items tagged with Augustana College

A musical based on the Weekly World News' tabloid-famous Bat Boy screams “camp.” Augustana College’s production of Bat Boy: The Musical, however, is not campy enough, as a couple of the leading actors played their parts too seriously or sincerely during Friday’s performance, softening the effect of this musical’s craziness.

There are few people in the arts who admit to being concerned about either their fame or their place in history. Jaimy Gordon is one of that rare breed, but she doesn’t need to fret anymore.

Over the past decade, she said in a phone interview last week promoting her April 19 reading at Augustana College, she wondered whether “I was going to be swallowed up in the oblivion of people who are just mildly well-known in their own lifetimes and then forgotten about.”

Since 1981, she has been on the faculty at Western Michigan University – in a creative-writing program that doesn’t have the cachet of, for example, the University of Iowa’s. Her 1974 novel Shamp of the City-Solo is considered a cult classic, and her 1999 Bogeywoman was a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.”

She had the respect of her peers but said she remained a nonentity in the publishing world. “I had what I would have called a career,” she said. “But to my surprise, the New York Times among other places didn’t even recognize it as existing. It wasn’t even on the map until I suddenly became famous with this book.”

Jessica Teckemeyer’s Fawn or Foe is both a cuddly creature and a disturbing monster, with a lifelike aura that defies the porcelain from which it’s formed. In this year’s Rock Island Fine Arts Exhibition, the piece stands out as a strong marriage of technique and subtext.

Similarly, Kristin Quinn’s Flyway offers a modern sensibility and expression that differentiate it from an exhibition full of technical skill yet often lacking stylistic flair, nuance, and ambiguity.

While those two works are exceptional, there’s also a strong vein of realism in the show, and several artists conjure meaning through an abstract approach – but without quite reaching the resonant standard set by Teckemeyer and Quinn.

Featuring 51 pieces by 40 artists within a 150-mile radius of the Quad Cities, the 36th-annual exhibit is on display in Centennial Hall at Augustana College through April 22. Juror Joseph Mella, the director of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, awarded prizes sponsored by the Rock Island Art Guild and Augustana College.

Karoly Veress’ sculpture Freedom is paradoxical: Its wing-like forms are ascending and graceful from some vantage points, yet they look like ax blades from others. Delving into the lives of the artist and the humanitarian who inspired this work, though, we can begin to understand that these elements aren’t as contradictory as they first seem.

Dedicated in 2000, Freedom is located on the Augustana College campus, near the Denkmann Memorial Building at 3520 Seventh Avenue in Rock Island. Cast in bronze from a plaster model, it rises from a cylindrical concrete base to an overall height of about 10 feet.

The dynamic upper portion of the sculpture unfurls boldly into two fluid forms – giving the work its sense of motion. Veress explained: “In this design I symbolize freedom in wings, partly protecting, and sheltering, but foremost enabling us to rise above the daily confusions. These wings sometimes lift us up out of the monstrous historic context into a state where all that remains is just one commitment: to human values, to the dignity of all human beings.”

Veress’ words stem, in part, from his own experiences. The artist was a student at the University of Budapest while the city was still in postwar ruins and under Soviet occupation. When the 1956 Hungarian Revolution failed, he fled to safety in the Netherlands, where he would discover his love for sculpting.

What first struck me during February 18’s performance of Ballet Quad Cities' Love Stories: Love on the Run was the venue, as Augustana College's Wallenberg Hall provided exactly the spatial experience I wanted for this series of balletic vignettes. There’s a grandness to the architecture, particularly the Tuscan pillars, that lends itself to the high-art air of ballet, but there's also an intimacy there that allowed the audience to be close to the dancers, who performed on a raised platform. I often lost myself in the beauty, passion, and emotion of the choreographed works because I was so near to the action, and not separated by a sea of seats in a formal theatrical setting.

Augustana College’s How I Learned to Drive offers an interesting opportunity to compare the acting talents of performers at different points in their lives, as there’s a marked contrast between Reader editor Mike Schulz’s work and that of the students who compose the rest of the cast. Being beyond college-age (and hired here as a guest actor), Schulz is presumably more aware of the darkness in the world, the pain of real life, and the reality of what some would call sin. I imagine he's subsequently able to draw from what he knows and use it to shape his character, whereas it’s apparent that the students are feigning their feelings. To be clear, that’s not to say that the students are poor actors, and each one offered a notable performance during Friday’s presentation. Compared to Schulz’s effort, however, there are distinct differences in the sincerity of their portrayals.

The Reader's chief theatre reviewer, Thom White, saw and wrote about 52 area stage productions in 2011. I saw 39 and reviewed 12. Obviously, during our second-annual breakfast chat on the Year in Theatre, there was a bit to talk about.

If I were a college (or even high school) student of the female sex, I might find playwright Merri Biechler’s Real Girls Can’t Win! poignant and, if not life-changing, at least food for thought. I’m not, though, so while I appreciated Augustana College's cute presentation of the piece, I found the play itself to be rather pretentious, and annoyingly preachy.

Like most professional performers, Chicagoan Nick Semar has a healthy number of musicals on his résumé.

Unlike most professional performers, Semar can boast acting credits in 26 original, hour-long musicals.

Staged over 27 nights.

All of which were made up on the spot.

If, at any point, you find your mind wandering during director Jeff Coussens’ Genesius Guild presentation of The Taming of the Shrew – and trust me, that won’t happen often – snapping back to attention is easy: Just check out the reactions of the men watching the show from stage right. You’ll have no trouble spotting them, because one of the guys is drunk off his ass, and the other’s wearing a dress.