Performance: Hank Lazer and Andrew Raffo Dewar Poetry/Music Duo
Monday, November 11 at 6 PM
Dancz Hall, Hodgson School of Music Room 264
ICE Conversation Series: Creative Campus
Tuesday, November 12 at 9:30 AM
ICE Office, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Room S160
ICE is pleased to host Hank Lazer, Andrew Raffo Dewar, and representatives of Creative Campus, a student-centered arts advocacy organization at the University of Alabama, for two days of performance and conversation about the role of the arts in a research university.
Hank Lazer and Andrew Raffo Dewar have been exploring the improvisational performance of poetry and jazz, working mostly with texts from Lazer’s handwritten Notebooks project. At times, the performances involve music that supports, illustrates, or reiterates elements of the written and spoken text. At other times, the balance shifts in the direction of the text as a mere suggestion and the music becomes the dominant element of the new composition that results from the interaction of words and music.
Lazer is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he is Executive Director for Creative Campus and edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. Over the past fifteen years, Lazer has collaborated with various jazz musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, and visual artists in seeking new ways to present poetry. Lazer’s seventeenth book of poetry N18(complete), a handwritten book, is available from Singing Horse Press.
Andrew Raffo Dewar (b.1975 Rosario, Argentina) is a composer, improviser, soprano saxophonist and ethnomusicologist. Since 1995 he has been active in the music communities of Minneapolis, New Orleans, the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, performing his work internationally. Dewar had the good fortune to study with a number of masters of contemporary music, such as Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, Bill Dixon, and has also had a long involvement with experimental and traditional Indonesian music. Andrew Raffo Dewar is Assistant Professor in New College and the School of Music at the University of Alabama.
Links:
http://creativecampus.ua.edu
N18
http://adewar.web.wesleyan.edu
A student-centered arts advocacy organization, Creative Campus is dedicated to building relationships that will serve as a voice for the cultural arts. The interns at Creative Campus—forty-eight students with various majors and personal backgrounds—work with students, faculty, and community members in order to engage the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa with innovative ideas. Over the past few years, projects and events have included a student art publication, an interdisciplinary speaker series, an experimental jazz concert series, a student film festival, and the Druid City Arts Festival. By developing collaborative relationships with a wide range of community partners, interns not only learn how to work as a team but also build skills in ideation, organization, design, collaboration, marketing and media production which cultivates a skill set and sense of professionalism that translates into any field of work.
