Arts Council

CE International recently had the opportunity to connect with Tomás Ó Ruairc, the CEO of the Teaching Council of Ireland. His work at the Teaching Council represents a remarkable intersection of community, creativity, and professional standards that is capturing the attention of the OECD and European Union. Here, we share highlights from a conversation between Tomás and Diane Whitehead, CEO at CE International.

Backpages is an opportunity for the academy to engage with theatre and performance practice with immediacy and insight and for theatre workers and performance artists to engage critically and reflectively on their work and the work of their peers. Featuring short, topical articles and debates, polemics where necessary, it’s a place of intellectual intervention and creative reflection. It’s also where we hope to articulate, perhaps for the first time, the work of new and rising theatre artists in an academic forum.

The essay draws together various threads of a 2-year multidisciplinary practice-as-research project that combined theatre historiography, performance ethnography and clown practice. Along with theatre historian Professor Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University) and a creative team including a director, dialect consultant, choreographer, musical director and multimedia designer, I (a trained clown) performed various iterations of Charles Mathews’s Trip to America (1824) in Chicago and Cardiff between 2009 and 2011. The essay cites the project’s numerous research outputs, including new insights into Mathews’s virtuosic technique, but also new theories regarding the genealogy of racialized performance including blackface minstrelsy in the USA and UK, for which Mathews is often cited as a progenitor. The project had transatlantic significance for our understanding of racialized representation, both in performance and reception. However, the essay also tracks and critiques the reception of my own performances in the present day, giving the research an additional layer of relevance and impact. The strong (yet distinct) reactions of audiences in USA and UK provide the jumping off point for a sustained critique of historical reconstructions that seek to bridge or elide historical or cultural gaps. Reflecting on the sometimes fraught relationship between artists and scholars the essay develops a distinction between three different levels at which practice-as-research can contribute to or work alongside the demands of the academy: the pursuit of authenticity and verisimilitude (mimesis); the harnessing of creative strategies in adapting source materials for a modern audience (poeisis); the embrace of the critical and political potentials of performance in relation to controversial issues such as race (kinesis). As such, the essay performs multiple research functions: it disseminates the new scholarly knowledge acquired through the project; and it proposes a rationale for evaluating the significance of embodied ways of knowing and learning that were so valuable in this project.

Proulx, Steve, Les saisons du Parc Belmont, 1923-1983 (Montréal, Libre Expression, 2005), 186 p.. An article from journal Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française (Volume 59, Number 3, Winter 2006, pp. 223-404), on Érudit.

Fashion designer Bruce Oldfield tells Nick Smurthwaite about his school days at a grammar school

Alexandra Dilys-Slaby : What did your position as Special Advisor to Michael D. involve?Colm Ó Briain : Let me give you a few elements about my background first of all. I was the first full-time Director of the Arts Council before that, and I set up a course in Arts Administration in University College Dublin, and I was also involved with a group in setting up the Business Council for the Arts—it is now called Business2Arts, it was called Cothú then—and I was the first Director of that as wel...

The ASCE EWRI Environmental Multi-Media Council ~EMMC! Awards Committee each year ~1! reviews papers in the Journal of Environmental Engineering and the Practice Periodical of Hazardous, Toxic, and Radioactive Waste Management to make recommendations for three EWRI Awards ~Hering Medal, Horner Award, Greeley Award! and five Society awards ~Norman Medal, Croes Medal, Wellington Prize, Collingwood Prize, and ASCE State-of-the-Art Award!; ~2! makes recommendations for the Huber Research Prize, based on submitted nominations; and ~3! makes a recommendation for the Freese Award and Lecture. While ASCE has numerous awards for published papers related to environmental engineering, there are few awards to recognize different kinds of professional achievement. In Spring 2001, the EMMC Awards Committee proposed and received approval for three new, broader-scope awards. Award for Achievement in Environmental Engineering Education—to honor an individual who has made outstanding contributions to environmental engineering education, both at the individual’s home institution and more broadly.