Visual and Performing Arts

Introduction

VAPA 400 is the capstone course VAPA majors complete in their senior year. It is the culmination of our undergraduate studies, bringing together people with diverse talents and ideas to create interdisciplinary projects. The VAPA major is designed around the concept of interdisciplinarity, and in this course we have the opportunity to create connections between the arts and humanities, including art history, film, theater, and the visual arts. In this course we engage in discussion about theory and practice across the arts, and conceive and carry out a number of group projects on the model of interdisciplinarity.

Readings for this course included:

Alan Litch, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, (New York: Rizzoli, 2007).

Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

Matthew Goulish, 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance, (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Murray R. Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994).

Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and selected by Stephen Heath, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).Richard Florida,

The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it's transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life, (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

 

Theory Writings by one of our VAPA 400 students - click on the titles to view the PDF.

"In Your Face Space Coyote"

Interdisciplinariousness

 

What is Interdisciplinarity?

Interdisciplinarity can have multiple meanings depending on its context. However, the term generally refers to the crossing over of ideas and mediums. It can mean being informed by another discipline, like the application of a technique to a totally unrelated field, or using the theories and standards of one practice to analyze another. It can be a starting point from which extrapolations lead you to an end result that has little or nothing to do with your beginning.
Interdisciplinarity is not necessarily an equal transference between two or more disciplines, nor is it simply limited to a single field. Interdisciplinarity is active on multiple levels, penetrating and overlapping seemingly isolated disciplines, creating alternate fields of view. It can be a collaborative effort between multiple people of singular talents, who by working in an interdisciplinary context, celebrate and appreciate their diversity and individuality.
This aspect of collaboration opens up the way for interdisciplinarity to be a community-based concept. Alone, people can learn and do a number of things, but the scale of what they can accomplish by themselves cannot compare to a community of collaborators. The networking inherent in collaborative interdisciplinary work allows us to delve into our specialties and become experts, and then join our talents and ideas to those of others, building something greater and more full-bodied than we alone could achieve.

Interdisciplinary ideas and interactions are important to the arts because they provide artists with enriching encounters that can expand their creativity and help make their work stronger. Artists may refine and improve their work with the help of various perspectives which interdisciplinarity can offer through discursive networking. Every point of view, from the inexperienced to the expert, has something to contribute in this model, and every artist can expect to better realize his or her vision through this type of collaboration. Without the diverse flow of ideas and interactions characteristic of interdisciplinarity, growth in any sector, not just the arts, would be slow.

The VAPA Interdisciplinary Program

The VAPA program, with its emphasis on the concept of interdisciplinarity is meant to teach students to recognize and appreciate the interconnectedness of the arts, humanities, and society, and to utilize networking amongst our peers to the benefit of our individual and collaborative works.
UCCS interdisciplinary VAPA program prepares students for life after college in the art world by creating an environment that requires them to work with other students in the department to realize collaborative projects.

 

VAPA 400 Student Projects: Spring 2008

"Why, let the stricken deer go weep,

The hart ungalled play;

For some must watch while some must sleep;

So runs the world away."

-William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

This is a film-noire tribute to The Big Sleep. It opens with credits and dramatic music. The setting is the Everwood Racquet club. We see a man in suit and hat walking down the steps to the club. He meets with a man in a Hawaiian shirt. Thus begins a discourse in which we find the man in suit is a detective and the one sitting across from him is a prospective client. The narrative builds as we hear the details of the case. Classic lines and a witty t'te-'-t'te between the detective and a woman named Laura leave us with a stunning conclusion. Length: 7min 52 sec

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This file plays with Windows Media Player. To view, click here and save the file to your local drive. Through "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer", double click on the file (AVSEQ01.DAT) and click on the option to "select a program from a list of installed programs". Choose Windows Media Player and click OK. This film has audio. Length: 2min 3sec

From the Director of To the Rescue!, Franklin R. Hallman:

To the Rescue! is about a woman who drives a car with super powers. Upon receiving a distress call, Miss Red and her car, Chasey, respond to the call. This is an experimental short film that required a car to become a character. To achieve this effect, I included a shot of a car pulling forward, without a driver being seen in the car. Also, I included a shot of the driver's side door opening, while the Miss Red character is walking to the car. Upon seating in the car, Miss Red has a conversation with Chasey. The conversation was the interdisciplinary aspect of To the Rescue!. I had pre-recorded my voice-actress, and I used the Roxio Sound Editor to make her sound like a car.

Thank you, and enjoy.

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Film is an incredibly interdisciplinary medium, incorporating editing technology, the visual aesthetics of shot design and composition, theatre, sound, and narrative story. To the Rescue! and Some Must Sleep has all of these elements, from the directors' use of musical score and sound-manipulation software, camera operation and actors, to the written screen-play.

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The SoundJACHS on YouTube (8 video clips)

mp3 of the SoundJACHS' performance (Length: 14min 58sec)

Outside on the dirt there was an upright piano the group had prepared to their liking. With paint and other miscellaneous tools, they performed with, around, and on this musical instrument. Certain actions were choreographed, like beating percussion rhythms on the piano with hands or screwdrivers, playing chords, pulling off wooden panels, throwing rocks at the piano strings, taking out the little piano hammers and playing the strings like a xylophone, or jumping on the piano keys. In short, the actions constituted a creative destructing of the piano. During this mass of actions, the artists also painted on the piano and themselves using their fingers and spray-paint.

Inside on a TV monitor played video feed of the group's pre-performance, which took place inside the piano lab. They played with a grand-piano, but did not destroy it. Instead, they made drawings that were based on what sounds were produced in the playing with the grand-piano. This part of the project was modeled after the concept of synesthesia in which senses translate into each other and other media. In addition, the artists crossed tools between the musical and visual; sometimes a staff-drawing tool was used to make the visual-art drawings. Hand-implements like brushes were used to depress the piano keys instead of fingers.

This work is a more even and obvious distribution of interdisciplinarity, visibly incorporating the genres of music (the making of and the base object), performance (of the music and choreographed actions), and visual-art (paint on the piano object on each other). The artists have combined and shared their particular specialties into this one work.

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Click image to view movie; please note there is no sound.

Inside the Heller Center main house, there was and installation titled 'The Seven Deadly Sins'. The ringleader in vest and top hat with his assistant Lust, guided us through the house. The character Lust moved and spoke in a manner dripping with sex, wearing also a little black dress and high-heels. The second character encountered was Envy. She was a sad-looking girl who had dotted lines drawn on her body, noting where she thought she needed a plastic-surgery nip and tuck to emulate the gorgeous female models cut out from magazines plastered on the wall. To the left of Envy was the character Gluttony. This larger woman in jeans and white shirt, sat hunched in a chair eating and drinking from the piles of junk food and garbage spread all around her on the table, on the floor, and even coming out of a TV screen. In the next room we were greeted by the character Greed, an extremely dramatic woman dressed in fancy clothes and singing about her possessions and how she loved them. There was a pile of purses which she guarded, even fighting with the character Wrath who tried to take one. The woman Wrath looked like she had been in a fight or was high on drugs. She had a man-slave in the corner, and was constantly bad-mouthing or picking fights. In her environment were blood covered curtains and a window, along with a demonic painting that glowed. In an adjacent corner hallway sat the character Sloth, just sitting in her rocking chair and not paying much mind to the audience. Mirrors were set up on the opposite wall with phrases like 'Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?' to represent the last sin of Pride. After taking in all these sins, the audience was then surprised by Lust pulling back a curtain to reveal a large floor-to-ceiling window covered with texts and pictures of strange and disgusting acts and/or fetishes. She pulled people from the audience and goaded them to pull one off of the wall and read it aloud. All of the things on the window were terribly disgusting or graphic in nature, but real things that some people apparently engage in.

Installation and theatre are the major interdisciplinary players in this work. To a lesser noted degree there is incorporated visual art aesthetics and symbols, along with music (in singing), and narration. Add the interactivity and it could be likened to a simulation game (the Sims?) in which characters are prescribed certain actions or behaviors to perform with or without interaction from the players (or audience in this case).

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Click image to view movie; please note there is no sound. 

mp3 of the Sun Project performance (Length: 8min 50sec)

On the Heller Center property, in a nearby field, we constructed a circular performance area with objects found in and around the main house. The audience members gathered in a loose circle around these objects, and were prompted to pick up any of the objects and 'play' them. In this way, they collaboratively created a new sound-scape. One instrument was simply a large piece of wood which one could hit with a wooden mallet to produce resonances of different depths. While we played our makeshift drums made of ceramics pots, makeshift bass and guitar, blew on whistles, howled like wolves, banged on metal objects, pieces of tile, rock, and brick, one of the artists performed a 'sun's greeting'- what looked like a form of enlightened yoga. Stationed near the head of this artist, there was a pole in the ground with a metal bowl arranged with dried grasses and flowers, hung with seed pouches and wind chime tubes. On either side of the pole sat wooden planter boxes with dirt and other objects to 'play' sticking out. Around the yoga performer was also arranged an assortment of long objects pointing outward, as if rays from the sun. If you were to listen to only the audio, it could be mistaken for some sort of nature ritual.

The bulk of the project is a combination of sound and performance. Visual aesthetics however, did play a part in the arrangement of the environment. It was an interdisciplinary integration between the participating artists and their specific mediums to create this wonderful interactive sound-scape performance.