Department News 11-26-18

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Critically acclaimed documentarian Nanfu Wang will be visiting BYU next week. Nanfu Wang is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody-winning filmmaker based in New York City. She is best known for the documentary Hooligan Sparrow, for which she worked under the scrutiny of secret police. The film paints a harrowing portrait of the oppression of Chinese dissidents. The documentary follows a Chinese artist-activist as she seeks justice for victims of a child sex bribery scandal. Filming secretly with a variety of hidden cameras and devices, Wang found herself followed, interrogated and constantly in fear of her work (and life) being destroyed. Since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2016, Hooligan Sparrow has won
over twenty awards internationally including two Emmy Nominations, a Peabody Award, a 
Cinema Eye Honor for the Best Debut Film, the George Polk Award for the journalistic achievement, an IDA award, and the Truer than Fiction Award at the Independent Spirit 
Awards. Born in a remote farming village in Jiangxi Province, Chinese-American filmmaker Wang seeks to illuminate lives normally hidden from the view of the West. Her works include a variety of photographs and short films, as well as the feature-length documentary, There Is No Time, which follows a homeless man in Florida over the course of a month. Wang’s schedule will be as follows. Students, full-time and adjunct faculty  are welcome to join us for any of these events.

Tuesday, December 4:  

• 7-8pm, Guest Lecture in 2107 JKB     

Wednesday, December 5:

• 9-10am, Beginning Production Students about making their first feature film 
• 11am-1 pm, Q & A With Documentary History and Theory Class (Students will have watched Wang’s film Hooligan Sparrow)
• 7-9pm, Watch Dailies and Give Feedback to Two Documentary Capstone Projects

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Radium Girls, directed by Stephanie Breinhholt, continues its run this week and next in the Margetts theatre. We interviewed the production’s dramaturg, Pollyanna Eyler, about some of the things she discovered in the process of researching the production. Stephanie really wanted the cast to see these characters as human beings, not just “good” and “bad,” so Pollyanna figured out a unique way of doing that. In one exercise, the cast and crew used relative finder from Family Search to discover they were related to some of those involved on both sides of the law suit.  Even though the play focuses on a relatively small cadre of workers, there were actually thousands of factory workers who were affected by the radium.  Check out the amazing lobby displays on the 1^st floor and the study guide in the program to learn more.  Pollyanna says, “I’ve lost family members and many friends to cancer, so initially I didn’t want to work on Radium Girls due to the sad subject matter.  Over the last year of production, I’ve learned to face my fears and focus on hope.  Thanks to the sacrifice of the Radium girls, actions of concerned citizens, and continued research by scientists of integrity, we have hope for a better tomorrow.  As consumers, we can do our part to think critically and make informed decisions about how we spend our time and money.  I have come to appreciate this play, despite the tragic circumstances, as a word of caution, a support for scientific research, and a catalyst for change.”

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Rick Curtiss and Adam Houghton recently participated in the ASTR Forum in San Diego. They participated in a working group on puppetry and their paper title was “The Power of Pure Form and Puppetry”. The content of the paper shared discoveries of Rick and Adam’s research in Pure Form during their creation and performances of Legend for Witkacy. The purpose of the working group was to provide peer feedback on their paper in order to strengthen it. They had a positive experience with this and got good feedback from colleagues at other institutions. They also participated in an invigorating, broader conversation about puppetry with other puppetry scholars. This conversation gave them ideas of where the scholars hope research and scholarship will go in the next few years. All together this forum experience gave us a lot to contemplate and they are in discussion about our next steps.

Department News 11-12-18

This weekend is BYU’s 25th annual Final Cut Film Festival. This festival allows students of all majors to submit short films to be screened in the Pardoe Theatre. Due to the large quantity of submissions, a selection committee carefully reviews each year’s submissions to determine which should be included in the actual festival. This year’s festival organizer, Scott Christopherson, remarked on the importance of this opportunity for student filmmakers: “You can show your film to your friends, and they might sugarcoat it, but when you show it to the public, they’re either going to laugh, or they’re not; they’re going to emote, or they’re not… A festival gives students a goal to work towards. It pushes them to create better work because they know that people are going to see it.” Scott has personally experienced the potential opportunities these film festivals can provide; he also participated in the Final Cut Film Festival when he was a student at BYU. His work “Only the Pizza Man Knows” won Best in Fest and caught the attention of other filmmakers that would later become his greatest friends and connections in the field.

The Final Cut Film Festival will be held from Thursday, November 15 to Saturday, November 17. In addition to the short film submissions, the four fiction and two nonfiction media arts capstone projects will also be screened, making a total of 19 films being shown. To maximize the number of submissions screened, different films will be shown each night and the final night will be followed by an awards ceremony. For more information about showtimes and which films will be shown each night, click here. For access to ticket purchase, click here.

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Radium Girls opens this weekend and with only nine characters playing 40 roles, the play “is a fast-paced snapshot of the true story of what happens when the American dream bumps up against the realities of health, wealth, and big business.” Commenting on the unique aspects of this production, director Stephanie Breinholt said, “It’s a nice challenge for the actors and for me in staging all of these different scenarios in one very simple space without a lot of props or furniture… The actors change costumes in the blink of an eye, or even one moment they’re one character, and then they turn and they’re another character.”  One of the things the dramaturg, Pollyanna Eyler, tried to help the cast deal with was how to understand how people could jeopardize others’ lives when they were aware of the risks. Eyler points out that, “Even the ‘bad’ people, they’re not villains. They’re just real people with real intentions of trying to do what they think is appropriate in the situation.” Breinholt also remarked on how impressed she was with the actors’ ability to empathize with their characters saying, “I love that the cast is finding positives in every character… You could go in with quite a bit of bias, especially against the characters that represent the Radium Corporation, but they’re finding the humanity in every character. It’s not just a cut and dry story. Everyone has good qualities, but they make some glaring mistakes.”  For more about the production, click here. For access to showtimes and tickets, click here.

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Megan Sanborn Jones and the current grad cohort of 6 students attended a one-day (October 31) Frantic Assembly workshop to learn the “Frantic method,” which is a way of creating physical theatre using the principles of pressure, counterbalance, and team work.  We created some lovely duets and group movement pieces, and concluded the workshop with a group choreography with all the participants.  The best part of the day was the ride back and forth to SLC in Megan’s mama van, where we talked about art, history, baby names, and the gospel. Frantic Assembly also conducted a workshop here on campus with Kris Jennings, Julia Ashworth, and their students.  They participated in similar experiences, where they learned the principles of the Frantic method in devising theatre stories.  Frantic Assembly teaches a method of devising that is one of the most studied and praised theatre companies working today.  Their work has always been about more than the work on the stage.  It is about the ethos of collaboration, empowerment, and of the constant desire to improve, telling stories in a voice we don’t always hear and finding talent in places we don’t always look.  The group has toured extensively across the UK and worked in over 40 countries internationally collaborating with some of today’s most inspiring artists.  Below are some of the fun things they did at the workshop on Saturday, November 3.

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Student News

Anna, directed by Billy Knowles, just won Best Student Drama Short and Best Director Student Short at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival Awards. Anna was screened last week at the media arts forum and will be screened this weekend at the Final Cut Film Festival.