Prom Night at Idyllwild Arts Academy
by Julia Countryman
A day of fun and sun in the sand is hard to trump, but this year’s Senior Prom may have surpassed this year’s senior trip to Laguna Beach. With an evening filled with dining, dancing and music, the Senior Class of 2012 spent a Casino Night themed-evening at The Mission Inn in Riverside this past Sunday, May 6th.
Dining, dancing and electing the Prom Court were the events slated for the evening, but perhaps more importantly, the teens gathered together for what was a final ceremonious act as a class before each of the graduates embarks on their new futures. Graduating senior Jake Rakusin related his sentiments, “Prom was fun and exciting. Everybody looked amazing, and it was a great time to hang out with friends in a fun relaxed setting.” Gerard Minaya chimed in, “Prom was amazing! The scenery was beautiful, the food was delicious, and the vibe was great!”
Attendees voted for candidates to Prom Court, electing Chase Ingrande as King; Allison Leggett as Queen, Harald Beran as Prince, Maria “Isita” Martinez as Princess, and Jake Rakusin as Jester to preside over the evening.
Prom organizer Kevin Michael Sullivan, Associate Dean of Students, was very pleased with the event, “Prom was great this year. We owe a big thanks to our chaperones Becky B., Kevin, Angela, Lance, Maria, Marissa Siegal-Charles, Nick, and Phil. And special thanks to Becky B for setting up the voting for the prom court and working with the prom committee.”
Legendary Dancer Jock Soto Teaches Master Class
by Julia Countryman
In what is perhaps the first time since modern dancer Bella Lewitzky was in residence at Idyllwild Arts, IAA was honored to play host a world-renowned ballet dancer this past week. Jock Soto, retired principal ballet dancer of the New York City Ballet was in residence to teach a master class to Academy dance students and to choreograph a ballet pas de deux to music by Laura Ortman who is White Mountain Apache which will be performed during the Native American Arts Festival.
Soto, who retired from the City Ballet in 2005, at the age of 40, enjoyed a remarkable 25-year career with the Ballet and continues to teach at The School of American Ballet. Over the course of his exquisite career, Mr. Soto inspired the creation of approximately 100 new ballet roles composed specifically for him with a repertory that included numerous works by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Peter Martins. He also inspired the creation of roles in many new ballets, including Peter Martins’s A SCHUBERTIAD (1984), ECSTATIC ORANGE (1987), FEARFUL SYMMETRIES (1990), JAZZ (SIX SYNCOPATED MOVEMENTS) (1993), SINFONIA (1993), and MORGEN (2001) among others.
Ellen Rosa, Director of the Dance Department commented, “We are very excited to have Mr. Soto here on campus. Besides teaching and choreography, he will be a great inspiration to the young men of the dance department.”
Soto’s visit was made possible by a grant from the Arts Enterprise Laboratory (AEL). The Arts Enterprise Laboratory is a new program that provides student grants for emerging young artists to create new works of art, develops directed master classes designed to facilitate mentorships that live beyond the master class experience. For more information regarding the Arts Enterprise Laboratory, visit http://www.idyllwildarts.org/arts-q10509-c10022-Arts_Enterprise_Laboratory.aspx.
Marc Shaiman Announced as Commencement Speaker for Idyllwild Arts
Idyllwild Arts Academy is honored to announce that our Commencement speaker for the 2012 Graduating Class is Marc Shaiman. Mr. Shaiman is a Tony, Grammy, and Emmy winning and Oscar nominated American composer, lyricist, arranger, producer, and performer for films, television, and theater. He composed the music and co-wrote the lyrics with Scott Wittman for the new NBC hit series, SMASH, for which he is also an Executive Producer.
Marc and Scott Wittman also teamed up for the musical Hairspray for which their score won the Tony, Grammy and Olivier Awards, and for Broadway’s Martin Short—Fame Becomes Me and Catch Me If You Can, for which Marc’s orchestrations gained him a Tony nomination. The duo are currently at work on a new original musical of Charlie & The Chocolate Factory for director Sam Mendes.
The Commencement Ceremony at Idyllwild Arts Academy will be held on Saturday, June 2 at 11:00 am in the Holmes Amphitheatre.
Question & Answer with Three IAA Graduating Seniors
Three Idyllwild Arts seniors from three different majors took time to respond to a few questions about their experience here at Idyllwild. They are:
Each of these students has had an incredibly productive time at Idyllwld Arts Academy having served as student leaders, good academic students and emerged as serious artists in their own right. Their responses provide insight into each of their experiences and how Idyllwild Arts has affected their growth as artists, individuals and set them up for their future college/conservatory education.
1. Tell me about your experience at IAA? How has it affected you as an artist, dancer, performer or musician?
Lani: Yes, my experience at Idyllwild Arts Academy has affected me as a dancer. I’ve discovered a pathway to a future that I would not have imagined in another environment, such as public schooling. My biggest issue while attending Public school and dancing at a small studio was to find the balance between the two. I could not simply be with friends from school because my routine would be to finish homework and attend afternoon dance classes right when school was let out. Here, I have made extremely close friends, who are interested and passionate about art, like me. The teachers are also very compelling and motivating. With this type of support I am still driven to make dancing a career. My passion and desire for this to happen has only increased in the time I have been here. In public school it seemed like a distant dream, here at IAA a possible reality.
Xiao Fan: This was my first time studying at a boarding school and it took me a period of adjustment to get used to living with my friends and faculty. Today I feel pretty close to school. Before, I went to school from 8-12 in the morning. Here I found myself living at school and that made a huge difference as I could go and talk to the faculty when I had questions or needed additional help. I also developed friendships with classmates & friends. I know everyone on campus. I was open to meeting new students and a new culture. Early on I accepted the opportunity presented by a boarding school and learned to accept everyone for who they are.
As a musician I’ve played in the orchestra and chamber music that has helped build my community and has been beneficial. In the past, I used to play as a soloist and since coming I’ve mellowed and enjoy working with other students. I’ve changed as a person too. Before coming here I was arrogant and after coming here I feel that I’m part of the community. I try to learn from those around me.
Vita: I came to IAA as a freshman in the Visual Art program four years ago. This school contains really different elements and resources that a public school or normal private school lacked. Throughout these four years of studying in IAA, I have realized that the school really has made art more accessible to students. Teachers are willing to extend a student’s potential as an artist and are never reluctant to answer students’ questions. Moreover, the flexibility teachers perform and the diverse assignment teachers composed has always, or constantly, expanded my imagination to a higher level, which I really appreciated.
2. What’s been the most critical lesson that you’ve learned as a student? Is it something in the academics or the arts?
Lani: Being a student here is an experience in itself, to be surrounded by other students with the same or more of a drive and passion. Every student here is unique; they have their own story to tell and background that they come from. What we all have in common is maturity. I am learning how to live on my own as a surviving artist. But, this school has taught me that I am not alone. I’ve got Allison Leggett and Gerard Minaya, also devoted dance majors. We help each other in tougher times and celebrate in worthy times. They are family to me. The Idyllwild Arts community is a family, but with smaller and tightly knit families within. I’ve learned this family and community of artists fuels and sustains my dreams.
Xiao Fan: I’ve learned a lot about time management. At boarding school you have to learn how to use your time efficiently and how to be independent. There are no parents to make you do your homework. You have to learn to take responsibility for yourself. Doing the college process in particular made me more successful since I had to do it on my own.
Vita: Learning to be humble and communicative is the most critical lesson I got after four years at IAA. At first I always had an ego about how outstanding my skills were in art. Therefore there was always conflict between some art teachers and myself when the teachers would disagree with my way of producing works. After repeatedly correcting and redressing my arrogance through teachers’ advice, I find things became easier to process and a new perspective was revealed through that communication.
3. Where have you been accepted and where are you planning to attend college/university/conservatory or art school? How did Idyllwild Arts education prepare you for the college audition/application process?
Lani: I will be attending Dominican University of California. I am joining their Dance BFA program in collaboration with Alonzo King’s Ballet Company, in San Francisco. Jonathan Sharp suggested the school to me last year. I auditioned for the summer program and attend for four weeks. It was a completely new experience to me and my dance history. So I danced to my potential and was invited to the BFA program. This is my next path I choose and that Idyllwild Arts has helped me find. I was accepted into LMU, CSLB, Adelphi, Goucher, and Fordham (on the wait list). IAA has supported my planning and independence skills; college application was an extenuation of this. I always knew there was someone to coach me when needed.
Xiao Fan: I’ve been accepted to New England Conservatory (NEC), Cleveland, Manhattan, Boston Conservatory, and San Francisco Conservatory. I’m going to attend NEC next year. As a string player they have the best string program in the nation and I like the student to teacher ratio. I’ll be studying with Masuko Ushioda who is a very accomplished musician. I have to credit the ESL program which really helped me with my TOEFL score and the work that Todor Pelev, my violin teacher gave me was very instrumental in my gaining a position at NEC. Playing in the orchestra also gave me a lot of inspiration. I’ve played with many wonderful violinists here and they’ve all served as inspiration to me.
Vita: I have honorably been accepted by RPI, MICA, SVA, Pratt Institute, and the Cooper Union. I will be attending the Cooper Union as an architecture undergraduate. During the time when I was arranging my portfolio my art teachers have given me plenty of advice and methods in order to make my work become more effective and distinguished. They also set up several reviews to “push” students to speak up and help students integrate their ideas in preparation of facing real college interviewers.
“Berlin to Broadway” Opens in One Week
“Berlin to Broadway”, a musical voyage with Kurt Weill, opens on Friday, May 18 at Idyllwild Arts. This is the final production of the year for the department and the only main stage musical production. “Berlin to Broadway” takes the audience on a musical voyage from pre-World War II Germany to Broadway’s Golden Age through the music of one of the 20th century’s most influential composers, Kurt Weill.
I sat down with THE ACTING, SINGING, DANCING COMPANY, the shows large ensemble cast, and asked them a few questions about the production to help understand the show and all that it encapsulates.
What’s the best part of rehearsing this production? Unanimously, they all said that it’s the choreography. Paulina Kurtz said “none of us are really dancers but we started with the choreography as the first step in the production process. It proved to be very important for the overall rehearsal process to have the choreography set before we went further.” Guest Choreographer Donna Cory came to the Idyllwild Arts campus during her own Spring Break and spent two weeks working closely with the students to teach eight different production numbers. The dance styles covered in the production range from the tango to tap to Broadway style partner lifts. The members of the company all agreed that this was a crucial step in development of the musical.
Asked how the show was put together through the rehearsal process senior Jake Rakusin stated “it began with dancing followed by singing and finally blocking. It was a pretty graceful process.” The ensemble started rehearsal in early March so the show will have been in production for nearly two and a half months before the performance. A lengthy but necessary process for building a show.
The students of the ensemble also said that it’s a multi-faceted show. It’s an opera and a review that required lots of character work & development. The production requires them to develop new & different characters for each piece. They each take turns as “The Guide” for the show and take us through 20 years that tells the history of theatre, from pre-war Germany to the heyday of the American Broadway musical. Paulina noted “the original production of ‘Berlin to Broadway’ was produced in the 1940s and carries political commentary that is still applicable.”
Howard Shangraw, director of the production, said “the audience will leave the show humming tunes that are now standards in American modern songbook.” Songs featuted include “Mack the Knife,” “Lost In the Stars,” “Surabaya Johnny,” “September Song,” and “My Ship” among others. This production fuses serious and popular music into one very special work.
Make sure that you find time to attend the performances which are Friday, May 18 & Saturday, May 19 @ 7:30 pm and the Sunday, May 20 matinee at 2:00 pm.
Casey Abrams Remembers his Roots
by Julia Countryman
Idyllwild Arts Alum Casey Abrams came home to Idyllwild recently to shoot cover photos for his upcoming album on the Concord Music label. Casey’s mentor, Marshall Hawkins, commented, “This is a wonderful tribute to Idyllwild Arts Academy by Casey, and it salutes his upbringing. It’s wonderful to see Casey doing so well. He’s incredibly busy right now, but he always has the time to remember his beginnings in Idyllwild.”
Casey was also spotted at Cafe Aroma in Idyllwild last month when he and fellow musicians Dave Hitchings, Paul Carman, and Lake Jiroudek played a set or two for a delighted crowd. Hawkins continued, “They were fabulous. Casey defines the difference between being a professional and being a real pro. He never forgets his roots and where he got his start.”
LA Times Takes notice
by Julia Countryman
In a media first, the LA Times Entertainment editor listed last weekend’s New Music Concert as an “Editor’s Top Ten Pick” of music events, and for good reason. The nearly sold-out concert was an outstanding success for Music Director Peter Askim and the Idyllwild Arts Academy Orchestra.
The nearly sold-out concert, which took place on April 29th at The Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Los Angeles, featured the legendary guitarist, composer, and songwriter Richard Thompson along with So Percussion, Chen Yi’s Tone Poem and the Idyllwild Arts Academy Orchestra. Askim offered deep praise for the event, “I was so pleased with the concert – we had great crowds both days, both in terms of numbers and in enthusiasm. The audience was with the orchestra every step of the way, and everybody fed off of the amazing synergy in the room. The orchestra was in top form – playing with passion, sensitivity and precision and utterly dedicated to bringing the music to life. S? Percussion and Richard Thompson were incredible and were blown away by the students. I think in terms of the audience, the impact and the music making, these were some of the most exciting and successful concerts I’ve experienced in all the years I’ve been at Idyllwild. Bravo to all involved!”
Those who missed the concert can view video clips online at the following link:
Askim – Elsewhere
Jazz Combo Wins Again
by Julia Countryman
Congratulations to the Idyllwild Arts Academy Jazz Combo on their first place win at the Reno Jazz Festival. Held April 26-28, combo members Mary Kate Duffy (bass), Lake Jiroudek (guitar), Luca Jacaruso (piano), and Max Kazakov (percussion) did a tremendous job taking a first place in the AAAA High School Combo division.
This is the third first place for the combo, who won the top award two years in a row at the Berklee Jazz Festival followed by last week’s win at Reno. Marshall Hawkins praised the group, saying, “This is a milestone for the combo. Not only did they win three first places, they did it in the highest division possible for their age group. They owe it all to their instructor, Paul Carman who has mentored them and facilitated the trips to these competitions for both years.” Again, congratulations!
Assumptions
by Brian D. Cohen, President, Idyllwild Arts
reposted from The Huffington Post
Motorcyclists, mountain bikers, pilots, all worry about target fixation, a phenomenon in which you focus so intently on a hazard you want to avoid that you slam into it, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of the senses.*
This is how we’re wired. It saves us energy, mental storage space, and time. Neuroscientists call this “predictive coding,” a kind of ongoing unconscious educated guessing of the senses. We constantly and pre-consciously make assumptions about the world, and these assumptions are embedded in perception. Perception is selective; we see by anticipating what we’ll see based on our past experience; we see what we expect to see.
The eye and brain are not really separate as we presume; the model of the receptor and the processor is not entirely accurate. According to recent studies our primary visual cortex is influenced from above motivations, predictions, and assumptions in higher centers of the brain. Visual channels seem to flow both ways, both receptive and informing. Researcher Ramesh Jain has called perception a “controlled hallucination” in which sensory input is a means of confirming and adjusting expectations rather than a wholesale intake of stimuli.
Seeing is a process of continuous predicting, visualizing, and hypothesizing. It is not difficult to imagine this process continuing without external sensory stimuli in the form of dreaming and imagination. In the art teaching world, we often see “drawing from life” and “working from your imagination” as somehow opposed, or at least springing from very different sources; yet perception and imagination are informed by some fundamental process of continuous visualization. You create your own world. I often had this feeling, after working very hard on my art, that the world looked like my art. I was creating my art, and creating through my art a way to see world.
When we see, our expectations are almost always confirmed (optical illusions take advantage of figures and diagrams that confound expectation, and we sometimes mistake one person for another, or drive off the highway when we wrongly assume a bend in the road). We create our own reality, perceptually, and ultimately we create our own outcomes based on those perceptions. Expectation is embedded in perception; perception becomes reality.
It’s as if we can predict the future; we are actually making it happen. The world we perceive is a dream that almost always comes true.
*(Another side of target fixation — I was learning archery, and the best book on the subject told you to pretty much forget about your stance, your form, and your equipment and just fixate on the target until everything around you disappeared. It worked).
Willing Suspension of Belief
by Brian D. Cohen, President, Idyllwild Arts
reposted from The Huffington Post
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers.
— James Baldwin
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
—Paul Kleef
I like to know, and sometimes even figure out on my own, why things look the way they do. Some things seem to explain themselves; I like things whose outward appearance reveals their function. “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges,” said Marcel Duchamp a century ago, mistrustful of everything that called itself art.
An enormous and admirable amount of effort has gone into understanding why the world is the way it is, and we carry around many answers. Science and religion share an explanatory power, and different underlying assumptions, but assumptions nonetheless. It becomes hard to look at anything in the world without seeing its associations, implications, precedents, diverse meanings, or seeing our own dilemmas mirrored. The habit of understanding makes us who we are.
But what if we give away, even for a moment, meaning, purpose, received wisdom, analysis, knowledge, and let things be? Forgetting where things come from, or how things work, why? If we didn’t try to understand or feel we already knew?
Art is so often seen as representing feelings, reproducing something we already know and can explain. The remarkable thing about art is that it gets to our core via unexpected paths, with immediacy and presence and in unanticipated form, yet with utter familiarity, as if we already knew what it was saying, though we know we haven’t seen or heard it before. Art is irreducible and often inexplicable, and though much can be said of it, its truths we should pass over in silence.
