The 2013-14 season of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television and Theatre will feature four plays, beginning in October with On the Verge. The three remaining plays are Cabaret, November 13-17; Clybourne Park, February 20-March 2; and Blood Wedding, April 9-13, 2014.
Finding and publishing long-forgotten musical compositions by classical composers is usually a project reserved for Ph.D. and master’s students. But don’t tell Samantha Osborn that. Last summer the Notre Dame music and pre-med major spent two weeks in Rome at the Conservatory of Saint Cecilia, where she was able to locate and duplicate eight of Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti’s handwritten cantatas. She will perform one of them this spring as part of her senior thesis recital.
The University of Notre Dame will celebrate Valentine’s Day with the fourth annual SonnetFest—a communitywide public reading of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as interpreted by members of the Notre Dame and Michiana communities. The event will be streamed live online for the first time this year at www.shakespeare.nd.edu.
The Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States has selected MurphyKate Montee as a Churchill Scholar for the academic year 2013-2014. Montee, a senior mathematics and music (voice) double major in the Glynn Family Honors Program, is one of just 14 students in the United States to receive this honor.
Thirteen design majors in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Art, Art History & Design used their fall break to engage the local community with a “social design blitz.” In a single week, the students brainstormed, conceptualized, created, and exhibited three public, interactive art projects designed to help bridge the gap between downtown South Bend and the Notre Dame campus.
“It’s all I’ve ever dreamed about,” says Deborah Mayer. “I can’t think of any young, American, soprano who didn’t dream of singing at the Met. Now I can die happy.” Mayer, a vocal instructor for the Department of Music in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, will make her debut with the Metropolitan Opera this spring in the role of Gerhilde in Richard Wagner’s opera, Die Walküre; part of the Met’s revival of Wagner’s epic, four-part Ring cycle directed by Robert Lepage, and conducted by Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi.
The 24th annual Notre Dame Student Film Festival, presented by the University’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, will take place January 24 to 26 (Thursday through Saturday) in the Browning Cinema at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
Sacred music has the power to enrich and inspire entire communities. And with the support of a Lilly Endowment grant of $1.9 million, Sacred Music at Notre Dame (SMND) is now poised to help congregations across the region renew worship practices and enliven musical expression to engage people more deeply, across the generations.
A unique event in November 2012 brought together ND students, faculty, and other members of the campus community who love the Italian language, the poet Dante, and his immortal poem, the Divine Comedy.
Sacred music is foundational to many of the world’s artistic traditions, and this is especially so when it comes to Western music. It is also an artistic—and academic—area that continues to grow and develop. To celebrate and promote this diverse and vibrant art form, the University of Notre Dame is launching a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) program with majors in organ and choral conducting, beginning in fall 2013.
The recent discovery of a previously unknown musical manuscript by Ludwig van Beethoven provides a glimpse of the composer at work on a medieval hymn he would already have known quite well, according to Peter Jeffrey, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Music. Beethoven’s manuscript was an arrangement of the Gregorian chant “Pange Lingua,” a hymn often sung in Catholic liturgies during Holy Week.
Networking with industry insiders, watching highly anticipated films, walking the red carpet, and seeing stars was all part of the job for a group of University of Notre Dame students who jetted off to the 2012 Cannes International Film Festival this summer. Working with Assistant Professor Aaron Magnan-Park, the students from the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) were granted the exclusive right to make a documentary about the internship program at the festival’s American Pavilion—an opportunity that provided a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the premier event in international film.
In Performance Analysis, a Notre Dame theatre course taught by Anton Juan, senior professor of directing and playwriting in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre (FTT), this fall, majors from a cross-section of the FTT’s disciplines are guided to the sources of performance. It’s more than just “What’s My Motivation 101.” The goal, says Juan, is for student actors to develop critical thinking.
Collaboration among University of Notre Dame faculty and students, Sedlack Design Associates, and Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns has resulted in a $50,000 Sappi Ideas that Matter grant to together+, a campaign to combat xenophobia in South Africa.
Some may look at Dante’s Divine Comedy and see just a dusty trilogy of poetry written by a long-gone Florentine. But for others, Dante and his opus are immortal. For them, Dante is now. In that spirit, Italian Studies at Notre Dame and the College of Arts and Letters’ William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies will host “Dante Now!”—a series of public readings from The Divine Comedy. Readings will occur simultaneously at various locations around campus on November 2, beginning at 2 p.m.
With a $400,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Notre Dame announces the launch of the Sacred Music Drama Project, a four-year, cross-disciplinary initiative designed to engage people more deeply with the power of shared creativity, performance, and scholarship. The project will draw on humanistic, artistic, and sacred topics from a variety of musical traditions to develop new coursework and to stage the production of a major dramatic performance each year. The Mellon grant will also bring both eminent and emerging guest artists to campus and will fund the commission of a new work of sacred music drama at the end of the project.
Together+, a campaign to combat xenophobia in South Africa by providing educational resources to empower people to embrace diversity, has been awarded a $50,000 Sappi Ideas that Matter grant. After a year of research, development, refinement, and two trips to Johannesburg, the grant will enable the together+ team to produce and distribute the first round of materials designed by students from the University of Notre Dame’s graphic design program in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design.
More than 100 musicians gathered last week on the campus of the University of Notre Dame for its inaugural Sacred Music Conference.
As a documentary filmmaker, a faculty member in College of Arts and Letters’ Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT), and a producer for Fighting Irish Digital Media, Ted Mandell ’86 quite literally sheds light on the University of Notre Dame’s traditions of social justice and student athletics. What unites his approach to these roles, says Mandell, is a commitment to show the human side of every story—and help his students learn to do the same.
When Kathleen Bracke got the call, she dropped the phone out of shock, then picked it up and asked the caller to repeat the news. On the other end was a representative of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA announcing that Bracke had won a 2012 Princess Grace Award. Bracke, a senior in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) is one of only two winners of this year’s Princess Grace Undergraduate Film Scholarship.
Actors From The London Stage (AFTLS), a self-directed ensemble of five professional British actors, will present William Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice in historic Washington Hall on the University of Notre Dame’s campus at 7:30 p.m., September 12-14 (Wednesday-Friday).
The University of Notre Dame’s inaugural Sacred Music Conference will be held Thursday through Saturday (September 13 through 15). The conference will feature sacred music from the Renaissance to the present day and will bring together composers, scholars, and conductors of sacred music to discuss, share, and perform their work. Several concert events are open to the public and free of charge.
With her graduate thesis project, University of Notre Dame alumna Charlotte Lux, M.F.A. ’11, set out to redesign a stressful diagnostic procedure women who might have breast cancer undergo in the hopes of making it less traumatic. The resulting design has earned Lux recognition in the 2012 Core77 Design Awards, where she was named student winner in the strategy and research category.
Notre Dame’s Ryan Geraghty ’12 has been named one of the top five graduating industrial design students in the nation, and his work will be featured at the Industrial Designers Society of America’s (IDSA) International conference in Boston August 15-18. Geraghty earned this opportunity by winning first place at the IDSA’s Midwest District competition in April. “For students, this is the highest honor they can receive within our profession and within our professional society,” says Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Conrado, “so that’s something that goes down in the record books.” Another record for the books: Geraghty was the fifth Notre Dame student in six years to take the title.
Anne García-Romero, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, has been accepted to the prestigious Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference this summer. One of just eight playwrights selected out of nearly 1,000 applicants, García-Romero will spend the month of July at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, working with acclaimed theatre professionals to workshop her play Provenance. Also among the honorees is Notre Dame English alumna Theresa Rebeck ’80, an award-winning playwright and creator of the television show Smash.
Moneyball. True Grit. The Social Network. Black Swan. If you watched a trailer for any of these movies, then you’ve seen the work of Notre Dame alumnus Scott Mitsui ’92. A communications and theatre major, Mitsui has spent the past 12 years as producer and vice president of operations at Mark Woollen & Associates in Santa Monica, Calif., a company responsible for some of the most noteworthy and award-winning film trailers in Hollywood.
Ariel Clark-Semyck, a rising sophomore English major at the University of Notre Dame, will spend three weeks at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre this June as part of the Fulbright Summer Institute program. She is one of three U.S. students invited to attend the American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) Summer Institute at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre—a demanding academic and cultural immersion program that focuses on acting and the study of Shakespearean texts, including workshops on combat play, set design, movement, and dance.
The 2012 Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival (NDSF) will run July 14 through August 26, highlighted by the Professional Company’s production of Hamlet, directed by David H. Bell. Other performances include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, presented by the Young Company at outdoor spaces throughout the Michiana region; Beyond the Stage, a performance-based lecture series, which will be presented at select venues in July and August; and ShakeScenes, which will open the festival with performances at historic Washington Hall on July 14 and 15.
As a linguist, artist, semiotician, and interdisciplinary scholar committed to social action, graduating senior Mary Atwood is a Notre Dame original. Drawing on seven weeks of research in Peru, the theology major recently completed a senior thesis that included original oil paintings and English translations of three Inca legends gleaned from interviews with Quechua speakers in Cusco’s central market.
Grant Mudge has been named the Ryan Producing Artistic Director of the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival. Mudge succeeds Jay Paul Skelton, who departs after the conclusion of 2012 season of the Festival to pursue a research degree in England. “We chose Grant after an extensive national search,” says Peter Holland, associate dean for the arts in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. “His success in building the Richmond Shakespeare Festival shows that he has the track-record and the talent to help us take the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival forward to an ever more exciting future.