CALARTS SET TO HONOR NAGRIN, WOLFF.Byline: Daily News VALENCIA - CalArts will award honorary degrees during Friday's graduation to dancer, choreographer and educator Daniel Nagrin Daniel Nagrin (born May 22, 1917) is an American modern dancer, choreographer, teacher, and author. Nagrin was born in New York City and studied with Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow, Hanya Holm, and Helen Tamiris whom he later married. and composer and classics scholar Christian Wolff Christian Wolff may refer to:
California Institute of the Arts California Institute of the Arts known as CalArts U.S. private institution of higher learning in Valencia. Created in 1961 through the merger of two other art institutes, it was the first in the U.S. President Steven D. Lavine will make the award presentations during the 6 p.m. ceremonies at the Valencia arts college Arts Colleges were introduced in 1995 as part of the Specialist Schools Programme in the United Kingdom. The system enables secondary schools to specialise in certain fields, in this case, the performing, visual and/or media arts. . ``These honorary degrees acknowledge the accomplishments of two exceptional artists,'' Lavine said. ``Daniel Nagrin and Christian Wolff have made important contributions to their respective fields, and the awards are a reflection of how much CalArts appreciates their work.'' Nagrin has been called ``the great loner loner Psychiatry A single young man estranged from society and family, who suffers from psychogenic pain, and tends to live 'on the edge', vacillating between aggression and depression; loners often have unrealistic goals, but are unable to work towards those goals of American dance'' by Dance Magazine. Now in the seventh decade of a career as a performer, choreographer, teacher and writer, Nagrin has worked with the likes of Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow Anna Sokolow (born February 9, 1910, Hartford, Connecticut; died March 29, 2000 in New York City, New York) was an American dancer and choreographer. She began her dance training with Martha Graham and Louis Horst at the Neighborhood Playhouse. and Elizabeth Anderson-Ivantzova. Throughout the 1940s, he performed at New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of venues such as Unity House and the Rainbow Room and in various musical revues. On Broadway, he appeared as the male lead in musicals choreographed by modern-dance trailblazer Helen Tamiris - his future wife and artistic partner. In 1956, Nagrin received the Donaldson Award - the precursor to the Tony - for his work in the musical ``Plain and Fancy.'' Other musicals in which he starred include ``Bless You All'' (1950) and ``By the Beautiful Sea'' (1954). Nagrin was among the first in the dance world to draw on jazz music and social dances. Nagrin's best-known works are a series of solo pieces in which he offered complex portrayals of conflicted men, often outsiders. In 1960, Nagrin and Tamiris co-founded the Tamiris-Nagrin Dance Company, a modern ensemble. After Tamiris' death in 1966, Nagrin went on to choreograph one of his major works, ``The Peloponnesian Wars'' (1968), a full-evening, multimedia response to the Vietnam War Vietnam War, conflict in Southeast Asia, primarily fought in South Vietnam between government forces aided by the United States and guerrilla forces aided by North Vietnam. . In 1971, he formed The Workgroup, a New York ensemble that developed new work through improvisation. In 1982, Nagrin joined the faculty of Arizona State University Arizona State University, at Tempe; coeducational; opened 1886 as a normal school, became 1925 Tempe State Teachers College, renamed 1945 Arizona State College at Tempe. Its present name was adopted in 1958. , where he is now professor emeritus. During this tenure, he has written four instructive books including ``How to Dance Forever: Surviving Against the Odds.'' Wolff was born in France and moved to the United States in 1941. He earned a doctorate in classics from Harvard and rose to prominence in the 1950s as part of a generation of American experimentalist composers that included John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Earle Brown - a group collectively known as the New York School New York school Painters who participated in the development of contemporary art, particularly Abstract Expressionism, in or around New York City in the 1940s and '50s. . Largely self-taught as a musician, Wolff briefly studied with Cage and went on to work with composers Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski. Wolff's early work was fully notated and incorporated the use of silence. In the 1960s, his compositions gave more flexibility to performers. Continuing in this direction since the mid-1960s, he has introduced open structures and new modes of musical notation and blurred the conventional boundaries among composer, performer and listener. His accomplishments include works for piano, solo instruments, chamber ensembles, choruses, orchestras and variable groups of players. Wolff's most famous compositions include ``Snowdrop'' (1970), ``Burdocks'' (1970-71) and the Tilbury Tilbury (tĭl`bərē), part of the urban district of Thurrock, Essex, E England. Tilbury Fort originated under Henry VIII; it was rebuilt and strengthened in the 17th cent. chamber music cycle (1969-1996). Other compositions, such as ``Changing the System'' (1973), contain an explicit political program and feature elements from protest songs and folk music. Among his more recent works are ``Tuba Song'' (1992), ``Exercise 28'' (1999) and ``For E.C.'' (2003) a tribute to composer Elliot Carter that was premiered in New York this January by The Ensemble Sospeso and the Arditti String Quartet. Wolff is an accomplished improviser and has performed with Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacy, Kui Dong, Larry Polansky and Alpert Award winner Christian Marclay. His writings on music, meanwhile, are collected in the volume ``Cues: Writings & Conversations,'' published by MusikTexte in 1998. In addition to his career in music, Wolff has excelled as an educator and scholar. A longtime professor of classics at Harvard, he eventually joined the faculty of Dartmouth College, where he now holds the position of professor emeritus. There, Wolff has taught music and comparative literature as well as classics. Wolff has earned numerous honors, including an award from the American Academy and National Institute for Arts and Letters Arts and Letters (1966-1998) was an American Hall of Fame Champion Thoroughbred racehorse. Owned and bred by American sportsman, and noted philanthropist Paul Mellon, and trained by future Hall of Famer Elliott Burch, the colt began racing at age two. and the John Cage Award for Music from the Foundation for the Contemporary Performance Arts. |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion