Browse the Art Collections
« Previous | 1 - 7 of 7 | Next »
Louder Than Words: The Musical
Louder Than Words is a Musical centered around communication, specifically song, dance, dialogue, and sign language. Christian Andrews and Ian Macdonald, in collaboration with Deaf Education major, Claire Stacy, have devised a musical that will explore how American Sign Language (ASL) can be a therapeutic way to combat the lasting effects of damaged mental health. Nick Drashner and the School of Theatre and Dance have aided in the creation a demo reel of the original score, composed by Emily Dezort and Hope Kennedy. This will allow the team to begin the first steps of producing a full length musical, including marketing materials, a full length script, designer presentations, ect. With help from the Flash Grant from the College of the Arts, they want to see an open dialogue amongst the members of our community about working with our disabilities, versus trying to cure them. They log their process through a weekly update video, and the outreach of the performance. They intend to hold a "Director Speaks" after the presentation where questions can be asked and a conversation be opened up amongst the audience and the team.
|
Claws Out
Claws Out explores the ways in which female identifying individuals are made to feel unsafe, out of place, and self-conscious on a daily basis. Our story takes place in a public restroom, where six individuals have taken shelter as they await an oncoming tornado. In their potential final moments, they are forced to examine the ways in which societal expectations have shaped their behavior and sense of safety. We are joined by Bridget Martinez, a fellow theatre major, who is working alongside us as assistant director. Abbie Bottar, a political science major, is aiding us in our research as our dramaturg. Animalistic masks, created by Kate Rossello, an art major, are used to explore the nature of fear and primal behavior. We are exploring the boundaries between text and physical movement to investigate our question. We are utilizing theatrical movement, body percussion, and rhythmic breathing as a tool to help us explore our theme. Our ambition is to formulate a piece that transcends the labels of “dance piece” or “play” and make a work in which either element is unimaginable without the other. We aim to inspire our audience to re-evaluate the way in which they think of and treat the women in their lives when they leave our show.
|
Seeing the Unseen: Where Science Meets Visual Art
In pursuit of a career in Biomedical Illustration, I created a BIS degree program that allowed me to combine my passions in both art and science. For my senior thesis project, I intend to create a scientific illustration of my own to showcase how the things I have learned work together to clearly communicate an abstract neurobiological concept. I intend to showcase how that neurobiological concept is interpreted by the scientific community typically (data), and upon rendering it as a medical illustration, produce a cohesive image that thoroughly explains that scientific topic in a way that is more accessible. Pairing with a graduate student in Neurobiology, I will be using their research on neurohormones and their effects on cognition in relation to Alzheimer’s Disease as a model to create an illustration to convey the key points of her findings. This illustration will describe how different areas of the brain are affected, the pathways involved in hormonal communication, and represent that research in an easily interpreted visual representation.
|
Image
Prominent Female Dramatists 1600-1900
Prior to the 1600s, the world didn't see many female dramatists, or even theatre practitioners, and if there were any their work was seldom recorded. Practically the only female playwright we have record of prior to then is german nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, and her work primarily revolved around religious plays and she was rarely paid or credited for her work. However, after the invention of the printing press and the societal and cultural changes of the renaissance, we see the emergence of female dramatists making a living off of their art. With each writer and practitioner that comes along, there are improvements made to their form and style, their percieved respect from the public, and the widening feminist lens and subject matter of their pieces. These women were intellectual, driven, and had voices and means to say it; all of which were traits that made them ahead of their time. Through the exploration of their accomplishments and their personal lives, we get a glance of the progress of women in the arts over the 300 year span.
|
Image
Brainchild Magazine
Brainchild is the award-winning literary and arts magazine based at the Kent State University Honors College that publishes the work of honors students attending schools in the Mid-East Honors Association region. Brainchild strives to share the best art created by the students throughout our region, which includes thirty-five colleges and universities across eight states and Canada. Our team members fulfill this goal by compiling the best student literature and art into the annual issue of our magazine, after carefully reviewing each submission and considering which ones best fit our idea of what we want Brainchild to embody. During the fall semester of each year, we discuss what aspects of art and literature are most meaningful to us as a staff while also figuring out the best ways to encourage submissions from students attending our member schools. During the spring semester, we work in teams to select and edit the most outstanding pieces and bring them together into a cohesive collection. This year, two of our primary goals were to increase the number of submissions we received and the number of schools whose students submitted, and we accomplished both of those goals. We also engage with our local audiences by hosting events throughout the year, such as poetry readings and creative workshops, which all are welcome to attend! Each year, members of our staff attend literary conferences across the country to learn from and network with other artists, magazines, and publishers and to share Brainchild with a wider audience.
|
Image
Research on KSU production of musical ParadeTitle: Dramaturgy for Musical Parade My topic is dramaturgy for the musical Parade. Parade (book by Alfred Uhry and music/lyrics by Jason Robert Brown) depicts the unjust trial of Leo Frank, a Jew from Brooklyn, living in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1910s. In 1915 Frank was unlawfully lynched based on the public belief that he murdered a 13-year-old factory worker, Mary Phagan. This musical deals with issues of justice, southern urbanization, the rise in antisemitism, the Jim Crow South, Jewish and African American relations, child labor, sexual assaults, the populist movement in the period of Reconstruction, and yellow journalism. In order to honor the voices missed in the original musical, the School of Theatre and Dance production frames the story with the powerful prologue and epilogue. I have been working as the assistant director to Fabio Polanco, the director, and dramaturg for the Kent State University School of Theatre and Dance’s production (February 21-March 1, 2020, at Stump Theatre) over six months. I will present: (1) my research on the trial, the surrounding facts and its relevance in today’s political climate; (2) making of the prologue and epilogue; (3) artistic renderings that include costumes and set design (with permission of the designers); (4) my discussion of how dramaturgy—the product of eighteenth-century Germany—can be applied to an American educational institution. |
Melodies that Pop: Measuring Melodic Repetitiveness Throughout the Billboard Era
Using the Lempel-Ziv algorithm (1977), Morris (2017) demonstrated that pop song lyrics have become increasingly repetitive over time, measured by text compressibility ratio, and that top 10 songs were more repetitive than the rest of the dataset. Humdrum encodes musical data as text, permitting compressing the information using the same method. This study tests two hypotheses: 1) pop song melodies have similarly become increasingly repetitive over time as a measure of compressibility ratio, and 2) top 10 melodies are more repetitive than less popular songs. This study tests its hypothesis using a new dataset: 718 MIDI encodings of the top 20 Billboard year-end popular songs from 1956-2015 scraped from the web. Using Humdrum, melodies are extracted from complex textures, turned into text strings, and subjected to the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, resulting in a percentage of the file compressed for each song. Consistent with H1, pop song melodies have become increasingly compressible over time (R=+.23, suggesting that popular song melodies are more repetitive now than in the past. However, amount of melodic compressibility is not statistically significant (p=.070) between songs in the Top 10 vs. from chart position 11-20. There is also not a significant interaction between chart position and year in predicting compressibility, although it is close to the significance level (p=.0502), suggesting that the effect of chart position on melodic repetitiveness may have less impact today than in earlier years. In fact, the range of compressibility is much narrower after about 2001.
|