The Pursuit of Artistic Inquiry

2 years ago

The Pursuit of Artistic Inquiry

ksinajon

Annie Loui, professor of acting in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, remembers being recruited to UCI from her cozy, full-time faculty position in the theater arts department at Brandeis University, just outside Boston. For Loui, who also trained as a dancer and choreographer in France and taught theater at Harvard University, Southern California was as foreign as an alien moonscape. But the pitch from CTSA's acting brass was irresistible. "I was told I could use the university as my laboratory," Loui recalls. That was 30 years ago. The chair of the Department of Drama at the time was Stephen Barker – the recently named dean emeritus of CTSA who was a passionate advocate for research and innovation in the arts. New dean Tiffany Ana López, who took over on July 1, 2022, aspires to build on Barker's legacy of interdisciplinary arts research not only within the school's four departments of drama, dance, art and music, but also in collaboration with other UCI schools, from medicine to business to the humanities and beyond. "The arts are engaged with research questions that are the pillars of the university," says L.pez, a dramaturg and first-generation Latina college student born and raised in Southern California. "We interrogate and investigate in the same way that a clinical researcher does in the laboratory, but here, our theaters and studios are our laboratories." The naming, in 2020, of Jesse Colin Jackson, then an associate professor of electronic art and design, as CTSA's inaugural associate dean of research and innovation underscores the school's aim to further develop as a living, breathing lab of leading-edge work at a university whose stellar reputation in research is dominated by the hard sciences. "Arts-based research is one of UCI's most unheralded forms of excellence," Jackson says. "One of the core characteristics of research is the pursuit of novelty. What's the future of being an actor? Of sets? Of curating an art show? That's where the novelty comes in for us." He adds: "A research paper's purpose is to distribute knowledge. What we do here is not that different: We create work that's in conversation with other similar work that gets put into catalogs or cultural programming, and it has a similar goal of distributing new ideas. "Arts professors want to advance their fields just as any other professors do." Photo by Paul R. Kennedy The stage had nowhere for the seven actors to hide – they remained in full view of the audience. There were no sets. A sophisticated projection system had replaced this mainstay of traditional theater. "The Story of Biddy Mason," which Loui wrote in collaboration with University of Southern California professor of English Dana Johnson, embodied CTSA's focus on research and innovation – and the novel ways in which faculty and students are producing art. The December 2022 production, in CTSA's technologically loaded Experimental Media Performance Lab, told the story of a real-life Los Angeles pioneer who walked, as an enslaved woman, 1,700 miles from Mississippi to Southern California with her Mormon owner's wagon train in 1848. Mason later worked as a midwife and nurse and became an entrepreneur and philanthropist, building schools and churches. Her story is little known. Loui aimed to change that. She learned about Mason in a short-story collection and reached out to Johnson, who wrote the original short story, to bring it to the stage. Spending hours at the Huntington Library and online, Loui filled in the blanks of Mason's life – boilerplate research that her CTSA colleagues routinely engage in. It's an activity that mirrors the nuts-and-bolts gumshoe work of UCI scientists who toil away in wet labs. CTSA is filled with scholars who conduct similar conventional research, such as musicologists and dramaturgs and other professors who study dance theory and dance science. The push for novelty that L.pez and Jackson stress is being realized in plays like "The Story of Biddy Mason" – in which actors simulated cattle, wheels, horses and riders, with their wordless, dancelike movements, a specialty of Loui, taking center stage. Ariyan Johnson, assistant professor of dance who specializes in hip-hop and jazz, brims with excitement as she discusses several projects she's juggling. One is a 37-minute documentary she's putting the finishing touches on, "Spiritual Cyphers: Hip Hop and the Church," which examines how the 50-year-old dance form connects to spirituality. Production of the first installment was funded by a $10,000 faculty grand prize Johnson won as part of CTSA's research and innovation initiative, launched in tandem with Jackson's appointment in 2020. She's among several recipients of Institute for 21^st Century Creativity grants for faculty research that began in 2017 under Barker's leadership. One awardee is producing an art piece about institutional elder care in a musical setting; another is usi

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Publisher URL: https://news.uci.edu/2023/03/01/the-pursuit-of-artistic-inquiry/

DOI: 7892.28471.7e5bcb62-8264-4d6c-b301-ea87f35f4906.1677710043