Citywide Arts Festival Celebrates Engagement Marquette University's Department of Performing Arts, Alverno Presents and the UWM Peck School of the Arts Collaborate on Art, Faith & Social Justice Released: August 18, 2005 In September, Marquette University's Department of Performing Arts, the UWM Peck School of the Arts, and Alverno Presents will launch a year-long, city-wide arts festival on the theme of Art, Faith and Social Justice. Art, Faith and Social Justice celebrates engagement. It showcases human activity— art-- that reaches simultaneously towards the spiritual and the political. Though it may be argued that all art is a form of prayer, our focus is on artists who explore identity, examine individual and collective responsibility, seek transcendence, and strive to create a legacy that can help us heal the world. Art, Faith and Social Justice emerged from a shared interest among the core partners (Alverno Presents/David Ravel, Marquette's Department of Performing Arts/Phylis Ravel, UWM Peck School of the Arts/Polly Morris) in social action, in making the case for the arts as an agent of change, as well as in a desire to integrate the arts more fully into the life of our community, The collaborative festival encompasses performances, exhibitions, screenings, lectures, debates and a national academic conference on the theme of Art, Faith & Social Justice. Educational and community-based activities include hands-on workshops, talkbacks, panel discussions and forums. To date, the core partners have scheduled more than 20 performance/exhibition events around the theme of art, faith and social justice. The festival begins with a week-long residency (September 26-October 2) with Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, a Brooklyn-based dance company, at the Peck School of the Arts. The residency includes a series of activities on campus and in the community (50+ Workshop at Danceworks, Master Classes, Text & Movement Workshop, Community Workshop, Open Rehearsal/talkback ) and culminates in two public performances. These performances (September 30 & October 1) will feature three works with “a spiritual through-line”: Come Ye, Grace (originally created for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre), and the premiere of Order My Steps. Mr. Brown returns in January to create a piece for UWM Dance students and members of the Ko-Thi Dance Company that will be performed on Winterdances/Faith (February 2-5) and again on Ko-Thi's Kuumba (May 5 & 6). Ronald K. Brown's work, much of which confronts the proud, rich and sometimes painful and controversial issues of African and African-American cultural identity, provides an excellent starting point for a community-wide exploration of art, faith and social justice. The week after the Evidence residency, Marquette's Department of Performing Arts opens Everyman , directed by John Schneider (October 6-16), part of a six-production season devoted to the theme of Art, Faith and Social Justice. On October 8, Alverno Presents welcomes Maggie & Suzzy Roche and their Zero Church project to the Pitman Theatre. For Zero Church , singer/songwriters Maggie & Suzzy Roche collected prayers and meditations from individuals in different walks of life and set them to a wide variety of musical styles. Developed at playwright Anna Deavere Smith's "Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue" at Harvard University, Zero Church is o riginal and spiritual without espousing a particular doctrine or dogma. Later in the season, Alverno Presents hosts the Klezmatics with gospel singer Joshua Nelson (February 17) and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co. (March 4) as well as three Alverno Debates on project-related themes. At the Peck School of the Arts, the Dance Department has committed its four-concert season of student and faculty work to Art, Faith and Social Justice and the Department of Theatre is staging four thematic productions, including Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Festival affiliates are offering additional performances and screenings. In November, Early Music Now hosts a mini-residency on The Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain with the Ivory Consort and Maria Rosa Menocal, Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The academic centerpiece of the festival is a National Conference on Art, Faith and Social Justice (November 10-12) hosted by Marquette University's Department of Performing Arts and Office of Mission and Identity, in collaboration with Alverno and UWM. There will be explicit and direct links between the festival, the conference and Milwaukee's arts, faith and social justice communities. The conference will coincide with the Marquette production of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (November 10-20) and an Alverno Debate, “What is the Place of Faith in the Political Process?” (November 10). Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, author of the book on which Catonsville Nine is based and a participant in the events it describes, will attend the November 11th performance. For more information on the November conference, or to participate, visit http://www.mu.edu/comm/departments/artfest/index.html The project web site, arts.uwm.edu/artfaithjustice, built and maintained at the Peck School of the Arts, will house the most up-to-date information on festival activities as well as discussion boards, project documentation, project blogs and collaborative web-based artmaking projects that will make it an independent site of community engagement. Artist Nicholas Frank will be creating a project-related platform that integrates digital and material elements. To encourage participation across venues and disciplines, we are distributing an Art, Faith and Social Justice badge ($5) that will entitle bearer to a 20% discount on full price tickets at all other designated AF&SJ events. The buttons will be available at designated festival events at Marquette and Alverno as well as at UWM Peck School of the Arts box office. Electronic images available. Office of Public Affairs Contacts Christopher Stolarski Media Relations Specialist Phone: (414) 288-1988 Send e-mail