Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE)

2012-2013 Project Grants
Invitation for Letter of Inquiry

Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) is an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at the University of Georgia. ICE invites Letters of Inquiry from UGA faculty and students for projects to be initiated during the 2012-2013 academic year. Selected inquiries will be invited to submit a full proposal and then be considered for an ICE Project Grant.

Projects should be consistent with the ICE mission:

ICE is a catalyst for innovative, interdisciplinary creative projects, advanced research and critical discourse in the arts, and for creative applications of technologies, concepts, and practices found across disciplines. It is a collaborative network of faculty, students, and community members from all disciplines of the visual and performing arts in addition to other disciplines in the humanities and sciences. ICE enables all stages of creative activity, from concept and team formation through production, documentation, and dissemination of research.

Letter of Inquiry should be no more 500 words and sent via email to:
ice@ideasforcreativeexploration.com

Please include the following information:

• Title and brief description of proposed project.

• List of proposed participants (include titles and affiliations).

• Impact of project and potential for future development.

Liz Lerman Residency
October 29 – November 2, 2012

Lecture: “Hiking the Horizontal: Making Rules, Breaking Rules”
Tuesday, October 30 at 4 PM
Miller Learning Center

Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) is pleased to host Liz Lerman for a weeklong residency at the University of Georgia, supported by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Department of Dance, and the President’s Venture Fund.

Liz Lerman is a visionary choreographer, performer, educator, and writer best known for organizing highly collaborative works that cut across traditional disciplines and communities. She has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship. Her work has been commissioned by the Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, Harvard Law School, and the Kennedy Center among many others. Her newest performance, The Matter of Origins, examines the question of beginnings through dance, media, and innovative formats for conversation.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Milwaukee, Lerman attended Bennington College and Brandeis University, received her BA in dance from the University of Maryland, and an MA in dance from George Washington University. In 1976 she founded the Dance Exchange, based in the Washington DC area and now regarded as one the most innovative and creatively expansive dance companies in the world. She is the author of many articles and books including “Teaching Dance to Senior Adults” (1983), “Critical Response Process” (2003) and “Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer” (2011).

Liz Lerman’s five-day residency will feature both her mastery as a choreographer and her extraordinary ability to galvanize and inspire dialogue among multiple voices – artistic, scientific, and scholarly – in all their varied perspectives. Her visit will include a public lecture, master classes in the Department of Dance, and a workshop based on her Critical Response Process, a critical feedback methodology that evolved over the past fifteen years through workshops and a book that has been adopted by many artmakers, educators, and administrators. The core of Lerman’s residency will be a series of collaborative workshops connecting faculty and students from various disciplines in the UGA community of research to spark new works that will grow with the continued support of ICE. Interested participants may contact ice@ideasforcreativeexploration.com. For more information about Liz Lerman, please visit www.lizlerman.com.

Planting Feet Growing Community
Thursday, April 19 at 4 PM
Pinewoods Estates Lot F-G 1465 US Highway 29 North Athens, GA
hortisculpturega.wordpress.com/

Hortisculpture is an interdisciplinary project that combines art and gardening to expand personal and public awareness of art, community action, and environmental issues. We reproduce human feet in clay through a process called press-molding; once made, the feet are “planted” with flowers and vegetables, thereby transforming unused land into a large scale art installation and – eventually – a sustainable garden.

Hortisculpture is doing an installation at Pinewoods Estates on April 19th from 4-6pm; we are working in conjunction with Athens Land Trust to plant a children’s garden for the kids living at Pinewoods Estates. Kids aged 8-12 years will paint unfired clay feet with an earth-friendly liquid clay, then we will plant our feet together! We are looking for volunteers to help out – any and all are welcome. Please contact Clara Hoag (clarahoag@gmail.com) for more information.

Hortisculpture is supported in part by an ICE Project Grant.

Brothers Cobb: private detectives for hire
Monday April 16 and Tuesday, April 17 at 8 PM
Cellar Theatre

a thrilling whodunit? yes.
a world adventure race? yes.
a new play by John Plough? yes.

The Brothers Cobb is an original comedic play that parodies the detective genre in an interactive theatre environment. The project brings together students and faculty from Theatre and Film Studies, Music, Journalism and Mass Communication, and the community. Supported in part by an ICE Project Grant.

ICE-Vision: Venus in Furs (Jess Franco, 1969)
Thursday, April 12 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Loosely adaptated from Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s famous novel, Jess Franco’s film stars James Darren as an American jazz musician wandering the beaches of Turkey. When a female aquaintance washes up dead on the beach, the musician suspects foul play by a sadistic playboy (Klaus Kinski) and his cohorts (including Dennis Price and Margaret Lee). Maria Rohm stars as the dead girl’s lookalike, who may be back for revenge from beyond the grave.”
-Facets

“Like a Marvel Team-up between Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Russ Meyer set loose in the Hammer Studios. Translation: It’s trippy and campy as hell”
-San Francisco Examiner

“The film’s Spanish director, Jesus Franco–an admirer of Orson Welles and the Marquis de Sade, surrealism, and jazz who frequently worked under such aliases as Clifford Brown, Dave Tough, and James P. Johnson–made so many films that an entire subculture was required simply to keep track of his activities . . . When questioned as to his ultimate intentions, Franco could well reply: ‘The cinema is not only my my livelihood but my life . . . [Movies] don’t interest me as a means but as an end”‘
-Geoffrey O’Brien, The Phantom Empire

Beg, Borrow and Steal: Poetics of the World Wide Web
Tuesday, April 17 at 7 PM
Cine, Downtown Athens

The symposium panelists are authors David Shields, Kenneth Goldsmith and Laura Mullen. As part of the English department’s Helen Spencer Lanier Lecture Series, the event is free and open to the public. Other sponsors include the Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) and the President’s Venture Fund.

Goldsmith is a poet and conceptual artist. He has served as a fellow of poetics and poetic practice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and also is a host for WFMU radio in Hoboken, N.J. His work includes Fidget, a chronicle of every movement of his body over a 13-hour period on June 16, 1997, which serves as homage to the work of Irish writer James Joyce, specifically to Joyce’s Ulysses. According to Publishers Weekly, it is an “important book from Goldsmith, pointing the way to a rapprochement between poetry and conceptual and performance art-avant-gardists and art lovers of all stripes will want to experience its near-hypnotic pleasures.”

Shields is the author of 12 books, including Jeff, One Lonely Guy, which will be released in 2012 and was co-written with Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto; The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.

Mullen’s work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid and I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Mullen’s recent prose appears in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action and is published in Ploughshares and The Fairytale Review. Her most-recent work appears in Action Yes!, Cerise Press, Ghost Town, the Denver Quarterly, Viz Arts, OR and New American Writing. Mullen is the special interest delegate in creative writing for the Modern Language Association for 2012-2014 and is a contributing editor for online poetry site The Volta. Mullen is on the master of fine arts faculty at Louisiana State University.