In this illustrated presentation, Professor Huang explores the unique challenges and rewards of touring Shakespeare productions, drawing on several cases of Asian adaptations at the World Shakespeare Festival at the London Globe during the London Olympics in summer 2012.
I work in a field where I don’t really know what field I work in. And I’m okay with that. I’m fascinated by work that challenges my ideas and my preconceived notions, things that really take me out of a comfort zone. I’m okay with just being an artist. It allows me to jump from place to place to place to place to place, or from content to content, without having to categorize what kind of response people should have to what it is that I do.
Hearing Kronos Quartet really made me rethink what music is.
It was 1964 and, as a young professor at Howard University in the Department of Art, I had a grant to travel to Europe. It was my first visit to Europe; I started out in Greece. And I wanted to recount some of my classical education, specifically Greek theater, so I went to the amphitheater at the base of the Acropolis to see a performance of The Birds by Aristophanes.
…the arts are universal. They move beyond barriers…
I love the moment where you see something happen on stage, or backstage, when the person gets it, when it clicks. Moments like that happen all the time at the Clarice Smith Center.
I get to watch students have those ‘aha’ moments and I see all the work that has gone into it…
In 1995 my dear friend and mentor took me to see the Off-Broadway production of Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk. It was early in my career as a professional dramaturg and my mentor thought this much-touted piece would help me gain a greater understanding of the possibilities of devised theatre.
This total merging of the sensory and the cerebral helped me realize, fully, the power of performance…
I grew up in rural Arkansas trailer parks. Our house had wheels and we used them! By the time I was eight, we had lived in 16 different towns and probably because of this nomadic lifestyle, I had no connection to the performing arts.
I had never seen modern dance or heard music… Chills ran up and down my spine!
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I was directing a choir of high school students in rehearsal of a contemporary piece called A Boy and A Girl by Eric Whitacre, which is an English translation of a poem by Octavio Paz.
…working with young voices, college age and even younger, is such a magical experience.
This is the moment when I knew I wanted to dance for the rest of my life: My high school boyfriend’s mother, Susan Dowling, was the executive producer for dance programming at public television station WGBH in Boston.
I wanted to … needed to … HAD to experience that intimate and compelling mingling of art and life.
