Department News (3-2-15)

Another film made by media arts alums has also been accepted into the South by Southwest Film Festival.  Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, by alums Tim Skousen and Jeremy Coon will premiere at the festival as 1 out of 1018 entires.  The film reenacts all the special effects scenes from the film.  The film was also featured last week in IMDB’s highlighted films on the main page. The South by South Film Conference & Festival (SXSW) will take place March 13-17 in Austin, Texas. The SXSW Festival brings together the best and the brightest from all spectrums of the film industry and covers a breadth of topics, from digital release strategies, to filmmaking techniques, production, and casting.

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Variety announced today that TMA BFA Acting alum Mirielle Enos has just been cast in a Shonda Rhimes pilot, “The Catch.” Mirelle has most recently been starring in The Killing.    Variety reports that, “Enos has been cast as the lead heroine, Alice Martin, a woman who investigates fraud for a living. The thriller follows her as she’s about to get married — and about to get conned. And unbeknownst to the man she’s about to marry, Alice is not all she claims to be. When her fiancé’s expertly planned con collides with her perfectly constructed lies, the couple plunges into a dangerous game of cat and mouse.”

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Divine Comedy’s Into the Glenhood show will be taking place this weekend, March 6 – 7 at 7:00 & 9:00 pm in the Varsity Theatre. To purchase tickets, visit byudivinecomedy.com/tickets.

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Playbill, the industry standard for musical theatre news has announced the selections for the 2015 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYTF) sponsored Next Link Project.  There are some great competitors, but among the ten selections is George Nelson and Jordan Kamalu’s Single Wide. “A love story that isn’t spoiled by the trailer. Katy may live in a tiny trailer park, but that doesn’t stop her from having enormous dreams. As a single mother, living with her own single mother, she does all she can to get her son out of their “single wide” situation. This includes avoiding all men, especially the type who left her there in the first place. But when her son befriends the reclusive new move-in two trailers down, she sees something different in him that makes her take a second look.”  To read the whole article, go to http://www.playbill.com/news/article/new-musical-by-american-idol-finalist-among-this-years-new-york-musical-theatre-festival-selections-342584.

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This past weekend, the Scera gave out their annual Star awards, which “honor and celebrate groups and individuals who have made and continue to make significant contributions to the arts in Utah County and beyond.”  The evening also serves as a fundraising event for the Scera Endowment for the Arts and its programs.  This year, there were three individuals who received awards that are associated with TMA:  Pat and Kathie Debenham, Kathryn Laycock Little, and Christian Vuissa.  Congratulations to these individuals who have excelled in the following areas:

• Dance: Pat and Kathie Debenham – Pat graduated from BYU in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education for dance. He’s worked in the Dance Department for over 35 years and retired in 2013.  He was a strong voice and participant in the MDT program.  Pat’s wife Kathie is currently a Professor of Dance at UVU and is the former dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UVU.
• Theatre: Kathryn Laycock Little – graduated from BYU in 1982 with a degree in Musical Theatre. While at BYU, Little performed as part of the Young Ambassadors. She was also featured in the webseries Pretty Darn Funny, directed by Jeff Parkin.
• Visual Arts: Christian Vuissa is an alumnus of the media arts program and is a Latter-day Saint filmmaker. He is also the founder and head of the LDS Film Festival. Vuissa is a native of Austria.