4B - Thursday, March 27, 2014

The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com

4B - Thursday, March 27, 2014 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom

A RT ATTACK
Kids engage with
the arts at UMMA

AR TIST PROILE

Art education alive
and kicking at
Museum
By ADAM DEPOLLO
OnlineArts Editor
In the age of No Child
Left Behind and its latest
incarnation, the Common
Core State Standards, arts
education has slowly faded
from prominence in public
school curricula as districts
struggle to meet education
standards with shrinking
budgets and increasing class
sizes. Politicians questioning
the economic value of non-
STEM education often single
out the fine arts, in particular,
as a subject with no practical
use - President Obama
recently recommended that
young people forego an art
history degree in favor of jobs
in skilled manufacturing.
Arts education is, however,
very much alive and kicking at
centers of higher learning like
the University of Michigan.
The University of Michigan
Museum of Art provides the
entire University and Ann
Arbor community with access
to a fluid collection of artwork
from around the world while
offering a wide variety of
tours, performances, films
and lectures aimed at creating
a learning environment and
benefitting the public.
In addition to its work
in Ann Arbor, Ruth Slavin,
UMMA's deputy director
for education, explained
that UMMA has, in recent
years, expanded its services
to reach learners of all ages
and provide opportunities for
kids to interact with art on a
personal level.
"We've always had ahealthy
elementary school population
that comes - we serve about
5,000 kids a year through that
elementary school program,"
Slavin said.
Aside from the area
immediately surrounding
the University, UMMA has
expanded its educational
outreach programs to include
22 different school districts
and 16 independent schools
from across Michigan. The
proximity of local Washtenaw
County schools allows for
closer working relationships
with the museum, however.
"We have a partnership
with Ypsilanti High School,
where each high school
student is coming at least once
this year, and 11th and 12th
graders are coming twice. So
we serve about 400 students
through that program," Slavin

said.
Serving more than 5,000
students each year can be a
challenge, especially for a
small museum like UMMA.
But, as Slavin explained, the
museum's small size allows
UMMA to provide unique
experiences for its K-12
visitors.
"We don't have any canned
tours," she said.
The museum works to tailor
its tours to each group of
students that comes through
its doors and to provide an
educational experience that
goes beyond the limitations of
a particular subject.
"With Ypsilanti High
School this year, Pamela
Reister, my colleague, really
worked in depth to find out
what the kids are studying and
to make connections, not only
between content and subject
matter but also between
skills that they might be
learning," Slavin said. "Let's
say it's writing essays and
making an argument - then
we look at a work of art and
pose a question in response
to which you could form an
argument. And then you look
for evidence in the work of art
and outside the work of art."
Recent grants from the
National Endowment for the
Arts and the Community
Foundation of Southeast
Michigan have also helped
UMMA expand the use of
technology in its educational
programming. Aside from
purchasing a number of iPads
to add digital media to gallery
walks, the museum has been
able to expand its online
presence and provide remote
access to its collections.
"We have a content
management tool for the
museum called 'Many Voices,'
which allows teachers
and students to explore
the museum from their
classroom," Slavin said. "If
kids come and do the 'Art
Rocks' tour, they can then go
back and the teacher can get
the media that was shown
on the iPad digitally through
that interface."
Although UMMA receives
fewer school visits during the
summer when classes aren't in
session, it continues to provide
educational programming
for K-12 students throughout
the year. The museum's
summer programs provide
an even more intimate and
personalized experience for
students.
"Usually the kids come for
an extended period ... and
the idea is to make a vivid,
fun, creative and exploratory
experience for the kids, to

not only boost their specific
learning but also provide
motivation for learning and
excitement," Slavin said. "It's
pretty special, you know, a lot
of times they get to be in the
museum when it's not open to
other people. It's a pretty nice
feeling, going from thinking
'I don't know if that's a place
for me,' to thinking 'Wow,
I've got this special behind-
the-scenes experience.'"
UMMA also partners with
the School of Education
to provide an immersive
program for students learning
English as a second language.
"There the kids wrote plays,
wrote poems, did artworks,
planned speeches and then
there was a night where their
parents came in addition to
the student-teachers and
teachers for a demonstration
of their learning across
many art forms," Slavin said.
"For some of those parents
that was the first time that
they had seen their kid in an
English performance. I came
that night just to see and I
was kind of, just floating on
a cloud, because I thought,
you know, this is really what
can happen when you have a
partnership."
At UMMA, arts education
isn't an end in and of itself.
As the museum's programs
for ESL, English as a Second
Language, students and its
individually tailored tours
demonstrate, the arts can be
an important tool for helping
students develop skills that
will serve them in all of their
academic subjects.
"If a kid is uncomfortable
here and not excited about art
and they just go home with
facts, we don't consider that
a uccess," Slavin said. "It's
all about motivation to learn
more. It's all about sparking
curiosity, making them
comfortable and moving their
knowledge along a little bit."
When education is limited
by an endless stream of stan-
dardized tests and pre-pre-
scribed curricula, it's easy to
lose the sense of wonder one
feels when grappling with
deep questions and the appre-
ciation for the world possible
through the acquisition of
knowledge. Arts education at
UMMA, as Slavin explained,
is best viewed as a way to keep
that sense of wonder alive.
"We try to look for the big
issues and the big questions
that art can raise that aren't
in a vacuum in the art world,
but spread out to science,
spread out to literature,
politics, social life, history,
because that's what makes it
interesting."

1

Professor of Theater Malcolm Tulip attended the prestigious Lecoq School.
T
Tulip: A m-a ftesae

By ADAM DEPOLLO
Online Arts Editor
Malcolm Tulip is, above all,
a man of the stage. Over the
course of his career, the School
of Music, Theatre & Dance
Associate Professor of Theater
has worked in all facets of
theatrical production - as an
actor, director, playwright and
choreographer.
The many strands of Tulip's
work, however, are tied togeth-
er by his love for the physical
spectacle of theater - a love
he developed in his native Lan-
caster, England, and honed into
his own personal style, begin-
ning with his training at the
Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
"I went there because the
training there was about two
things: One was a physical
approach to theater, which
means that, in some ways it's
the spectacle that counts,"
Tulip said. "This training is
a lot about how you get your
physical vocabulary to be able
to express whatever you want."
In his acting roles, Tulip
puts the command of physical
vocabulary he developed at
the Lecoq School on display.
In one of his productions, the
one man show "I Am My Own
Wife," Tulip took on the role of
Charlotte von Marlesburg, an
East German transvestite, and
34 other characters during the
course of two hours.
"The training I had with
changing physicality in a bold
way from character to char-
acter really came into play,"
Tulip said. "And it's not just the
shape that you take on, it's then
the quality of movement, what
kind of gestures each char-
acter makes, some shameless
use of accents. I mean there's
one scene with Charlotte and,
I think, eight reporters from
around the world."
Tulip's study of clowning
and vaudeville also informs
his approach to acting and his
original works. He teaches a
class on clowning for senior
theater students each fall and

developed "Quick Comedians he said. "I think there's an
& Changeable Taffeta," a piece immediacy thatpeople respond
combining Shakespearian to when they hear music and
fools and clowns with modern see it being played right there
clowning techniques, which that energizes them, and
he performed with University energizes their attention in a
students at the Kennedy Center completely different way. Their
for the Performing Arts in intellect is freed from having
Washington, D.C. to understand in the same ways
In his approach to - not that they don't have to
directing and staging plays, understand - but their ears are
Tulip emphasizes open receiving different signals. But
communication with his actors also you can see that I use it in
and a fluid development of the the same way you would have
vision for each play. the music for a cartoon."
"I attempt to establish an While Tulip revels in
atmosphere of investigation. I pushing the theatricality of his
try and allow enough time in productions to the extreme, he
the early stages for everyone also has a deep appreciation for
to understand that we're older styles and the traditions
all searching, that we're all of the stage, an appreciation he
playing," he said. developed in part at the Lecoq
But, at the same time, he School.
adds his own personal touch of "The other part of the school
flamboyance and grandiosity was about encountering what
to each production, they call 'le grand style,' the
'big styles' in Greek Tragedy,
Commedia dell'Arte, melodra-
ma, a thing called bouffon -
Loving spectacle buffoons - and clovn," he said.
of theater. "Nostalgic? Yes, I do have that
aspect to myself. I think I am
old-fashioned in many ways,
while making theater in the
present. I like the traditions, I
"I like what goes on stage to like the old traditions, I really
appear painterly or like a rich do."
kind of movie, as in texture," Ultimately, however, Tulip
Tulip said. "I believe that what seems most proud of the
we're doing is supposed to be uniqueness of his style and
taking an audience beyond the the new life that that style can
everyday, so I'm not a big fan of bring to theater.
what people call naturalistic. "Obviously everything I see
My belief is that once it's on ... some of it is going to sink in
stage in front of an audience, and be somewhere in my toolkit
it's already not naturalistic at some point. But I think I can
because, let's face it, we're honestly say that I don't look
pretending. And I enjoy to other productions of a play
pushing that to extreme." that I'm going to do for clues,"
The emphasis Tulip places he said. "The given is the play,
on the spectacle of theater you've got the text and that's
carries through in his original it. What's going to make (the
productions, which always work) exciting is that it's new
include live music in addition people having a relationship
to the action happening on with this play."
stage. Tulip will be acting in and
"I think it's just an providing choreography for a
in-your-face reminder of production of "One Man, Two
the theatricality of the Governors" at the Heritage
presentation. It's like music hall Festival in Charlottesville,
and vaudeville, it's like circus," Virginia this July.
Design by Gaby Vasquez
GooCps!
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin
announce that they are "consciously
uncoupling."
Vogue-ye
Kim Kardashian and Kanye
West pose for the cover of
Vogue,

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mags of Jaon Iee L Dvid

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