News & Events

Polly Carl, who has served as artistic director of the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis for seven years, will leave the Twin Cities in September to take a job with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. The news is to be announced today.

The Minneapolis-based service organization serves as both midwife and research-and-development lab for new plays. During Carl's tenure, the group heightened its national profile, upped its annual budget from $600,000 to $1.4 million, and saw its member-playwright ranks swell from 200 to more than 900.

Carl shies away from naming favorite plays -- "They're all special," she said Tuesday. She worked on Craig Lucas' "Small Tragedy," which later won an Obie Award in New York in 2004 for "best American play."

A former political activist and labor organizer in Florida, the Elkhart, Ind., native moved to the Twin Cities in 1991 to work on a doctorate in comparative studies at the University of Minnesota.

She joined the Playwrights' Center in 1998 -- a year before completing her degree -- as development director.

She will join another Twin Citian at Steppenwolf. Managing director David Hawkanson formerly served in the same capacity at the Guthrie Theater.

ROHAN PRESTON

This article originally appeared in the Star Tribune and can be viewed at http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/onstage/45437582.html

As a graduate student in Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota, Craig Wilkins was struck by how people define space at hip hop raves. In the midst of dance, human presence defines architecture, not the other way around.

An avid dancer, Wilkins hung out at raves in the Minneapolis area when Prince was rising in popularity. He was fascinated with how music and dancing creates an identity and function for space.

"No matter how many different kinds of people come to a rave, there's a moment in that rave where everybody's on the same page. Everybody's in the same place, whether that place is in a warehouse, an open field... I'm like, man that's a phenomenal, wonderful thing. Are there any other ways that can happen? How might I be able to make that architectural? Basically what architects do is shape space. If music can help create space and can help create identity, what kind of identity would a hip hop space make?"

Fast forward 20 years, Wilkins is in Detroit, a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan and the director of the university's Detroit Community Design Center. He dances less, but retains an appreciation of hip hop and the notion that human activity defines architecture, not the other way around.

Wilkins, an African American in a field representing few like him, has combined his hip hop ideas with mentoring young African-American students in an innovative book, "The Aesthetics of Equity," published last year by the University of Minnesota Press. A manifesto on hip hop architecture for professionals and students that challenges the traditional view of architecture and its inclusion of African Americans, the book is written in two voices - that of a scholar and a student. The hip-hop sections tend to be shorter and wittier, but no less complete than the academic sections, written in proper scholarly rhetoric.

Born in the poverty of the Bronx, "hip hop culture has taken things considered garbage, has rescued them and taken things that have been considered dispensable and made them indispensable," he says. The use of turntables and scratchy LPs, at a time when CDs were defining recorded sound, became a laboratory of sound. "What they did was rescue the turntable, and they used it in a way that it was not designed for. The turntable is a passive instrument. You play a record on it. They used in a diametrically opposed way. It's an active instrument now."

Culturally, hip hop created an avenue for "dispensable" people to become "indispensable." To get out of the Bronx, "you either had to be shockingly brilliant, which is almost impossible to do with the quality of the schools, or you had to be physically talented; you had to be a basketball player, a football player, something. ... Hip hop changed the rules. You could take a cassette player, go in the basement of your parent's house and rap all day, come out and sell it and become an entrepreneur. And eventually you sell it to a record company and how you become a recording artist. From there you become yet another kind of entrepreneur."

Wilkins reasons that you can also make "dispensable" material "indispensable" in architecture. "(Hip hop) had huge possibilities in terms of sustainability ... If it can be realized, it is groundbreaking. It would bring together all of the things I want to do in my architectural career -- not only doing aesthetically pleasing work but do work that means something beyond the fact that it is a beautiful object; it addresses a critical, meaningful concern.

"We don't bulldoze buildings like we used to, because that just creates waste. We now deconstruct buildings so we can those materials again. The entire argument for sustainability comes out of the hip hop mentality. What sustainability is about is using things in an efficient manner, rethinking how material gets used and how material gets made.

"What we've come to understand about space is a very Cartesian (philosopher Rene Descartes) view of space - this wide, that long...that abstract notion of space. Hip hop space is not like that at all. Hip hop space is a space that only becomes a space when people are in it; when people interact with it.

"How do we know we are in a classroom? From a Lockean (philosopher John Locke) perspective, we know we're in four walls that have defined the space... from a hip hop perspective, those things don't matter. The reason you know you're in a classroom is because there is a teacher and a student and they are interacting...and that teacher, in that interaction, can become the student, as the student can become a teacher."

Wilkins' connection between architecture and music is both traditional and innovative, says Kenneth Crutcher, president of the Detroit Chapter of the National Organization for Minority Architects and adjunct lecturer at Lawrence Technological University. Architecture, he says, has been referred to as "frozen music." What's different is that Wilkins says hip hop not only defines the artistic appearance of a structure, but the function of its design. Most significant, hip hop "is an African American invention." Our perception of space and aesthetics are based on Western tradition, he says, concurring with Wilkins. "To apply an African American art form like hip hop to architecture is significant."

Crutcher, whose architecture firm, Crutcher Studio, designed Lola's restaurant in Harmony Park/Paradise Valley, says that hip hop has permeated culture on all levels and has become a universal music genre. Many architects have drawn their ideas from hip hop, though few may have noticed. "Some of their edgy styles and use of raw materials, whether they admit it or not, (has) urban feel, urban character."

As an educator, Crutcher also appreciates Wilkins' effort to write the book in a student dialect. Chapter 4, "Space-Action," is required reading in his design studio. The concept of space being taught when he was a student was not something familiar to Crutcher's experience growing up in Detroit. "There was no translation. You had to do a lot of reading and some of it didn't make sense" Wilkins explains that "this is what the professor will say to you and this is what he's really saying."

In the "Remix" section of Chapter 4, Wilkins writes: "So dig. There is another way of looking at space, eh? Who knew? Actually, there is a shit load of ways, but first, let's look at ol' Lockey (John Locke) boy again. He really believes that the only way we can know space is to touch it or see it. That's an interesting point - but is that really true?"

Although Wilkins' book is directed to African American students and colleagues, it has a universal quality. "A lot of the themes I talk about in the book are beyond people of color," he says.

"When you talk about the way in which we are taught to see the world ... it allows for certain things to happen and it excludes certain things. When I talk about looking at space as designers - not from an abstract perspective but from an engaged perspective, a real perspective that puts people at the center of the creation of space, not on the periphery of the space, that transcends color; it has nothing to do with color.

"What it comes down to, as a designer, what do you think your responsibility is? Is it to the form of the building or the people who inhabit it? Is it to the client who pays for the building or is it society that has to interact with that building? Those things have no color."

If architecture abruptly changes, like break dancing, this could be a moment where "a rupture in the dance is necessary," says Wilkins. "The old solutions no longer apply. Our problems at this time are different. Architecture should be about that, about responding to society now, all of society, for the future."

In a place like Detroit, where there hasn't been much building going on lately, and many questions loom about its economic and social future, Craig Wilkins projects a street-smart prophetic vision: "Let's get started ... It's gonna be a lil' sumpin' sumpin' special."

This article can be seen in its original context at http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/wilkins19109.aspx .

In 1992 Anne Enke received her MA in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota. She continued her work at the U, and in 1999 she completed her Ph.D. in History. She is now working as an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of History and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. Specializing in the history of sexuality, her research and teaching interests include historical constructions of race and sexuality, women's activism, social movements, feminist, trans, and queer theory. Her most recent publication, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism, was released by Duke University Press in 2007. Anne's faculty profile can be seen at http://history.wisc.edu/people/faculty/enke.htm.

Ariel Ducey graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1994 with a BA in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center. She now works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Her most recent book, Never Good Enough: Health Care Workers and the False Promise of Job Training, was released December 2008 by Cornell University Press.

The following synopsis can be viewed in its original context at http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5280:

"Frontline health care workers have always been especially vulnerable to the perpetual tides of health care "reform," but in the mid-1990s in New York City, they bore the brunt of change in a new way. They were obliged to take on additional work, take lessons in recalibrating their attitudes, and, when those steps failed to bring about the desired improvements, take advantage of training programs that would ostensibly lead to better jobs. Such health care workers not only became targets of pro-market and restructuring policies but also were blamed for many of the problems created by those policies, from the deteriorating conditions of patient care to the financial vulnerability of entire institutions.

"In Never Good Enough, Ariel Ducey describes some of the most heavily funded training programs, arguing that both the content of many training and education programs and the sheer commitment of time they require pressure individual health care workers to compensate for the irrationalities of America's health care system, for the fact that caring labor is devalued, and for the inequities of an economy driven by the relentless creation of underpaid service jobs. In so doing, the book also analyzes the roles that unions--particularly SEIU 1199 in New York--and the city's academic institutions have played in this problematic phenomenon.

"In her thoughtful and provocative critique of job training in the health care sector, Ariel Ducey explores the history and the extent of job training initiatives for health care workers and lays out the political and economic significance of these programs beyond the obvious goal of career advancement. Questioning whether job training improves either the lives of workers or the quality of health care, she explains why such training persists, focusing in particular on the wide scope of its "emotional" benefits. The book is based on Ducey's three years as an ethnographer in several hospitals and in-depth interviews with key players in health care training. It argues that training and education cannot be a panacea for restructuring--whether in the health care sector or the economy as a whole."

Ariel Ducey's faculty profile can be viewed at http://soci.ucalgary.ca/profiles/ariel-ducey

Jonathan Sterne graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BA in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature in 1993. He went on to earn his Ph.D. at the Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He now is the Chair of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal. To read the following profile in its original context, and to learn more about Jonathan's work, visit http://sterneworks.org/:

"Dr. Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. His interests include sound, the history and philosophy of technology, cultural studies, music and digital media. His award-winning first book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003--now in its third printing) considers late 19th century technologies like sound recording, telephony and radio as artifacts of a broader sound culture. The Audible Past rewrites the history of early sound reproduction, and argues for the centrality of sound to our understandings of modernity.

"Originally trained in cultural studies and continental philosophy, Sterne branched out into historical and documentary research. His work thus combines materials recovered from the esoteric world of archives and forgotten documents with big questions that cross disciplines, paradigms, and fashions. He strives for a balance of invention, recovery, vigor and humor in his work.

"In over 40 journal articles and book chapters, Sterne covers a wide range of issues in media, technology, and the politics of culture such as: Muzak as sonic architecture; histories of television networking technologies, trains and telegraphs; the racial politics of cyberculture; and the philosophy of computer trash.

"His next book, tentatively titled MP3: the Meaning of a Format, connected the cultural and institutional forces behind the development of the mp3 format in the 1980s and early 1990s with long-term trends in the development of telecommunications, psychoacoustics and cybernetics. The book is at once a study of the world's most common audio format (more recordings exist as mp3s than in any other format or medium) and a history of hearing in a media-saturated world.

"As a primary investigator and co-investigator, Sterne has supported his work (and the work of his graduate students) with grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

"Sterne has been online since 1982, and he has seen cyberspace evolve from a loose network of bulletin boards to the massive internet as we know it today. Since 1994, he has been involved in producing Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, one of the longest continuously-running publication on the internet and precursor of the open-access publishing movement.

"In addition to writing for Bad Subjects and sometimes other alternative media outlets like Tape Op, Punk Planet, and Other Magazine, Sterne has occasionally been interviewed in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times,Wired Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Toronto Star, La Presse, CBC, Fox News and National Public Radio. He has delivered over 60 invited lectures in 9 countries at some of the world's top universities.

"An innovative and award winning teacher, Sterne is equally at home in the seminar room and the lecture hall. He has taught over 3000 undergraduates in his career. He is committed to creative pedagogy in and out of the classroom and his courses have had substantial online content since the late 1990s.

"Sterne has played bass since he was 10 years old and has performed and recorded with several rock bands, a few jazz acts, and a school orchestra. An aspiring amateur audio engineer, he runs a small not-for-profit home studio.

"His most recent band, Lo-Boy, released their first CD in spring of 2003, and is mixing their second, as yet untitled album."