2008-2009 Season & Events, Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies: St. Mary's College of Maryland

Upcoming Events

May 4
7:00 p.m., Bruce Davis Theater, MH, TFMS Night, a showcase of student performances, film projects, and design/technology work. Free and open to the public.
May 5-10
Final exams.
May 14
Commencement.
May 16
Summer session begins.

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2010 - 2011
Season & Events

Box Office

For Reservations:
240-895-4243, or e-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu

For our assisted hearing patrons: The Bruce Davis Theater is equipped with a hearing assistance system. If you would like assistance, please ask one of the Box Office managers for a receiver when you pick up and pay for your tickets. Students who require a receiver will be asked to leave their student ID at the Box Office until the receiver is returned; non-students will be asked to leave their driver's licence.

TFMS Alumni
Where Are They Now?

Megan Rippey (class of 2008, B.A. women, gender, and sexuality studies, minor in theater studies) is currently an M.F.A. student in the acting program at the California Institute of the Arts (class of 2013).

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Site maintained by:
Mark A. Rhoda
For comments about this site or suggestions for its improvement, contact: marhoda@smcm.edu

2010-2011 Season and Events

Hay Fever

by Noel Coward
directed by Michael Ellis-Tolaydo

Bruce Davis Theater, Montgomery Hall Fine Arts Center
Oct. 14-16 & 21-23 at 8:00 p.m., Oct. 17 & 24 at 2:00 p.m.

Like many of Noel Coward's comedies of manners set among the English bourgeoisie and written between the two world wars--like Fallen Angels, Private Lives, and Design for Living--Hay Fever epitomizes the wit and sophistication of the Coward play. Inspired by a weekend he spent at the house of actress Laurette Taylor and her playwright-husband, Hartley Manners, as well as by a slew of other larger-than-life personalities of Coward's acquaintance, Coward wrote Hay Fever in just three days, to both critical and audience acclaim. It's about a family whose eccentricities and theatrical excesses torment a group of unsuspecting weekend guests.

Hay Fever is set in the Hall of the Bliss family home, where we meet Judith, a recently retired stage actress; David, her would-be novelist husband; and Sorel and Simon, their two equally unconventional children. The Blisses blissfully live in a world where fiction easily substitutes for reality, and where their unfortunate weekend guests--a proper diplomat, a shy flapper, an athletic boxer, and a fashionable sophisticate--are repeatedly thrown into melodramatic scenes wherein the Blisses over-emote and, with characteristic theatrical flourish, over-react to situations that do not really exist. The resulting comedic chaos ends only when the tortured visitors tip-toe out the door one-by-one, with our unsuspecting hosts none the wiser.

Reservations: To reserve tickets for Hay Fever, 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.

The Bald Soprano

by Eugène Ionesco
translated by Donald M. Allen
directed by Mark A. Rhoda

Bruce Davis Theater, Montgomery Hall Fine Arts Center
Dec. 8-11 at 8:00 p.m., Dec. 12 at 2:00 p.m.

Both hilarious antidote and fitting complement to the verbal virtuosity of Noel Coward's Hay Fever, TFMS's first main stage show of the year, Frenchman Eugène Ionesco's one-act "anti-play" The Bald Soprano sets out to show how human discourse devolves into platitudinous inanity and triviality. Language, or more accurately, its non-sense, savagely betrays the banality and ferocity of our living, to both laugh-out-loud and mock-tragic consequences.
Bald Soprano poster

Everything in Ionesco's wacky world reeks of English: from the determinedly middle-class English interior, replete with English armchairs and an English fireplace, to the not-so-proper and overworked Mary, the English maid, and her sidekick, the Butler, who's as reliable as the grand English clock, which repeatedly strikes 17 or 29 or 15 English strokes. Here, we meet the middle-aged English couple Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who unexpectedly host the young married English couple, the Martins, who seem neither to be married to nor to know one another. Into their midst arrives the Fire Chief, Mary's past lover, who's on official business to douse a fire and, to the thrill of the Smiths and the Martins, to tell a few funny stories. Innocent at first blush, the Smith and Martin get-together careens toward uncomprehending disaster. And in that wicked twist at the end lays Ionesco's equally wicked humor.

So, come spend a short visit with the Smiths; their young guests, the Martins; their surly maid, Mary; her sidekick, the Butler; and the Fire Chief and your evenings will never be the same again!

Reservations: To reserve tickets for The Bald Soprano, 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.

Fourth Annual TFMS Film Series: Alternative Animation & Collage

Weekly Monday evening screenings
February 14, 21, & 28 at 8:15 p.m.
Cole Cinema, Campus Center
Free and open to the public

With the participation of cutout animator and collagist Lewis Klahr (California Institute of the Arts), computer animator and video installation artist James Duesing (Carnegie Mellon University), and animator Karen Aqua, whose short films have screened in Croatia, Japan, and France and on the iconic children's television program, "Sesame Street," TFMS's Fourth Annual Film Series will offer a range in forms of alternative animation and collage.

The following filmmakers' participation is subject to change. Please check back periodically for updates.

Karen Aqua
Monday, February 14

8:15 p.m., Cole Cinema

According to Leah Sullivan, Animation Magazine, animator Karen Aqua “has a distinctive style and vision of her own, coupled with a dancer's sense of movement and a musician's sense of rhythm."

Karen Aqua has been making animated films since graduating from Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. She has completed 11 independently produced animated films and one collaborative animation/live action video. Her award-winning films have screened worldwide, at festivals in Europe, Asia, North and South America, New Zealand, and the Middle East. She has received fellowships from the American Film Institute, the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), among many others. Aqua has taught animation at Boston College, Emerson College, and at workshops and residencies around the United States, and has served as a juror for film festivals in Japan, Canada, and the U.S. In 2005, a special program of Aqua's animated films was presented at the Tehran International Animation Festival, Iran. Since 1990 she has directed/animated 22 segments for the acclaimed children's television program "Sesame Street."

Aqua's newest film, "Twist of Fate" (2009), was screened at Telluride Film Festival, Starz Denver Film Festival, and Ottawa International Animation Festival, and has won awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, James River Film Festival, and Black Maria Film & Video Festival, New York.

For more information about Karen Aqua and her animation work, visit her web site @ http://mysite.verizon.net/karen.aqua/.

Aqua's program of animations for the Fourth Annual TFMS Film Series is suitable for all ages and includes the following films:

HEAVENLY BODIES
1980, 3 min, music by Handsome Brothers

An astronomical love story.

"Integrates style and content in a fluid tale of the relationship between the individual and the universe." – Michael Blowen, Boston Globe

YOURS FOR THE TAKING
1984, 7 min, collaboration with clay artist Jeanee Redmond, music by D. Sharpe

A three-legged cup embarks on a journey, filling itself with images and impressions of its surroundings.

NINE LIVES
1987, 7 min, music by Ken Field, Robert Moses, and Ken Winokur

A fortune teller's cards lead the viewer on a journey through time and collective memory, using the metaphor of a cat's multiple lives.

KAKANIA
1989, 4 min, music composed by Karlo Tacky, performed by Skin

A striking blend of music and image, contrasting the tension and chaos of modern urban life with the ritualized order of tribal societies.

PERPETUAL MOTION
1992, 5 min, music by Ken Field

A shrine to ritualized time. This film celebrates the cyclical nature of time and the symbols and rites which have been created to mark and honor its passage.

GROUND ZERO /SACRED GROUND
1997, 9 min, music by Ken Field

In south central New Mexico, an ancient Native American rock art site lies 35 miles from the detonation site of the world's first atomic bomb. The juxtaposition of these sites points to the striking contrast between the two worlds which created them: one which reveres and lives in harmony with the natural world, and one which, in striving to control the forces of nature, has created a means for its destruction.

ANDALUZ
2004, 6 min, collaboration with Joanna Priestley, music by Juanito Pascual

A traveler's love letter to Andalucia, this animated film is an homage to the culture, landscape, and architecture of southern Spain. The film explores details of the natural world in relation to the four elements, and suggests the close relationship between people and the land which they inhabit.

SENSORIUM
2007, 5 min, collaboration with Ken Field, with animation by Karen Aqua and music by Ken Field

A hand-drawn experimental animation exploring the relationship between music and image.

An alphabet of abstract animated and musical gestures combines in various configurations to create a visible rhythm in this study of sound/motion synthesis.

TWIST OF FATE
2009, 8:40 min, sound by Ken Field, music by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic

This experimental animated film explores the transformative experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. This expressionistic piece captures impressions of such an experience: upheaval, uncertainty, a sense of physical intrusion, and loss of control. Exploring this emotional landscape, the film visualizes an internal world within the body, imagined on a cellular level.

"Modern illness is a combination of the scientific, the mysterious, and the ineffable -- a startling subject for Aqua, one of the animation world's most playful, rhythmic talents." – Telluride Film Festival

James Duesing
Monday, February 21
Jim Duesing

8:15 p.m., Cole Cinema

Animation historian Robert Russett has said of James Duesing's digital animations: "Characteristically composed of dark fantasy worlds and strange hybrids of animals and humans, Duesing's digital animation offers comical and eccentric reflections on human interactions and desires in an increasingly violent and polluted world. On one level his imagery is composed of entertaining cartoon-like characters in various kinds of richly rendered environments. On another level his work probes serious sociological issues in a way that is at once provocative and disturbing."

A professor in electronic and time based art at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art, James Duesing has had hundreds of exhibitions throughout the world in major museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; at film festivals, including Sundance and Ars Electronica; and for broadcast, including on MTV and Showtime. His work is held in collections at the Museum of Modern Art; the Goethe Memorial Museum, Tokyo; the UCLA Film Archive, Los Angeles; and The Israel Museum. He has been co-director of The STUDIO of Creative Inquiry, a center for interdisciplinary collaboration in art and science projects.

Duesing's current interests involve a team-based approach to animation production. Working with artists and computer scientists he is developing adaptations of motion capture data combined with unique rendering algorithms to depict animated work that contains both humor and cultural critique.

For more information about James Duesing and his animation work in film and video, visit his web site @ http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu/~duesing/html/jdhome.html.

Duesing's program of animations for the Fourth Annual TFMS Film Series includes the following films; some of their content may not be suitable for audiences younger than high school age.

IMPETIGO
1983, 5 min, 16mm original, hand drawn

"Impetigo" is the story of passion and possession in a steamy nocturnal landscape. The characters Zeke, an inhibited birdlike creature; Flake, a post-industrialist robot; and Fish, a fish, live in a barren tract amidst surveillance and entrapment. Their main concerns are lust and what to do on weekends.

TUGGING THE WORM
1987, 10 min, 16mm original, hand drawn

In a culture bounded by nihilism and a strong military presence monuments are raised to the dead and to the things that killed them. It would be austere if it were not dominated by high fashion and billboards that tell the characters there is a larger more beautiful world and it can be bought on credit. The inbred and hybrid beings that inhabit these landscapes enjoy seeing murders acted out for entertainment. They see each other only as stereotypes. They talk about going places and eating things. They dream of spending their life with someone or getting away from the one with whom they're spending their life. They are told that in order to be safe they must not touch; yet, sometimes they touch. Sometimes they strike. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they hold it all in.

MAXWELL'S DEMON
1990, 8 min, color, computer generated

When their culture shifts to being information and service based, industrialists are corralled on a reservation named Lorado to sell plastic things as remnants of their past traditions. The reservation is built on a polluted lake, which is a tourist attraction. In Lorado there are many forms of love and everyone keeps a pet. The story turns on the suicide of Fashionette's fish, because of bad water conditions, and ends with a large-scale chemical fire.

LAW OF AVERAGES
1996, 15 min, color, computer generated

"Law of Averages" is a story that occurs in two places, a lush garden and an addictive interactive theater called Big Ghost. In the garden two lovers meet and begin a relationship that is complicated by a lack of exact compatibility, daily compromise, and occasional sensuousness. The theater is the temptation in this exotic urban paradise. It stars a wild and addictive creature named Vynola. Vynola obsesses the minds of all that come to visit.

TENDER BODIES
2003, 8 min, computer generated

"Tender Bodies" is a sinister yet humorous story that imagines a time when genetic experiments become an elite hobby. The creatures created are hunters and hunted, and one unusual specimen becomes the entertainment at a strange party.

END OF CODE
2009, 15 min, computer generated

An animation that combines narrative experimentation with the abstraction of motion capture about two groups of misfit hackers in a city of traffic. They speak a language of advertising, corporate branding, and self-help, while engaging in a battle to control traffic lights. The discovery that the entire social code is embedded in the access code that regulates traffic lights begins a twisted ride through an environment of characters caught in an endless rush hour.

Lewis Klahr
Monday, February 28

8:15 p.m., Cole Cinema

Called "the reigning proponent of cut and paste" animation by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. Klahr is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations that have screened extensively in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, and Los Angeles Filmforum. In May 2010, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio presented a five-program retrospective of his films.

Klahr's most recent film, "Wednesday Morning Two A.M." (2009), was awarded a Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the 2010 International Film Festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In its recent poll of the top 50 experimental filmmakers from 2000 to 2010, Film Comment magazine ranked Klahr fourth. His epic cutout animation "The Pharaoh's Belt" received a special citation for experimental work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994. He has also received commissions from European arts organizations, such as the Gronnegard Theater in Copenhagen, Denmark (for "Lulu") and the Rotterdam International Film Festival (for "Two Minutes to Zero"). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Lewis Klahr currently teaches film and video and experimental animation at the California Institute of the Arts.

For more information about Lewis Klahr and the program in experimental animation at CalArts, visit http://directory.calarts.edu/directory/lewis-klahr and http://filmvideo.calarts.edu/gallery/program-experimental-animation.

Klahr's program of animations for the Fourth Annual TFMS Film Series is entitled Prolix Satori and includes the seven films which follow the series description. Some content includes drawings of nudity and is sexually frank and may not be suitable for young audiences.

PROLIX SATORI, series title
2009-2010, digital video, 7 films, 78 minutes

"I have often worked in series before—'Picture Books For Adults,' 'Tales of the Forgotten Future,' 'Engram Sepals,' 'The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy' – but never quite like this. The main difference is that 'Prolix Satori' is both open-ended and ongoing with a variety of thematic focuses instead of a single, centralized one. As the series title suggests, it will include films that are very, very short (under a minute) and ones that are feature length. 'Prolix Satori' will also contain various sub-series: this program offers several films from 'The Couplets' ('Wednesday Morning Two A.M.,' 'Sugar Slim Says,' and all three 'Nimbus' films). 'The Couplets' will generally, but not exclusively, organize themselves around the pairing of various pop songs, and just as in the songs' lyrics, around the theme of romantic love." – Lewis Klahr

FALSE AGING
2008, 14:45 min, digital video

Selected by Film Comment magazine as one of the best films of 2008.

"It's hard to believe that 'False Aging' is less than 15 minutes long, given how powerfully it evokes passing decades punctuated by muffled explosions of longing and regret. A button revolves around a clock--and the world moves with it. Klahr shares Joseph Cornell's alchemical genius, but his collaged reveries cast deeper shadows and offer little magical protection from death and disappointment. The soundtrack draws on 'The Valley of the Dolls,' Jefferson Airplane, and Lou Reed and John Cale's 'Songs for Drella.' As Cale channels Warhol, recounting a nightmare involving a snowy park under the stairs and anxieties about troubles real and imagined, a blond man peers at cityscapes, a skeletal hand snatches a fortune, and no-longer-redeemable trading stamps flutter by." – Kristin M. Jones, "Terra Incognita: Unknown Pleasures From Around the World," Film Comment, January/February 2009.

THE NIMBUS TRILOGY

Nimbus Smile, 2009, 8:30 min, digital video
Nimbus Seeds, 2009, 8:30 min, digital video
Cumulonimbus, 2010, 9:30 min, digital video

"Three romantic entanglements play out in the three 'Nimbus' videos, which extend Klahr's interest in constructing almost legible narratives — but doing so in formalist terms that complicate and enhance the traditional pleasures of stories. The trilogy's closer, 'Cumulonimbus,' is a movingly mature account of grief with a puckish sting in its tail." – Chris Stults, Film Comment

SUGAR SLIM SAYS
2010, 7:00 min, digital video

Music: "Lump" and "Like a Nurse" by Marc Anthony Thompson, performed by Chocolate Genius, from the album "Swansongs"

Same address, different buildings. "Put the rope in the can." Mark Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius Incorporated) and I became friends because our sons were classmates. He played me his new album and I showed him some of my recent films and we got excited about collaborating. This is the result. – Lewis Klahr

WEDNESDAY MORNING TWO A.M.
2009, 6:30 min, digital video

Deep Night – what the mind refuses to grasp the body understands. – Lewis Klahr

Tiger Award winner for Short Film at the 2010 International Film Festival, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

"Wednesday Morning Two A.M." has been enthusiastically received, perhaps not only because it's among [Klahr's] most visually ravishing works, but also because it's one of the most hopeful." – Chris Stults, Film Comment

LETHE
2009, 23:00 min, digital video

In Greek mythology Lethe is the underworld river from which the dead drink to forget their life on earth. "Lethe" is the first film in a possible trilogy of mythologically inspired pieces with female protagonists. – Lewis Klahr

"A straightforward narrative film by Klahr's standards, 'Lethe' is a pulpy melodrama that incorporates sci-fi B-movie elements into a story straight out of a Vincente Minnelli women's picture. It also functions as one of Klahr's most sophisticated enactments of the intertwining of Thanatos and Eros, as if the inanimate materials that he is bringing back to life wish to return to their natural state of dead calm." – Chris Stults, assistant curator of film/video, The Wexner Center for the Arts

The Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies would like to thank the following for their generous support of the Fourth Annual TFMS Film Series: Lecture and Fine Arts of St. Mary's College of Maryland; Art and Art History at St. Mary's College of Maryland; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Mother Hicks

by Suzan Zeder
directed by Holly A. Blumner

Bruce Davis Theater, Montgomery Hall Fine Arts Center
March 31-April 2 & April 7-9 at 8:00 p.m., April 3 & 10 at 2:00 p.m.

"Mother Hicks is a witch they say." So begins Mother Hicks, Suzan Zeder's award-winning play written for young audiences. Using poetry and sign language as well as dramatic action to tell its story, Mother Hicks is based on oral histories gathered in the rural Midwest during the Great Depression and deals very movingly with issues of discrimination, disability, exclusion, and the longing to belong. Its central characters are three

outsiders: a young 13 year-old orphan girl (Girl), a young deaf man (Tuc), and a woman in her forties (the titular Mother Hicks) who, because she is a recluse and tends to injured animals, is suspected by ignorant townsfolk of being a witch. These three lonely but loving people find and support each other, creating in the process a positive sense of community. The playwright, Zeder, is considered America's leading writer of stage works for young audiences. Produced by special arrangement with Anchorage Press PLAYS, Louisville, Kentucky, USA.

Benefit Performance for Earthquake-Tsunami Relief in Japan: Proceeds from the Saturday, April 2, performance of Mother Hicks will be donated to MercyCorpson behalf of Peace Winds Japan. Peace Winds is an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) "dedicated to the support of people in distress, threatened byconflict, poverty, or other turmoil." Headquartered in Japan, Peace Winds has partnered with Oregon-based MercyCorps to accept donations for earthquake-tsunami relief in Japan. You can visit Peace Wind's web site at www.peace-winds.org/en and MercyCorp's web site at www.mercycorps.org.

Reservations: To reserve tickets for Mother Hicks, 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.

Department of Theater, Film, and Media Studies