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The BLK ProjeK is having a bus party!
Share your photos of commencement with us on Instagram! Follow us at @CUNYSPS and don’t forget to use the commencement hashtag #SPSGrad2013!
Tammy Menezes (SPS Class of 2013) lives in California and can’t make it to Commencement on June 5 at Alice Tully Hall.
To celebrate the occasion, her son Cameron conferred Tammy with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Culture, Magna Cum Laude, during a small ceremony at home.
Her son Christian also received his Bachelor’s degree and her son Cameron earned his J.D. six hours before SPS’s first Californian conferral.
This is a big year for Tammy and her family.
Tammy’s daughter Jacey is a credentialed special education teacher, and her son Blake works at a tech firm.
We congratulate the Menezes’ family for their significant accomplishments. 2013 will certainly be a year to remember!
The M.A. in Applied Theatre culminates with the Project Thesis. Our graduating students envision and implement original projects in Applied Theatre. These projects are the sites for their research, which they in turn document and evaluate in their final written theses. We invite you to attend the dynamic presentations in which they share their processes and discoveries.
Wednesdays, May 22, 29, and 30
At CUNY’s Creative Arts Team
101 West 31st Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10001
May 22nd
6:45pm, Celebrating Community: An Applied Theatre Workshop for Child and Family Specialists
Brisa Muñoz, Kristy Kadish, and Michelle O’Connor
A two-day theatre-based workshop for a community of social workers in Johnson City, Tennessee. The purpose of the workshop was to promote connection, celebrate strengths, and examine the challenges within the professional community.
7:35pm, The WHY Factor: A Decision-Making Workshop with African Diasporan Male Undergraduates
Antonio Lyons and Julia Reimer
This 5-week workshop series at a college in Queens used theater, storytelling, and creative play to explore choices through the lens of identity, relationships, conflict, systems, and personal goals and expectations.
8:25pm, Facing the Blank Page Together: Finding Collaborative Approaches to New Play Development
Dominic D’Andrea
This presentation documents the experience of an applied theatre-inspired writers’ group that was designed as a lab for a cohort of 9 working playwrights in New York City. Through a focus on group collaboration, individual process, and working with a senior population, the playwrights engaged with applied theatre practice to inform and/or impact their individual approaches to “facing the blank page.”
9:15pm, Acting Out in Math Class: Role play and Mathematical Discourse
Anna Zivian and Nicolette Dixon
The presenters implemented workshops and residencies to support math teachers in developing and facilitating role play scenarios for students based on mathematical word problems. The project objective was to use role play to stimulate engagement in mathematical discourse for enhanced conceptual understanding.
May 29th
6:45pm, Performing Legacies: A Family Storytelling Workshop
Ramy Eletreby, Rachel Evans, and Amy Sawyers
This workshop series was implemented over four Sundays at a church community room on the Upper East Side with a diverse group of 24 individuals. Through a variety of activities geared towards performing family stories, this workshop explored the significance in our lives of sharing family stories.
7:35pm, Looking at the Past: The Women’s Theatre Project
Lydia Gaston and Junko Ishikawa
The presenters implemented a 6-week series of theatre-based workshops with Filipino senior women immigrants in Jamaica, Queens. Looking at the Past used process drama, Freirean dialog, and an exchange of personal stories to address group dynamics and build community.
8:25pm-10pm, Integrating Theatrical Conventions into a High School Peer Education Program
Ellen Brown, Sara Orr, and Leah Page
The presenters spent ten weeks at a community center that offers peer education programs for and with teenagers. The group taught the young people how to create, rehearse and facilitate activating scenes, a convention influenced by Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. At the end of the ten weeks, the young people performed and facilitated three original scenes for their peers at the center.
May 30th
6:45pm, Arts Together: Celebrating Moms and Kid Through Theatre, Crafts and Fun!
Lillian Ribeiro and Ben Weber
Arts Together was a series of 5 workshops that took place in New Jersey for mothers and their children who live in a domestic violence shelter or supportive housing facility. These workshops explored how applied theatre may foster meaningful experiences between mothers and children during a period of transition.
7:35pm, Interracial Relationships Explored
Carli Gaughf and Reyna Bonaparte
A 5-week project that mobilized theatrical conventions to address the struggles and joys of romantic interracial relationships. Individuals and couples met on weekly basis for Boal-based workshops at the Queens Presbyterian Church in Long Island City, NYC.
8:25pm, ACTION! The Creative Student Leadership Workshop
Claro de los Reyes and Shamilia McBean
ACTION! was a 4-week interactive theatre project that explored the concept of leadership with undergraduate commuter students in Jamaica, Queens. The workshop series addressed civic mindedness and psychological ownership through an arts-based investigation of how students saw themselves in relationship to their school community.
Admission is free.
Guests are welcome to attend any or all of the presentations.
The Master’s Degree in Applied Theatre, the first program of its kind in the United States, is a sequential, ensemble-based program for students interested in the use of theatre to address social and educational issues in a wide range of settings. The program stresses the unity of theory and practice, and is linked to the professional applied theatre work of the renowned CUNY Creative Arts Team.
April is officially Disability Awareness Month throughout CUNY and to celebrate our commitment to enabling students, faculty, and staff with disabilities to excel in their studies, research, and work there are a series of events throughout the university. Whether you are interested in learning more about a particular disability or you want to gain skills in your search for a career, there is something for everyone!
At the College of Staten Island, students tell their stories of challenge and triumph as students with disabilities in My Story: A Dialogue Among Students in just one of the many events being held on campus throughout the month.
Similarly, Lehman College is having a panel discussion on disability and higher education from an international perspective on April 17.
The CUNY Learning Disability Project is sponsoring a Learning Disability Awareness Conference on April 16 at Baruch College geared toward helping faculty and staff to better understand learning disabilities.
The Autism Spectrum is the focus of several events across CUNY including “Promoting Successful Transition: Into, through and beyond Higher Education, for students on the Autism Spectrum” at Brooklyn College on April 8 and “Autism Spectrum Disorders: Moving Forward” at BMCC on April 11.
Queensborough Community College is offering two very interesting events with “Engaging Faculty and Tutors in the Success of Community-College Students with Disabilities” on April 17 and “Young People with Disabilities” on April 24.
On April 18, Bronx Community College is hosting a screening of “Going Blind: Coming Out of the Dark About Vision Loss.”
And last but not least, Hunter College is hosting a series of events all month long covering everything from Career Choices and Job Readiness to Learning Self-Advocacy Skills, they’re even hosting movie screenings throughout the month too!
CUNY SPS students seeking information about disability services can contact Student Services. Students at other campuses can access services through The CUNY Disability Resources & Services website.
If you are a CUNY student, faculty, or staff sponsoring an event for Disability Awareness Month not listed above, add the information in the comments below. We will also update this list with new information shared with our office in the coming days.
Current student, T.J. Black (’14) contributed the following recap of the inaugural Master of Arts in Applied Theater Lab Conference that was held in mid-March:
On March 17, 2012, students and alumni of the Master of Arts in Applied Theatre program gathered for the inaugural MAAT Lab Conference. The MA in Applied Theatre was developed in 2008 in collaboration with the CUNY-Creative Arts Team as the first degree-granting program of its kind in the country. It is committed to the goal of creating leading practitioners in the field, using theatre as a tool to address educational issues and affect social change. The Lab Conference, organized by current students T.J. Black (’14), Olivia Harris (’14), Leah Page (’13) and Ben Weber (’13), was designed as a forum for current students and alumni to explore pressing topics in applied theatre, and to further cultivate an ever-growing community of applied theatre practitioners coming through the program.
Despite issues with scheduling—the conference was rescheduled due to Hurricane Sandy—nearly a third of all current students and alumni chose to participate. The sessions were a mix of participatory workshops and plenary discussions, covering a range of topics including sex and gender in the classroom, fundraising, applied theatre work in prisons, and many more. Several of the sessions were inspired and/or developed by class work done in the MA program.
During the closing reflection, the community expressed that the conference was a useful and effective exploration of current questions in the field of applied theatre. Attendees also found it to be an ideal opportunity to network with colleagues from different graduating classes. There is an enthusiastic interest in continuing to develop the conference as a venue for collaboration, dialogue, and exploration of the major issues facing this emerging field, potentially opening to the wider community in the near future.
Presenters included current students Rachel Evans (’13), Olivia Harris (’14), Shamilia McBean (’13), Brisa Munoz (’13), and Ben Weber (’13), as well as alumni Ria Cooper (’10), Max Forman-Mullin (’12), Maggie Keenan-Bolger (’10), Jessica Levy (’12), Heather Nielsen (’12), Kevin Ray (’11), Julia Taylor (’12), Sherry Teitelbaum (’11), and Michael Wilson (’11).
For further information on the MAAT Lab Conference, please contact T.J. Black at thomas.black2@spsmail.cuny.edu
For more information on the MA in Applied Theatre, please visit http://sps.cuny.edu/programs/ma_appliedtheatre
