[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Description, Matisse, film, trapeze artist, and all that jazz

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,
Mixed bag of articles. Have included some comments about why have included articles if thought off subject. Any way  subjects include description, Matisse, film,  trapeze artist, jazz and a bit more.
Regards,
Lisa

Correct me if  wrong, but I believe Matisse became visually impaired later in life. He used as a result paper cutting as a medium. Anyway a biography about Matisse by Hilary Spurling wins Whitbread prize. Link follows, full article at end of mail
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1694941,00.html 


Was a bit unsure whether to send or not. Link is to a movie plot
The reason I send is because the main character is a blind girl who is a gifted ceramist. This  is for those who are interested or have area of research in how blind artist are portrayed in the media.
http://www.bollywoodmantra.com/movie-reviews-276-humko-tumse-pyar-hai.html

I have sent this article before. I reappears many times in other papers, the latest I have seen is in The Weekend Austrailian. Here's a link to the article there.
Feeling can yield an image
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18084853%255E16947,00.html

Excerpt from article.

**Misunderstanding at center of a woman's denied access **

ENGLEWOOD -- When Jeanne Cadman, a legally blind artist on Dearborn 
Street and owner of Blind Images, was denied access to a local 
restaurant recently, she was bewildered.

http://www.sun-herald.com/NewsArchive2/020506/tp3ch7.htm?date=020506&story=tp3ch7.htm


The next article is perhaps a bit off subject or not?
High-flying hero

Blind trapeze artist leaves exciting past in Las Vegas, lives homeless 
on the banks of Fraser River, heroically saves woman from drowning

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/canada/article.jsp?content=20060130_120167_120167

excerpt from an article.
Ruby Stone, another Keystone resident, also enjoys the class. 
“It’s fun, but 
... you got to be careful what you’re doing, that’s for sure,” said Stone, who 
is legally blind. 
Most older ladies think they could never make a bracelet 
because they don’t have the hand strength or their eyesight is failing, Moore 
said. But since Moore taught Stone, she said she doesn’t take eyesight as an 
excuse anymore.

http://www.duluth.com/placed/index.php?sect_rank=1&story_id=214319


*Lisa Thorson Presents JazzArtSigns in Boston March **Lisa Thorson Presents JazzArtSigns in Boston March 
*http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=8631

Toronto Star, Canada
Saturday, February 25, 2006

New "colour commentary" has fashion debut

By HELEN HENDERSON

A group of innovators at Ryerson University is about to bring new meaning to the term "colour commentary."

When runway models strut their stuff at Ryerson's "Mass Exodus 2006" fashion show in April, Natalya Ratner will treat the audience to a detailed scene-by-scene description of colours, textures and choreography.

People who are blind or have low vision already can get wireless headphones offering verbal descriptions of what's happening on the big screen at many movie theatres. But live performances are another matter.

The Ryerson fashion show will debut LiveDescribe, sophisticated new software, developed at the university that promises to help deliver vivid descriptions of sets, fabrics, models and the whole runway atmosphere through wireless FM receivers.

It's billed as a North-American first.

Ratner, who has a background in both theatre and fashion, will be its first colour commentator. And the technology team, which has spent a year working on the system, hopes it will give a new type of access to everything from concerts to theatre performances.

This is about conveying the emotion and feel of the show, a talent all too familiar to sign language interpreters who portray the spoken word to people who are deaf.

"Our interpreters go to some rehearsals and they're almost like part of the cast," says John Watson, general manager of Theatre Direct Canada. 

Theatre Direct, which focuses on young people, will have American Sign Language interpretation at next month's performance of Beneath The Banyan Tree, a play incorporating dance, puppets and music to tell the story of a young girl who has moved to Canada from India and is struggling to adjust to a new life.

Next year, when the group is scheduled to move to a new performance space, Watson says he hopes sign language interpretation will be become a regular part of the playbill.

Ryerson's LiveDescribe project started out looking at ways to give blind students easier access to labs and other university activities, says principal investigator Deborah Fels.

Fels has already earned an international reputation for creating a video-conferencing system that lets children in hospital participate in school classes by activating from the hospital a colourful pear-shaped robot in the classroom.

A lot of thought went into the way LiveDescribe delivery affects the information itself.

"People who are blind say they find a colourful delivery with lots of emotion more entertaining but less trustworthy," says Fels, an associate professor of information technology management who has a doctoral degree in "human factors."

"But entertainment is important, too. They enjoy it much more."

The medium is the message.

In partnership with the University of Toronto and with backing from the federal government, the LiveDescribe team developed software that takes in a video signal and analyzes the best places to insert audio description.

At the "Mass Exodus" show, high school students from the W. Ross Macdonald School for the Blind in Brantford will be there, using the wireless headsets to review just how well the system works.

As the voice of the show, Ratner says she'll be aiming for a "vivid and lively" description but one that strikes a balance between the traditional dry video description and colour commentary. "I want them to be able to `see' the show through my eyes." 

"Mass Exodus 2006" will run at the Ryerson Theatre April 5 and 6. Tickets range from $12 to $25. For more information, see 

http://www.ryerson.ca/fashion/massexodus/



article


'Writing biographies is a bit like being a private detective'
Hilary Spurling, surprise winner of this year's Whitbread prize for her biography of Matisse, tells Stuart Jeffries why it took her 15 years to uncover the gripping story of an artist many had dismissed as dull

Thursday January 26, 2006

Guardian

It's only 7am, but Hilary Spurling - £25,000 richer than she had been 12 hours earlier, husband still sensibly asleep upstairs - receives me at her Holloway home more sartorially together than anyone has a right to be at this absurd hour. The 65-year-old biographer is as fragrant and seemingly indomitable as Mary Archer, though infinitely more appealing company. "Of course it was a complete surprise," says Spurling as she makes coffee. And the bookies were blindsided too - William Hill had the biographer as 5-2 second favourite to win from the five-strong Whitbread prize shortlist, while Ali Smith was 5-4 to win with her novel The Accidental.
Spurling, whose previous subjects have included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Paul Scott and Sonia Orwell, is especially surprised that she won the Whitbread Book of the Year award because, she says, "Biographies rarely win the overall prize. At least half the time it's won by a novel." The last biography to win was Claire Tomalin's life of Samuel Pepys in 2002. Spurling was pleased to win the £5,000 for the biography category earlier this month (a sum that paid her tax bill), but had no expectations of leaving the Whitbread Brewery on Tuesday evening with a cheque for £25,000. Has she earmarked it for anything? "Heavens, not yet!"

Spurling won for her two-volume biography of Henri Matisse, a life that one might have thought would be a sumptuously illustrated bore. Matisse's paintings of blissful bien-être and sun-drenched calm surely indicated that the artist was so unedifyingly well adjusted that his life wasn't worth writing about. Surely a man who sought, in his own words, to make art "that would console the mind and sustain the spirit as a good armchair relieves physical tension" was too banal to warrant one, let alone two volumes? Sure, he's said to have slept with his sitters and indulged himself in the fleshpots of Nice while the second world war raged all around - but what self-respecting artist hasn't?

Spurling has with 15 years' research and writing shown all the contentions of the previous paragraph wrong. She writes, for instance that, "For Matisse, models were working partners, not sexual captives," and is convinced that even though, aged 70, Matisse left his wife for his young model Lydia Delectorskaya, the relationship was platonic. He loved her, yes, but he only expressed it on canvas.

Spurling, moreover, has exposed a paradox about Matisse that nobody imagined to exist: that this tranquil art was made by an endlessly angst-ridden man. The Matisse disclosed by Spurling was the sort of person so insecure that he practised violin incessantly out of fear that he would go blind and have to earn his living playing for pennies in the street. He described his involvement with his models as a sort of imaginative "flirtation which ends by turning into a rape. Whose rape? A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in the face of a sympathetic object." His work was regarded throughout his life as that of a wild animal (fauve means wild in French: hence the name of the art movement, fauvisme, which he, unwittingly, led).

Spurling's biography serves to explain that the reason Henri Matisse craved calm in his art is that he didn't have it in his life; that his paintings were to be a vision of a superior reality. She found, most important of all, that there was a cracking story to tell.

"My publisher was probably the only person in the world to realise that nobody had written a biography of Matisse and he suggested that I do it," she says. "I felt my heart leap - I assumed it had been done, and was thrilled it hadn't. I was all wrong for it: I wasn't an art historian, I wasn't French and I am a woman. I thought these things would be a problem, but they helped.

"That's when I appealed to Matisse experts in Paris, London and New York and the message came back: he was a painter, but there is no biography. People deduced a life from the serene paintings. Because I'm a biographer, I said, 'I can't believe this.' I loved his paintings and I couldn't believe pictures of such power were painted by such a dull man."

In a newspaper article, Spurling once drew a parallel between herself and a character in Bartok's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle. In one scene, Bluebeard's new bride rushes through the dark rooms of his castle, flinging open one locked door after another, exposing shackles, fetters, instruments of bondage, walls wet with blood and an icy lake of tears. "The young wife in Bartok's opera," wrote Spurling "is tough, fearless, energetic and implacably determined to let in light and air on the murky past. When I started out as a biographer in my 20s, I was like that too. Each of my books since then has unearthed and exposed secrets that had been kept dark; in the words of my first subject, Ivy Compton-Burnett, 'through long lives and on deathbeds' ."

Spurling's contention is that she has been writing during a golden age for biography in Britain, one that has lasted for 30 years and to which her Matisse is a fitting full stop. Apparently, two-volume thumpers of the Matisse kind are no longer what people want. "We pursued our calling in what the romantic Richard Holmes [biographer of Coleridge and Shelley] called the courts of truth and justice. Discretion was another word for cant, hypocrisy and evasion."

Biographers of Spurling's generation and temper (she cites Holroyd, Tomalin and Holmes) were made of stern stuff. They would never contemplate writing biographies of people to whom they were close; intimate ties would have to be cut if the biographer did their job properly. "Surgeons never operate on people they know," she says.

Why didn't she become a novelist instead of a biographer? "The imponderable part of biography attracts me very much. There's always something that you can't explain." Such as? "Why did Matisse become a painter? For all my research, I can't answer that question." This charming mystery, one might think, could also be very vexing: 15 years working on a painter's life and you don't know what got him going? Spurling seems happy that the mystery cannot be unravelled.

I ask what biography was like before this alleged golden age. "Too discreet and rather dull. Until Michael Holroyd came along with his biography of Lytton Strachey in 1968, no biographer would have written that his subject was gay." Holroyd's book was a liberation to nascent biographers such as Spurling: it not only rehabilitated its subject, but in her words "revolutionised the nature, goals and intellectual status of the form itself". Not only was the life to be hunted down, but in its telling the age in which the subject lived was to be illuminated. "That is one reason why I wanted to write about Matisse, to illuminate the century in which I lived much of my life. If you take a life, it's a marvellous instrument for looking through the whole period."

But still the French don't care for the genre, she points out, refusing to take it seriously as an intellectual endeavour. "They see it as grubby and Anglo-Saxon. They didn't take me seriously at all." Why are they wrong? "For the reasons I've given." But it isn't merely a high-minded vocation. "Not at all," she says impishly. "It's like being a private detective, or a nosy parker."

That, at least, was the idea of the Matisse project: a few years of snooping yielding a great story hitherto untold. One year into the research, though, she was struggling. Was there really a good story? "I probably didn't sleep for two years." But she persevered, and the first volume, The Unknown Matisse, published in 1998, revealed a man who from the age of 20, when he first picked up a paintbrush, had given his life over to his art, a man whose career choice infuriated his father and an avant-garde artist whom only a few people could understand and whom, throughout his life, many detested. Better yet was volume two, Matisse the Master, published last year. The Matisse family let Spurling read Matisse's unpublished correspondence from 1909, when he was 40, to his death in 1954. One problem: Matisse set aside two hours a day to write letters, so reading them took several years. But she does not regret the experience. "I think they are wonderful letters. If anyone bothered t
o print them, Matisse would become known as one of the great letter writers of the 20th century." These letters were what made the second volume, which covers Matisse's life after 40.

What will she do next? "Something small that doesn't take 15 years," she says.

I ask her to sign my copy of Matisse the Master. She does, and then draws my attention to the dustjacket. It's an intimate portrait of Matisse lying on a bed painted by fellow artist Olga Meerson, who fell in love with him. "Look, he's wearing a green corduroy suit, which were his work clothes, the denim of its time. He wouldn't want interviewers to have seen him that way. He always dressed up for them. It discloses him in a lovely way, though." As does Spurling

· The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master are both published by Penguin.

 
Article Courtesy AllAboutJazz.com  

Lisa Thorson Presents JazzArtSigns in Boston March 9 

SEE, HEAR, FEEL THE MUSIC: JAZZARTSIGNS, THE CUTTING-EDGE ARTS AND MUSIC EVENT OF THE UPCOMING YEAR PRESENTED IN BOSTON MARCH 9, 2006 BY VSA ARTS OF MASSACHUSETTS AND WHEELOCK FAMILY THEATRE 


Acclaimed Vocalist Lisa Thorson Improvises with Her Band, American Sign Language Interpreters, and a Painter, Along With Live Audio Describer and Text Captioner 


Making Live Jazz Accessible To All People With and Without Disabilities 


VSA arts of Massachusetts and Wheelock Family Theatre, both celebrating their 25th anniversary seasons, are pleased to present JazzArtSigns, Lisa Thorson's groundbreaking multimedia, multisensory and interactive improvised jazz performance piece for all audiences. The event takes place on Thursday, March 9, 2006 at 7:30 p.m. at the Wheelock Family Theatre, 200 The Riverway, Boston. Tickets $20; $10 students. Voice: 617-879-2300 * TTY: 617-879-2150. Email: tickets at wheelock.edu 


JazzArtSigns performers include Lisa Thorson, vocals; Cercie Miller, saxophones; Tim Ray, piano; David Clark, bass; George Schuller, drums; Nancy Ostrovsky, improvisational painter; Jody Steiner and Misha Derrisaint, ASL interpreters; Vince Lombardi, audio describer; and Don DePew of The Caption Coalition. 


Created in 1999 by veteran jazz vocalist, composer and Berklee College of Music Associate Professor Lisa Thorson, JazzArtSigns provides a universally accessible, cross-disciplinary concert experience that redefines the way audiences interact with live performances. JazzArtSigns features a group of world-class jazz musicians, an improvisational painter, American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters, a live audio describer and text captioner, as well as program information in Braille, large print and on tape. This interactive fusion of improvisation, music, visual art, and language encourages all audiences to participate in the spirit of acceptance, innovation and cooperation. 


“Access to the arts and culture is still a rarity for many people with disabilities,” says VSA arts of Massachusetts' director Charlie Washburn. “Rarest of all are integrated events that make the artistic product available and accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities. JazzArtSigns is a groundbreaking event because it provides people with and without disabilities the opportunity to interact with art and music from a variety of perspectives so that they literally see, hear and feel music as it is being performed.” 


JazzArtSigns creator Thorson, a wheelchair user, comments on her artistic vision. “Through JazzArtSigns I hope to inspire new mainstream artistic projects that will take a holistic view of access to the arts -- one where access is an element in the creative process rather than an add-on that restricts creativity. With JazzArtSigns, the ASL interpreter and painter trade fours with the band and everyone improvises. This is what makes this event so unique.” 


JazzArtSigns has been performed twice: in 1999 in Cambridge MA and in 2003 in Portsmouth, NH. Audiences responded with great enthusiasm. As Janet K. Marcous from Northeastern University's American Sign Language Department says: “JazzArtSigns was the most extraordinary experience I've ever had with jazz. It left me feeling incredibly happy and with a sense of freedom that I don't often feel because I am deafblind... it captured every aspect of sound, sense, visionary collections, musical lyrics, movement, color, details, contrast and on and on.” And musician Luciana Souza says: “I felt privileged to have been an audience member at JazzArtSigns - all my senses were stimulated as I felt a communal experience take place.” 


In addition to the performance, VSA arts of Massachusetts is sponsoring workshops for students and presenters in jazz and painting improvisation, universal design in the arts and audience development. The purpose of these residency activities is to encourage community building of participants and presenters alike and give everyone a look at the future of cultural access. 


JazzArtSigns was developed in collaboration with VSA Arts of Massachusetts' National Cultural Arts Initiative with support from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). JazzArtSigns is also supported by the Berklee College of Music's Faculty Fellowship Program. 


The creator and lead artist of JazzArtSigns, Lisa Thorson is an acclaimed Boston-based jazz vocalist, composer and educator. She has toured the U.S., Canada and Italy as a concert artist and jazz clinician, and has produced five recordings as a leader. Her 2002 release Out to Sea which the Boston Herald praised as “a stunning duet date”, features pianist Cho Yoon Seung. Thorson's 1999 release Resonance was produced by Gunther Schuller for GM Recordings and has received unanimous critical acclaim. Michael Nastos (All Music Guide) hailed the CD as “one of the very best musical offerings of the year and an astonishing vocal document of the 90's.” She has also performed or recorded with jazz greats Sheila Jordan, Harvie Swartz, Herb Pomeroy, Jerry Bergonzi, Bruce Barth, Steve Grossman, Valerie Capers, Linda Hopkins, the Billy Taylor Trio and Kenny Wheeler. 


An Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music and a performer for over 25 years, Thorson creates works in theatre and music that bring people together to effect social change. Thorson has been nominated Outstanding Jazz Vocalist in the Boston Music Awards, received the Humanitarian Entertainer of the Year Award in 1989 from the Boston Encore Awards for Excellence in Cabaret and was nominated by actress Jane Alexander and received a Living Legacy Award in 1992 from the Women's International Foundation in San Diego, CA. In 1996 she received an award from the Massachusetts Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities. She is the subject of two award winning documentaries: Key Changes: A Portrait of Lisa Thorson, produced by filmmaker Cindy Marshall and Lisa and Friends, by producer Virginia Bartlett. Lisa has been a leader in the advocacy for full access to the arts for people of all abilities since 1980. She co-founded Next Move Unlimited, one of the first professional theate
r companies to bring performers with and issues of disability to the stage. She worked for over 15 years as an arts accessibility consultant with the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous non-profit, corporate and public organizations, including five years on the Board of the MA Cultural Council, a state agency. 


Now celebrating its 25th anniversary year, VSA arts of Massachusetts works to leverage access for people with disabilities through the arts. VSA arts of Massachusetts leads through a consortium of school systems, cultural institutions, universities, and human service agencies to creatively leverage programs, services, policy, and events in three program areas: 1) Create art programs in the schools to integrate students with and without disabilities, 2) Create programmatic and physical access to cultural and other public facilities, 3) Create sustainable opportunities in the arts for people with disabilities. VSA arts of Massachusetts represents part of an international network of VSA arts organizations founded in 1974 by Jean Kennedy Smith as an affiliate of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 


Wheelock Family Theatre celebrates its 25th year of creating intergenerational and multicultural productions that provide a shared experience for the whole family. Their productions celebrate the diverse range of families found in the world today and seek to unite them in the shared experience of live theatre. WFT is especially dedicated to those who are historically under-served: people of color, people with disabilities, and low-income families. Winner of the 2005 Commonwealth Award, Massachusetts' Highest Honors in Art / Science / Humanities, and Winner of the 2005 LEAD Award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts & The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation for Leadership in Accessibility, WFT was the first theatre in New England to audio-describe productions for blind patrons and the first in Boston to open caption all performances for patrons who are deaf or hard of hearing. Since their inception, they have interpreted every WFT production in American Sign
 Language for deaf patrons. WFT was instrumental in introducing these services and new technologies to other professional theatres in Boston. They are also one of the few theatres in America to offer a theatre education program for deaf teen-agers. Access is not limited to their audiences-actors who are blind, deaf, and physically disabled are given unprecedented performance opportunities on the WFT stage. Their access efforts have been hailed by the Bay State Council of the Blind and the Massachusetts State Association of the Deaf, among others.