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Three World Arts and Cultures Faculty Awarded 2005 Guggenheim Fellowships

Donald Cosentino, Simone Forti and Victoria Marks are named

Three faculty members in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures have been awarded 2005 Guggenheim Fellowships. They are professor and vice chair Donald Cosentino, adjunct assistant professor Simone Forti, and professor Victoria Marks.

The fellowships are given by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions. Those who receive the awards have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

The awards bring to six the number of world arts and cultures faculty who have been named Guggenheim fellows in the past five years. The three 2005 fellows join professor and chair David Roussève (2004), joint professor Judith Baca (2003) and adjunct assistant professor Lynn Dally (2001).

The department of world arts and cultures is part of the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA (UCLArts). Three UCLArts alumni also were named Guggenheim fellows this year. They are composer Jake Heggie ’84, ethnomusicologist Dale A. Olsen ’73 and artist Paul Sietsema ’99.

A tribute to past and present world arts and cultures Guggenheim fellows will take place from 3 to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, May 17, at Glorya Kaufman Hall on the UCLA campus. (Seating is limited.) Brief performance-oriented presentations will be made by Cosentino, Forti, Marks, Dally and Baca, as well as by world arts and cultures alumna and 2003 Guggenheim fellow Sophiline Cheam Shapiro ’97, artistic director of the Long Beach, Calif.-based Khmer Arts Academy.
The world arts and cultures 2005 Guggenheim fellows and their projects are:

Donald Cosentino’s research interests include African and New World Diaspora oral traditions, religions, and popular arts and cultures. He has done extensive fieldwork on African and Diasporic cultures in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Cuba and Brazil. He is the author of “Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers: Tradition and Invention in Mende Story Performance” (Cambridge University Press, 1982) and “Vodou Things: The Art of Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise” (University of Mississippi Press, 1998). He is the editor and chief writer of the award winning catalogue for “The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou” (1995), a traveling exhibition he curated for the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. In 2004, Cosentino curated two new exhibitions at the Fowler Museum in commemoration of the bicentennial of Haitian independence, and assisted in the curation of a retrospective on Haitian sculpture at the Frost Museum in Miami, Fla.

For his research project, Cosentino will write a book, “Travels With Charley and Manuel,” about Charley Guelperin, a Los Angeles-based priest of several closely related Afro Latin religions, and Manuel, an African spirit Charley channels during séances. Manuel is Charley’s spirit guide within the tradition of Espiritismo, an extremely popular spirit-possession cult with adherents throughout Latin America. In 1990, Charley opened Botanica El Congo Manuel, a spiritual services shop in East Hollywood, Calif. Cosentino, a professor of culture studies, met Charley a decade ago when he began doing Los Angeles-based field research on Black Atlantic religions.

Half of the book will be wrought from conversations Cosentino held with Charley and Manuel over that 10-year period. The priest and spirit will speak in their own words and voices edited from transcripts of their meetings. These essentially biographic chapters will be balanced with a narrative account of the trio’s quest for “holy bones.” Charley and Manuel have acted as guides and instructors in Cosentino’s project to document the use of the tangible dead — i.e., human skulls and bones — as objects of power and devotion.

Simone Forti came of age in the 1950s and 1960s and developed out of two main influences: dance improvisation, which she studied with Anna Halprin, and the legendary Judson Dance Theater that revolutionized modern dance in New York at a historical moment of dialogue between artists, musicians, poets and dancers. From Forti’s early minimalist dance-constructions through her animal-movement studies and news animations, she has been a seminal influence in her field. For the past two decades, she has been developing “Logomotion,” an improvisational dance/narrative form. She is the author of “Handbook in Motion” (Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974) and “Oh, Tongue” (Beyond Baroque Books, 2003). She was a contributing writer for “Taken by Surprise, A Dance Improvisation Reader” (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), a volume of essays on dance improvisation. Forti has received various grants including six National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In 1995, she received the Dance Theater Workshop’s New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for sustained achievement, and in 2004 she received the Lester Horton Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Dance Resource Center of Los Angeles.
Forti will use her Guggenheim Fellowship to continue her work in movement and language, giving voice to the thoughts and images that flash through her motor and verbal centers simultaneously. This work, which she calls “Logomotion,” has helped her know what’s on her mind while it’s still a wild feeling in her bones; and it orders her thoughts by the aesthetics of movement, time and space, so that they transcend the personal while remaining intimate. She feels hungry for the ways literature touches subject mater. Her process is closely integrated with her life, including performing, as the occasion arises, in venues ranging from art museums to alternative spaces and teaching workshops (which to a great extent are her laboratory), reading literature, and writing. She plans to continue working with certain colleagues, adapting her Logomotion process to projects of various formats that give room to their various perceptions and voices.

Victoria Marks creates dances for the stage, for film, in community settings and for professional dancers. Her work magnifies and develops the unique characters of the people she works with, and communicates those characters, through performance, to a wider audience. In 2003, her dance trio “Against Ending” won Lester Horton Dance Awards in four categories. She received the 2002 California DanceMaker Grant, the 2001–02 COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles and the 1997 Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and London Arts Board, among others. She also has received a Fulbright Fellowship in choreography and numerous awards for her dance films, including the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival (1996 and 1995), the Golden Antena Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association’s Dance and the Camera Festival.

Marks will research and develop an evening-length live movement/theater work made with and performed by a small ensemble of physically disabled veterans, both young veterans returning from Iraq and older veteran populations. The work will use movement as a primary vehicle for the communication of ideas. Her creation of the piece will build on techniques of choreo-portraiture that she has been developing over the past 10 years, where the performers are the subjects of the work. Composer Eve Beglarian will work with Marks in the creation of a sound score, partly composed and partly culled from existing sound sources. Marks will choreograph and direct the piece. The project connects three critical strands of Marks’ work over the past 10 years: it allows her to continue her choreographic research into the representation of disabled bodies on stage; it builds upon a body of work that she has made for “real people” (i.e. non-dancers), where an individual’s identity or where a real relationship is the subject of the stage narrative; and it permits her to take a stride toward understanding how to situate her dance making as part of a larger civic discourse.

For Immediate Use - May 6, 2005
Carolyn Campbell, ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu
(310) 825-6540
Patrick Polk,
polk@arts.ucla.edu
(310) 825-3951