their lives.
Attend the screening of the behind-the-scenes documentary chronicling the world premiere of Severe Clear: September 11 from Memory to History, and hear from the co-creators about the nearly three-year process of adapting true stories for the stage. What began as an idea grew into a course with a team of eager student writers and then into a fully-mounted production to honor the 20th anniversary of the attack. The play highlights the personal stories and sensory experiences of a collection of witnesses, survivors, and first responders in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., at the Pentagon, and aboard Air Force One, drawing on media reports, radio communications, and hundreds of interviews and testimonials.
“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” (Lennon, 1980). John Lennon’s lyrics speak to what happens when our plans are proven all for naught, and we have to adapt to what we see before us. The panelists in this session will discuss how music has been a focal point for adapting to changes in their lives and the cultural shifts that we live through. Focus will include adapting to grief and loss with music, what music teaches and how it guides us within gender scripts and social constructions of power, and the role of music in ongoing identity development and transitions
Explore techniques from interactive, devised, and improvised theater alongside artists from Theater Mu. How do we bring our full and complex lives into theatrical creation and performance? What transformations happen in both the actor and the audience at the moment of encounter? This workshop asks you to examine your own histories and observe our impact on others, both on and off the stage. Spots will be available both for those who wish to participate and those who wish to observe the process in action.
This session will feature Mu artists Morgen Chang, Clay Man Soo, and Hope Nordquist.
Moving painting from an easel or wall into three-dimensional space creates a transformative, interactive experience for the viewer. UWL Painting students invite you to both observe and participate in the process of creating an immersive, painterly installation featuring shaped light, fiber, color and wax. After visiting the painting studio to see the process, you can experience this impactful installation featuring color and light in the Creative Imperatives Gallery on the third floor of the Center for the Arts.
The biggest obstacle towards solving many of our humanity issues is the lack of ability to put ourselves truly in another person's shoes. In this session, we will examine how in the arts, and music especially, we can help our students, performers and audience transport themselves to the experiences and grow awareness of persons different from themselves. Through this awareness, we can begin the actionable work of equity.
Join Theater Mu as they offer insight into what it means to be an artist of color in the modern theater landscape. Learn how Mu became known as "the premiere Asian American performing arts company in the Midwest" and established themselves as one of the largest Asian American institutions in the country. Enjoy live performances from the artists, followed by a Q&A session centered around the themes of representation and resilience.
This event will feature Mu artists Clay Man Soo, Wesley Mouri, and Hope Nordquist.
Winter’s Spring: An Ältere Garten
Middleton, Wisconsin artist Leslie Iwai explores the connection between elders and children with vibrant colors, materials, and sculptural creations, which unfold a joyful metaphoric garden. While kindergarten recalls stories and images of burgeoning children, blossoming gardens and childhood adventures, the Ältere Garten contemplates the re-emergence of innocence and childhood wonder that comes in the later decades of life.
From 20’ tulips to a cluster of rabbits, Iwai creates an exciting and reflective exhibition to be enjoyed by children of all ages and the young at heart. During Creative Imperatives 2022, Iwai will be creating a new installation for Winter’s Spring with assistance from UWL students, faculty, and staff. Additional drawings and sculptural works by Iwai enhance the exhibition showing Leslie’s long-standing fascination with the intimate and her tender, caretaking perspective.
Moving painting from an easel or wall into three-dimensional space creates a transformative interactive experience for the viewer. Experience this impactful installation featuring color and light. To explore the process of creating these works, be sure to put the open studio in Painting on your schedule. It takes place on Monday at 4:45 pm in CFA Room 204.
Three-dimensional printing has changed the way we think about creating and making ideas come to life. In theatre we often design environments and objects in them you cannot purchase from a local or online store. With a tool such as a 3D rendering software that can then translate to a 3D printer, we can make these theoretical spaces and ideas a reality. A working 3D printer will be on display creating transformative items, and there will be a sample to take with you.
Photographs typically come to me with urgency. Often while traveling, in places that inspire and lift me, photos demand to be taken, to capture a feeling, an expansion of my soul, some beauty or curiosity or detail. During the pandemic, so much of what I normally found regenerative and restorative was unavailable, and I searched for ways to reinvent inspiration. These photos represent a quieter process, a reflection of an inner quest for gratitude and abundance when it sometimes seemed quite elusive.
A practicing metalsmith needs to explore the boundaries of their craft to forge new techniques and processes. This blending of traditions and new approaches allows the craft to evolve rather than remaining static. Art majors will demonstrate both non-ferrous metalworking skills and traditional blacksmithing techniques. Students will be available to answer technical questions, discuss creative influences, and guide visitors through the two studios.
Leotards aren’t just for ballerinas! Utilizing her background in designing sportswear and team apparel, costume designer Michelle Collyar will demonstrate and discuss how to create dancewear that meets the needs of actors constantly in motion onstage in a theatrical production.
Enslaved Africans and their ancestors in America learned and transformed Western musical traditions to create new, vibrant, and wholly American musical genres such as the blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and hip hop. After a brief 5-10 minute overview of African American music, the session will concentrate on how the essence of jazz is found in adaptation and dialogue between musical cultures. Musical examples such as George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" will show how jazz musicians were inspired by the rich tradition of musical theater in America to adapt its songs to create a new art form. The presentation will use both recorded music and live music demonstrations with UWL students.
Growing up in the Midwest, Leslie Iwai’s family garden was the setting for some of her earliest and most meaningful memories. A frigid winter melting into spring is an experience embedded in her work as she explores themes of growth, decay, death, and new life. Using processes such as sewing, layering, folding, and welding, coupled with an inward and personal form of artistic caretaking, she tends her own interior garden while creating each new work. The interplay of her architectural, mathematic, and science education is essential in the outworking of complex design processes and concepts coalescing in the joy of finding an elegant expression. These expressions can appear familiar—even ordinary—but through materials, scale, and design, she hopes to reveal a sacred and sometimes even whimsical dimension.
Enjoy a chance to meet Festival Guest Leslie Iwai and other participants while grabbing a quick drink or bite to eat (free).
How does a classic comedy of manners about the French aristocracy written in rhyming couplets become a modern satire about Gen-Z social media influencers told entirely through a series of Zoom meetings? Influence is Molière’s The Misanthrope updated for COVID. Performed entirely live on Zoom, Influence incorporated Tik-Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media to tell the story of Alexander, a 20s-something writer disgusted by the phoniness of modern society and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Carlie Mae, a fickle, flirtatious, and fallacious internet influencer. Find out how the UWL Department of Theatre adapted to the pandemic by adapting Molière’s masterwork to a play about the moment we’re living in, from inception to closing.
The 2019-2021 issues of The Catalyst, UWL's online magazine of student art and creative writing, feature many examples of adaptation--art and writing that work adaptively from many life sources, but especially to the conditions of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this session, student writers and artists read, show, and discuss their works.
Don't have a camera? Not a problem, you can still make photographs! Many artists work without a camera, creating images on photographic paper by manipulating light and casting shadows utilizing various objects: leaves, trinkets, notions, crystals, feathers, glasses, etc. It is only up to your imagination. In this workshop we will be making photograms with traditional black+white photographic paper in the darkroom. Come discover this photogram technique that requires only light to capture an image. We will provide objects for you to use, or you may bring you own. Participants will learn the tips and tricks and leave with a creation or two of their own.
A panel of Gen Ed and upper-level English literature students will present and discuss the creative textual adaptations they produced for a course research project assignment. Creative work may include a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, a handwritten journal imagined from the perspective of a novel character, and repurposings of various texts: The Hungry Caterpillar used to educate older readers about binge eating disorder, a resetting of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” designed to encourage teens and young adults to abstain from drugs, and a historically accurate revision of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled.
Join us for the final event of the 2022 festival, a celebration of the music of composer Steven Bryant. Conversation will be paired with highlights from his works, performed by students from the Department of Music. Topics discussed in this “informance” will be climate change and music‘s impact on this important subject. We will also explore the diverse influences on Bryant’s music such as Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor.
Steven Bryant
Steven Bryant’s music is chiseled in its structure and intent, fusing lyricism, dissonance, silence, technology, and humor into lean, skillfully-crafted works that enthrall listeners and performers alike. His seminal work Ecstatic Waters, for wind ensemble and electronics, has become one of the most performed works of its kind in the world, receiving over 250 performances in its first five seasons. Recently, the orchestral version was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra to unanimous, rapturous acclaim. The son of a professional trumpeter and music educator, he strongly values music education, and his creative output includes a number of works for young and developing musicians.
John Corigliano states Bryant’s “compositional virtuosity is evident in every bar” of his 34’ Concerto for Wind Ensemble. Bryant’s first orchestral work, Loose Id for Orchestra, hailed by composer Samuel Adler as “orchestrated like a virtuoso,” was premiered by The Juilliard Symphony and is featured on a CD release by the Bowling Green Philharmonia on Albany Records. Alchemy in Silent Spaces, commissioned by James DePreist and The Juilliard School, was premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra in May 2006. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series featured his brass quintet, Loose Id, conducted by Cliff Colnot, on its 2012-13 concert series.
Notable upcoming projects include an orchestral work for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (April, 2018), an evening-length dramatic work for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, a choral work for the BBC Singers (July, 2017), a work for FivE for Euphonium Quartet and wind ensemble (2019), and a large work to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the University of Illinois Bands. Recent works include a Concerto for Alto Saxophone for Joseph Lulloff and the Michigan State University Wind Symphony (winner of the 2014 American Bandmasters Sousa Ostwald Award), and a Concerto for Trombone for Joseph Alessi and the Dallas Wind Symphony. Other commissions have come from the Gaudete Brass Quintet (Chicago), cellist Caroline Stinson (Lark Quartet), pianist Pamela Mia Paul, the Amherst Saxophone Quartet (funded by the American Composers Jerome Composers Commissioning Program), the University of Texas – Austin Wind Ensemble, the US Air Force Band of Mid-America, the Japanese Wind Ensemble Conductors Conference, and the Calgary Stampede Band, as well as many others.
Steven studied composition with John Corigliano at The Juilliard School, Cindy McTee at the University of North Texas, and Francis McBeth at Ouachita University, trained for one summer in the mid-1980s as a break-dancer (i.e. was forced into lessons by his mother), was the 1987 radio-controlled car racing Arkansas state champion, has a Bacon Number of 1, and has played saxophone with Branford Marsalis on Sleigh Ride. He resides in Durham, NC with his wife, conductor Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant (Duke University).
Leslie Iwai
Leslie Iwai is an installation artist and sculptor whose studies in mathematics, chemistry, and architecture (MArch Virginia Tech) inform her passion to bring unusual connections found in her research and artistic process to the surface for others’ ruminations and inspiration. As the first recipient of the Bemis Community Arts Fellowship (2005) and, most recently, as the first Artist-in-Residence for Intervarsity’s Urbana 2018 and a 2021 finalist for the Forward Art Prize, Leslie has had many awards, solo exhibits, and residencies. Her work is in numerous private and public collections, including Duncan Aviation and the Omaha Public Art Commission. Leslie has taught in both academic and community settings in Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois and New Mexico. She has been a contributing writer and artist for Image Journal, SEEN (CIVA) and The Well (InterVarsity). She enjoys living in and exploring Wisconsin with her husband where she creates art and collaborates and connects with her community. When not in her studio, Leslie can often be found hunting for treasures at thrift stores or walking on trails near her home in Middleton, Wisconsin.
You can view her artwork at www.leslieiwai.com
Theater Mu
As one of the largest Asian American theater companies in the nation, Theater Mu produces great performances born of arts, equity, and justice. Founded in 1992, Mu tells stories from the heart of the Asian American experience, presenting a fusion of traditional and contemporary artistic influences, which range from classics to up-and-coming voices in our community. Theater Mu’s continuing goal to celebrate and empower the Asian American community through theater is achieved through mainstage productions, emerging artist support, and educational outreach programs. Theater Mu was named a Regional Cultural Treasure by the McKnight and Ford foundations through a national initiative which honors organizations that have made a significant impact on our cultural landscape over decades. Theater Mu is a member of the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists as well as a member of the Twin Cities Theatres of Color Coalition, proudly standing alongside New Native Theatre, Pangea World Theater, Penumbra Theatre, and Teatro Del Pueblo. Mu (pronounced MOO) is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character for the shaman/ artist/warrior who connects the heavens and the earth through the tree of life. You can learn more about the company at www.theatermu.org
Morgen Chang
Morgen Chang (she/her) is a Minneapolis-based theatre and dance artist. Her interests include community-based performance and developing creative approaches across barriers of culture, language, and ability. She is trained in Applied Theatre techniques, and as a facilitator uses art and imaginative play to bring physical engagement to dialogue and build authentic relationships between people. Morgen currently serves as a teaching artist and Programs Manager with Theater Mu.
Clay Man Soo
Clay Man Soo (he/him) is an Asian-American actor and teaching artist in Minneapolis, MN. He has acted or taught at The Guthrie Theater, Theater Mu, Great River Shakespeare Festival, Park Square Theatre, Jungle Theater, The Children’s Theatre Company, Pangea World Theater, The Lab Theater, Penumbra Theatre, Playwright’s Center, New Arab-American Theater, Full Circle Theater Company, Theatre Coup D’Etat, BARd Shakespeare Company, and South Dakota Shakespeare Festival. www.claymansoo.com
Wesley Mouri
Wesley Mouri (he/him) is a Twin Cities based artist with over a decade of experience performing both locally and internationally. He has appeared with Theater Mu in Flower Drum Song and A Little Night Music. Other work includes the Guthrie Theater, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, Park Square Theatre, History Theater, Jungle Theater, Children's Theater Company, and Chanhassen Dinner Theaters. Wesley's passion for Asian representation in the arts extends behind the scenes through his work as Development Director for Theater Mu.
Hope Nordquist
Hope Nordquist (she/her) is a multidisciplinary performer in the Twin Cities. She has been seen at Mu in Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, tot: The Untold Story Of A Filipino Hulk Hogan, Twelfth Night, and A Little Night Music. She has been seen at Park Square Theater, The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, Umbrella Collective, and The Moving Company. She can be seen every month at The Saloon where she performs as a singer and burlesque artist in Hot Pink.
Get an advanced look at the program and see all that the festival has to offer! The campus map shows the buildings where events will take place.
