What a year it has been!

Now that we can look back rather objectively, we realize that our Cannon St. performance was among the last live performance events to take place in Charleston in 2020! We are glad that things seem to be changing for the better in the Spring and Summer of 2020!

Quarantine gave us some time to reflect on what we had done, and think about how we can share our process with more people who are interested in integrating arts and science learning. Here are some things that we’ve been up to during the Covid year:

Workbook Plays 

In the age of  COVID-19, we have been re-imagining “That Which We Call a Rose.” “Rose” is now becoming what we call a workbook play. A workbook play is a script embedded with various activities and lesson plans designed to reinforce  science and art concepts. Activities in the workbook play include  building mission control, crafting a moon, or composing a monologue about their emotional imagination of space travel, and more. The team is polishing a draft of the first workbook play,“Monsters on the Moon.” We hope that we’ll be able to distribute it here this year.

Publications

• Vivian and Emily wrote a chapter in the book STEAM Education: Transdisciplinarity of Art in the Curriculum. The chapter is titled “But, what about the eyeballs?”: Devised Theatre as Transdisciplinary Knowledge-Generation Tool” and using Rose as an example of arts integration. The book will be available in Fall 2022
• Vivian and Kenya wrote an article titled  “The “A” in STEAM: PaR as Fifth Space for Research and Learning in the Arts and Sciences” for PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research. We have revised and resubmitted this article and we’ll let you know when it is available to read online!

Guides and Lesson Plans 

The lesson plans and resource guides that we made available last summer are still here. Please incorporate them into your classroom, pod, or home STEAM activities!

• Moon and Bennu Resource Guide- Resource Guide: The Moon and Bennu | “That Which We Call A Rose” (cofc.edu)
• Mars and Titan Resource Guide- Resource Guide: Mars and Titan | “That Which We Call A Rose” (cofc.edu)
• Lesson Plans- Educational Outreach: Lesson Plans | “That Which We Call A Rose” (cofc.edu)

Have you already made something and you’d like to share it? Please send it to us here and we will post it on our blog!

Wishing all of you health and happiness in Summer 2021!

Kenya, Vivian, and the Rose Crew

Well, tomorrow is Tuesday.

For me, that means that it is my ninth Tuesday in a row working from home due to restrictions caused by COVID-19.

One of the silver linings of social distancing is that, while we can’t do all of the things at all of the places that we are used to going (theatres, malls, museums, national parks, libraries, work, school, etc…), many wonderful institutions in far-away places are opening up their archives and activities for audiences to partake in all kinds of activities that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to do otherwise.

One socially distanced event that I am planning on participating in is happening tomorrow night. Science Friday is hosting the Astro Artists Club event with Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. At this live event, astronomers will be observing the sun through a solar telescope, and you can interpret these observations in your artistic medium of choice. I think I’m going to pull out my watercolor paints!

It’s FREE and it’s happening on TUESDAY MAY 12 from 7:30-8:30 PM (EDT).

Go to Science Friday’s Youtube page here: https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/astro-artists-club-may-2020/

Did I mention that if you register, Science Friday will send you kid- and adult-friendly drink recipes to sip while you stare (safely) at the sun? They’ve thought of everything!

Looking for more STEAM activities?

Check out our STEAM lesson plans on the Educational Outreach page of this website! Be sure to share pictures of your work with us!

See you on YouTube!

Vivian

Audio/Visual Map of Moon Craters by Felise Horne

We are over-the-moon to announce that our educational puppet play, “That which We Call A Rose,” is now funded not only by NASA’s SC REAP initiative, but also by a generous grant from the SC Arts Commission! This grant will allow us to complete the production of this devised work, and it will also fund bus service for k-12 students in the greater Charleston area to come downtown to see the show when it opens in February.

As an interdisciplinary artist, I am especially thrilled that this work has funding from state and national funds in the arts and the sciences. To me, that is the heart of what STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) means. All of these areas are necessary for the education of creative, versatile, critical students at all phases of learning. Through the STEAM model, arts do not merely support science learning, and neither does science only provide novel content for arts projects. Art and Science practices provide different, complementary platforms by which all learners might enthusiastically direct their inquiries about the world in which we live.

In this blog, I have shared our moon prototype map. The QR codes reveal the arts and cultural stories behind the names of some of the craters on the moon’s surface. The map is being designed by scenic painter Felise Horne, a graduate of the College of Charleston. The QR codes have been developed by Jack Wolfe. The stories are recorded by myself and company member Javaron Conyers, who is also a graduate of COfC. The QR codes may be accessed on this website on the page dedicated to the Moon.

Hello, Explorers!

We are about to head out to the Women’s Theatre Festival in Raleigh, NC! We have a van that is just about packed full of our set, costumes, puppets, and robot!

We will be performing at 2:00 on Friday, 11 July at the Wicked Witch ! That’s located at 416 West South Street in Raleigh, NC.

Our performance in progress will take up most of the time, but it will be accompanied by some very cool Augmented Reality stations to help audiences explore the topographies and cultural/literary histories embedded in the names of features on Mars, the Moon, Titan, and Bennu.

Stick around after the show – we’d love to hear your feedback! If you don’t have time to talk, please fill out a google survey and let us know your thoughts!

If you’re still around on Sunday morning, find Vivian for a Found Object Puppetry Workshop at 9:30 AM at 310 S. Harrington St. (yep! If you want to change the world, you have to wake up early on a Sunday morning to make the puppets 🙂

All other awesome events for the WTF Festival and Fringe can be found on their Event Schedule.

See you in Raleigh!

Vivian and Crew

Welcome to “That which We Call A Rose,” the blog!

“That which We Call A Rose” is a practice-based performance studies research project aimed to encourage a diverse range of audience participants to think creatively about how humans might mindfully encounter planetary bodies in our solar system.  “A Rose” engages audiences with questions pertaining to the human exploration of  worlds other than our own through a theatrical treatment of the planetary nomenclature process. Using data available through the “Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature” (a product of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), maintained by the Planetary Geomatics Group of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)), we are devising an interactive, multi-media performance installation that imagines the terrain of other planetary bodies as potential sites for embodied human exploration.

This environmental performance piece will invite audience members to experience topographical features of the Moon, Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan, and the asteroid Bennu. Audiences will inhabit a live environment that recreates aspects of each planetary body’s surface topography and its cultural context. This embodied exploration will be augmented through the implementation of interactive computer modeling; live actors, robots, and puppets will also populate the space and interact with audiences.

This interdisciplinary research project mines the literary, historical, and cultural data contained in the “Gazetteer” to ask questions about human Space exploration from an arts and humanities perspective. An interdisciplinary treatment of data and subject matter often relegated to “pure” science should contribute to the achievement of a diverse workforce and inclusive practices across science and humanities professions. This STEAM project extends science, arts, and humanities questions about outer space to audiences that are diverse in age, ethnicity, race, gender, and ability. Audiences will then share in the intimate experience of theatrical performance as they are asked to contemplate our human relationship with other worlds.

The process of theatrical devising is democratic, so as you follow this blog, you will hear from not just me, but actor-creators, designers, dramaturgs, stage managers, and digital visualization experts. Maybe our robot Martha will also blog about her experiences as an arts-science interlocutor…

Our work-in-progress performance will be shared in July at the Women’s Theatre Festival in Raleigh, NC.

Stay tuned for more as we create this multi-media performance!

**Vivian**