2007 - 2008 Season & Events
A Midsummer Night's Dream
directed by Michael Ellis-Tolaydo
Bruce Davis Theater, Montgomery Hall Fine Arts Center
October 18-20 & 25-27 at 8:00 p.m.
October 21 & 28 at 2:00 p.m
A royal couple on the eve of their marriage celebration. Young lovers, variously promised or betrothed, defiant of their parents and caught up in a tangle of star-crossed infatuations. Add a moonlit forest setting, to where the lovers elope; a traveling band of amateur actors, the infamous "rude mechanicals," who prepare a performance for the royal Athenian nuptials; a rivaling King and Queen of the Fairies, who rule the forest domain; and a puckish emissary who does both their biddings, but who muddles the whole lot . . . and we wonder: is what we see all a midsummer night's dream, or have we really abandoned Athens for the magical, topsy-turvy kingdom of the fairies? Shakespeare's most-produced play ponders the nature of love, marriage, youth and adulthood, and lays bare the tension between individual freedom and society's power to contain it.
To reserve tickets, contact the Theater Box Office at 240-895-4243 (ext. 4243), or e-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu. Ticket prices are $4 for students, faculty, SMCM staff, senior citizens, and Arts Alliance members; $6 general admission. Patrons must pick up their reserved tickets at the Box Office window by 7:50 p.m. for evening performances and by 1:50 p.m. for matinee performances; otherwise, unclaimed tickets will be released for sale.
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Dancing on the Earth: a dance concert
Bruce Davis Theater, Montgmery Hall Fine Arts Center
December 5-8 at 8:00 p.m.
December 9 at 2:00 p.m.
A TFMS main stage dance and physical theater production featuring original work by faculty, students, and special guests, directed by TFMS professor of theater and dance Merideth Taylor. The production this year explores an environmental theme, and follows in the tradition of past faculty-student dance concerts in weaving together cross-cultural and cross-genre work in an exciting synthesis of performance. Choreographers will include faculty members Merideth Taylor, Marcia King Bailey, and Kelly Mayfield; SMCM students; and guest artists. Traditional African dance and drumming, provided courtesy of Marcia King Bailey and her students in the Introduction to Traditional African Dance class, will highlight the event.
Of special interest to our patrons: The performance on Saturday, December 8 will benefit the local environmental group, St. Mary's River Watershed Association. The ticket price for this special performance is $10.00. Ticket prices for all other performances are $4 or $6
To reserve tickets, contact the Theater Box Office at 240-895-4243 (ext. 4243), or e-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu. Ticket prices are $4 for students, faculty, SMCM staff, senior citizens, and Arts Alliance members; $6 general admission. Patrons must pick up their reserved tickets at the Box Office window by 7:50 p.m. for evening performances and by 1:50 p.m. for matinee performances; otherwise, unclaimed tickets will be released for sale.
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First Annual TFMS Film Series: Experimental Documentary
February 4 - March 3 at 8:00 p.m.
Cole Cinema, Campus Center
Free and open to the public
TFMS's First Annual Film Series will feature films and filmmakers from the exciting vanguard of experimental documentary. Five guest artists-the internationally acclaimed and award-winning Alan Berliner, Laura Kissel, David Ellsworth, Christopher Harris, and Su Friedrich -will visit the campus to screen and discuss their films, which explore subjects in ethnography, autobiography, and landscape.
Alan Berliner
Monday, February 4
8:00 p.m., Cole Cinema
Nobody's Business, City Edition
Free and open to the public
One of the U.S.'s most acclaimed independent documentary filmmakers and recipient in 2006 of the Documentary Association's International Trailblazer Award for his "creativity, innovation, originality and breakthrough in the field of documentary cinema," Alan Berliner has been on the forefront of avant-garde filmmaking since 1975. Berliner's work has been broadcast worldwide and has received awards at a variety of major international film festivals. Selected retrospectives of his films have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and at film festivals from Norway and Finland to England, Australia, and Brazil.
Nobody's Business, which will screen with City Edition, is an unflinchingly honest and frequently humorous portrait of Berliner's reclusive (and stubbornly resistant) father. Writing in Film Comment in 1996, critic Philip Lopate has said of Berliner and the film: "I know of no one working in personal films today who can do so well what Alan Berliner does: bring dramatically alive the intense agony and ambivalence and love within families." Since its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1996, Nobody's Business has won twelve international awards, including both the Caligari Film Prize and the International Film Critics Association Prize at the 1997 Berlin International Film Festival.
Laura Kissel
Monday, February 11
8:00 p.m., Cole Cinema
Cabin Field, Vivian's Beauty Shop, Unfettering the Falcons
Free and open to the public
"I use filmmaking," says Laura Kissel, "as a mode of inquiry, a way of engaging with the world and exploring questions about culture, memory, and the representation of history." This approach is evident in two of Kissel's three films to be screened. Cabin Field (2006), an experimental documentary, explores the site of Cabin Field, a mile-long stretch of agricultural land in Crisp County, Georgia, through the memories of land owners, farmers, residents, and agricultural laborers. Vivian's Beauty Shop (2005) is a short video portrait of the customers who frequent a small town beauty parlor.
Kissel is an Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University of South Carolina. She has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, including the Juried Citation Award at the 2006 Black Maria Film and Video Festival for Cabin Field.
David Ellsworth
Monday, February 18
8:00 p.m., Cole Cinema
Time, and the River, Husks
Free and open to the public
Working in a variety of formats, including Super-8mm, 16mm, and digital video, David Ellsworth began filmmaking in 1996 with his 2.5 minute Ice, a Super-8mm experimental film that also played internationally on MTV as a music video for Chicago band Tortoise. His work has screened and won awards at festivals internationally, including New York City, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Havana, Paris, and Tokyo.
Husks (2002), which will screen with Time, and the River (2004), provides an experimental portrait of rural Iowa life that explores past and present visions of how people and rural landscape interact. The film includes a mix of 16mm and optically printed Super-8 film. Time, and the River, a documentary about people living in boat houses on the Mississippi River near Winona, Minnesota, "is at once deceptively simple, yet artistically complex," critic George Lellis has said. "Ellsworth prizes simplicity-the simplicity of nature, simplicity of living, the simplicity of sparsely beautiful images."
Ellsworth teaches film and video production, screenwriting, and cinema studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
Christopher Harris
Monday, February 25
8:00 p.m., Cole Cinema
still/here, Reckless Eyeballing
Free and open to the public
Christopher Harris's films still/here (2000) and Reckless Eyeballing (2004) employ formal abstraction in order to explore the intersection of history and memory in ways that unravel conventional tropes of race and identity. A powerfully melancholy film about the blighted cityscape of St. Louis's north side, still/here articulates the disturbing relationships of people with place. Reckless Eyeballing (2004), a short film using recycled images from The Birth of a Nation, Black action heroine Pam Grier, and '60s activist Angela Davis, unravels long-standing narrative tropes of the outlawed Black body and its threatening gaze.
Exhibited internationally at festivals and cinémathèques throughout North America and Europe, including Rotterdam, Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, Harris's experimental work has been the subject of scholarly inquiry and is included in the permanent collection of the Film Study Center at Yale University. Harris is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Central Florida, where he teaches experimental film, film theory, and Black Cinema.
Su Friedrich
Monday, March 3
8:00 p.m., Cole Cinema
Sink or Swim, Seeing Red
Free and open to the public
Su Friedrich began filmmaking in 1978 and has produced and directed eighteen 16mm films and videos. With the exception of one work, she is the writer, director, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor of all her films.
Synthesizing experimental, narrative, and documentary forms, Friedrich's work moves fluidly between the personal and the political, from autobiography, like Seeing Red and Sink or Swim ("one of the most emotionally moving avant-garde films produced in the past twenty-five years," The Chronicle Review), to investigations of sexual identities and identity politics. A leading figure in avant-garde cinema from the outset of her career, she has been a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema. Recipient of numerous fellowships-from the NEA and the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Jerome Foundations-Friedrich has been honored internationally for her filmmaking. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Library of Australia.
Friedrich teaches film and video production at Princeton University.
The Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies would like to thank the following for their generous support of the First Annual TFMS Film Series: Lecture and Fine Arts of St. Mary's College of Maryland; Arts Alliance of St. Mary's College of Maryland; the Department of Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
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The Balcony
translated by Bernard Frechtman
directed by Joanne Klein & Mark A. Rhoda
Bruce Davis Theater, Montgomery Hall Fine Arts Center
April 3-5 & 10-12 at 8:00 p.m.
April 6 & 13 at 2:00 p.m.
"M. Genet's vision of society is both perverse and private, and his play is a species of Grand Guignol -- arresting, horrific, and trivial."(Donald Malcolm, The New Yorker)
"You can't have sex without politics or politics without sex."(Larry Flynt, on MSNBC)
What does hegemony have in common with a bordello? Jean Genet's wicked and hilarious play, The Balcony, fuses the two worlds. The bedroom politics of S&M reveal not only the well-known pleasures of power, but also the clandestine thrills of humiliation and shame that eroticize abasement and explain why the lowly play their role in the game of social hierarchy. It is a profoundly subversive play.
First produced and written in 1956, The Balcony scandalized Paris and was banished to a private club in London. Set in a brothel, The Grand Balcony, the scenes depict patrons acting out drag fantasies -- impersonating civic, military, and religious dignitaries. As the city around them erupts in violent insurgency, working-class johns play out ritualized erotics of class abuse in Madame Irma's studios. In a series of hilarious and deadly masquerades, a "judge" abuses a "thief"; a "bishop" abuses a "sinner"; and a "general" abuses his "horse." After the Royal Palace is bombed and the rulers presumably killed, the patrons find themselves permanently, if reluctantly and ironically, thrust into their fantasy roles (with Irma assuming the role of Queen), preserving the status quo in the post-revolutionary public arena.
Jean Genet -thief, bastard, homosexual, convict, and one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century was born in Paris in 1910. After being abandoned by his twenty-two-year-old unwed mother when he was seven months old, he became a ward of the state. At thirteen, Genet was sent to a vocational school run by the state welfare system. He ran away almost immediately, beginning a series of escapes, failed foster-home placements, and arrests for petty crimes that ended with his incarceration in a penal institution for boys. In 1929, Genet enrolled in the French Foreign Legion, from which he soon deserted, turning to a life of thieving and pimping that resulted in repeated jail terms for burglary, vagrancy, and homosexuality and, eventually, a sentence of life imprisonment. In prison, Genet began to write poems and prose that combined pornography and an open celebration of criminality with an extraordinary baroque, high literary style and on the strength of this work found himself acclaimed by such literary luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, whose advocacy secured for him a presidential pardon in 1948. Canonized by Sartre in his seminal biography (Saint-Genet: Actor and Martyr) and called "rotten with genius" by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Genet is the author of the novels Our Lady of the Flowers, The Thief's Journal, Funeral Rites, Miracle of the Rose, and Querelle (which was made into a movie by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982), as well as numerous plays, including The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch, and The Balcony. He died in 1986, shortly after completing Prisoner of Love, his memoirs of his earlier experiences in the Middle East and with the Palestinian revolution.
Because of its adult-oriented content and depictions, this production may not be suitable for all audiences.
Tickets: $4 for faculty, students, SMCM staff, senior citizens, and Arts Alliance members; $6 general admission. To reserve tickets, contact the Theater Box Office at 240-895-4243 or e-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu. Patrons must pick up their reserved tickets at the Box Office window by 7:50 p.m. for evening performances and by 1:50 p.m. for matinee performances; otherwise, unclaimed tickets will be released for sale.
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