For this 50th anniversary celebration, Pilobolus questions its own “givens,” turns its traditions sideways, and brings its past into the future. As fresh and vibrant as ever, Pilobolus –that feisty arts organism– puts the “Oh!” in BIG FIVE OH!, and continues to morph its way thrillingly into audiences’ hearts and minds. The celebration includes signature works from vintage classics to their trend setting innovative work in shadow.
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Pilobolus Big Five-Oh!
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The Woods – A mixed-reality, two-player cooperative game
“The Woods” is a mixed-reality, two-player cooperative game that addresses the perils of social isolation by promoting connections between people and actively engaging them through play. Using Augmented Reality (AR) and 4-channel audio spatialization panning, players choreograph their movement in real-world space while interacting with birds, clouds, and other objects in virtual space. In pursuit of a shared goal, players experience an immersive sonic narrative of rumbling storm clouds and disconnected voices that culminate in stories of hope and reconciliation. The design intent behind “The Woods” is to illuminate human connections to others and to celebrate this through collaborative play.
4pm – 5pm – Experience The Woods (Demo)
Location: IDM (Interactive Digital Media) Research Lab, Plangere Room 135
RSVP Required for the demo session ONLY.
For more info or to RSVP, contact Wobbe F. Koning at wkoning@monmouth.edu
6pm – 7pm – Artist Talk and Q&A | Location: Pollak Theatre | Free and open to the publicBios:
Kyoung Lee Swearingen is a visual storyteller with over a decade of experience as a Lighting Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios and DNA Productions. Kyoung teaches computer animation at ACCAD/The Ohio State University and specializes in cinematography for games and animation. Her current research focuses on creating games and animation for collaborative play, using various emerging technology, and practicing transdisciplinary collaboration. Her award-winning projects have been shown (inter)nationally at ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE-GEM, Unite Berlin, GDC, Montreal Independent Game Festival, and Bucheon International Animation Festival, and many more.
Scott Swearingen is an Assistant Professor who teaches game design at ACCAD/The Ohio State University. With a research focus in designing game mechanics that enhance collaborative play, his work cultivates the human experience of connectivity across a variety of physical and social boundaries. His award-winning games and other works have been exhibited at (in)ternational conferences and shows including SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH-ASIA, CURRENTS New Media, GLS, IEEE-GEM, IFIP-ICEC, Montreal Independent Games Festival, and HASTAC. Prior to joining Ohio State, Scott worked in the video game industry for over ten years as a game designer, level designer, and environment artist at multiple video game studios including MAXIS, Electronic Arts, and Gearbox Software. There he worked on numerous award-winning games and franchises including Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, The Simpsons, Dead Space, The Godfather and The Sims.
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A Conversation with Robert Pinsky
Join former three-term US Poet Laureate and Long Branch, NJ native Robert Pinsky for an evening of conversation in celebration of the release of his memoir Jersey Breaks. The evening will be moderated by the Dean of The Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, David Hamilton Golland, Ph.D.
“Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore.” – Bruce Springsteen
The acclaimed poet takes an affectionate look back. The U.S. poet laureate from 1997 to 2000 and “an expert at nothing except the sounds of sentences in the English language,” Pinsky (b. 1940) moves back and forth in time, narrating his life in crisp, self-deprecating prose. “If I have a story to tell,” he writes, “it’s how the failures and aspirations of a certain time and place led to poetry.” That place was Long Branch, New Jersey, where the author grew up in an Orthodox, lower-middle-class family in a neighborhood that was both poor and segregated. In the “sounds of Hebrew,” Pinsky heard Milton, Blake, and Whitman. He recalls reading stories and poems in the glossy magazines in his optician father’s waiting room as well as the “exact moment when I became a writer,” thanks to Through the Looking Glass. As an “ambitious, pseudointellectual freshman” at Rutgers University, he encountered and enjoyed Ulysses and the poetry of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg. Pinsky confesses that his way of writing a poem stems from getting a “tune in my head…like noodling at the piano,” and his approach fostered his popular Favorite Poem Project, which combined the “appeal of gossip with the appeal of art.”
Though the author loved playing music, poetry came first in college, and he explains how his “habit of thinking about names was essential to my work as a poet.” He lavishes praise on two cantankerous college teachers—Paul Fussell and “relentless dictator” Yvor Winters—as well as his friend and mentor Thom Gunn. When teaching at Wellesley in 1970, Pinsky attended Robert Lowell’s “erratic writing workshop,” and Lowell gave him a blurb for his first collection, Sadness and Happiness. Throughout, the author sharply dissects a variety of poems, including his own, and he excitedly explains the welcome challenge of translating Dante’s Inferno.
Fans of literature will relish Pinsky’s jocular recollections and infectious love of poetry.
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The American Soldier
Douglas Taurel (“Nurse Jackie,” “Blue Bloods”) is the creator and star of the Off-Broadway Award-nominated solo play, “The American Soldier,” based on true events and documentary letters written by veterans and their family members from the American Revolution through current-day Afghanistan. It honors the experiences of veterans and their families and explores the internal struggles they face when returning home from combat. “The American Soldier” has been nominated for the Amnesty International Award for theatre excellence , received 4 stars internationally, and has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and Time Out.
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Los Lobos
The journey of Los Lobos began in 1973, 50 years ago this year, when David Hidalgo (vocals, guitar, and pretty much anything with strings), Louie Perez (drums, vocals, guitar), Cesar Rosas (vocals, guitar), and Conrad Lozano (bass, vocals, guitarrón) earned their stripes playing revved-up versions of Mexican folk music in restaurants and at parties. The band evolved in the 1980s as it tapped into L.A.’s burgeoning punk and college rock scenes. They were soon sharing bills with bands like the Circle Jerks, Public Image Ltd. and the Blasters, whose saxophonist, Steve Berlin, would eventually leave the group to join Los Lobos in 1984.
Early on, Los Lobos enjoyed critical success, winning the Grammy® for Best Mexican-American Performance for “Anselma” from its 1983 EP …And a Time to Dance. A year later, the group released its full-length, major-label debut, How Will the Wolf Survive? Co-produced by Berlin and T Bone Burnett, the album was a college rock sensation that helped Los Lobos tie with Bruce Springsteen as Rolling Stone’s Artist of the Year.
A major turning point came in 1987 with the release of the Ritchie Valens biopic, La Bamba. The quintet’s cover of Valens’ signature song topped the charts in the U.S. and the U.K. Rather than capitalize on that massive commercial success, Los Lobos instead chose to record La Pistola y El Corazón, a tribute to Tejano and Mariachi music that won the 1989 Grammy® for Best Mexican-American Performance.
That kind of sharp artistic turn has become Los Lobos’ trademark, serving to both fuel the band’s creativity and keep its fans engaged. In 1992, that willingness to defy expectations led them to record Kiko, an adventurous album produced by Mitchell Froom that’s considered by many to be one the band’s very best.
Since then, Los Lobos has continued to deliver daring and diverse albums such as Colossal Head (1996), Good Morning Aztlán (2002), The Town and the City (2006), Tin Can Trust (2010) and Gates of Gold (2015). On top of that, the band’s live shows never disappoint, as documented on the recent concert recordings Live at the Fillmore (2005) and Disconnected in New York City (2013). Through the years, they’ve managed to keep things interesting with unexpected side trips like an album of Disney songs in 2009, along with countless contributions to tribute albums and film soundtracks. One of those – “Mariachi Suite” from the 1995 film Desperado – earned the band a Grammy® for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. Los Lobos’ love letter to the city of Los Angeles as their album Native Sons (2021), returned the band to the Grammy winner’s circle with Best Americana Album of 2022. In 2023, Los Lobos celebrates its 50th anniversary as a band, a rare and impressive feat, as the band continues its great legacy.
Los Lobos has sold millions of records, won prestigious awards and made fans around the world. But perhaps its most lasting impact will be how well its music embodies the idea of America as a cultural melting pot. In it, styles like son jarocho, norteño, Tejano, folk, country, doo-wop, soul, R&B, rock ’n’ roll and punk all come together to create a new sound that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
More at: https://www.loslobos.org
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Fun Home
When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires.
Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic novel, Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.
Presented by the Department of Music and Theatre Arts, Fun Home features Director Sheri Anderson, Choreographer by Bob Boross, Musical Director of George Wurzbach and Assistant Director Annie Sacks.
Fun Home is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
“In an effort to make our show accessible to as wide an audience as possible, we’ve decided to make the show free to the public.
Thank you for your ongoing support of the arts at Monmouth University.”
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Fun Home
When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires.
Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic novel, Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.
Presented by the Department of Music and Theatre Arts, Fun Home features Director Sheri Anderson, Choreographer by Bob Boross, Musical Director of George Wurzbach and Assistant Director Annie Sacks.
Fun Home is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
“In an effort to make our show accessible to as wide an audience as possible, we’ve decided to make the show free to the public.
Thank you for your ongoing support of the arts at Monmouth University.”
-
Fun Home
When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires.
Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic novel, Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.
Presented by the Department of Music and Theatre Arts, Fun Home features Director Sheri Anderson, Choreographer by Bob Boross, Musical Director of George Wurzbach and Assistant Director Annie Sacks.
Fun Home is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
“In an effort to make our show accessible to as wide an audience as possible, we’ve decided to make the show free to the public.
Thank you for your ongoing support of the arts at Monmouth University.”
-
Fun Home
When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires.
Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic novel, Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.
Presented by the Department of Music and Theatre Arts, Fun Home features Director Sheri Anderson, Choreographer by Bob Boross, Musical Director of George Wurzbach and Assistant Director Annie Sacks.
Fun Home is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
“In an effort to make our show accessible to as wide an audience as possible, we’ve decided to make the show free to the public.
Thank you for your ongoing support of the arts at Monmouth University.”