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Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
217-333-5491

When University of Illinois sophomore Stephen Diebold signed up for Deana McDonagh’s industrial design studio course, he figured he might get experience designing a prototype for a lamp or some other common consumer product.

But McDonagh, whose specialty is empathic design – that is, designing products with rather than for a specific set of users – had a loftier, more altruistic vision for the projects her students would be charged with designing. The undergraduates and graduate students in her course would be primed for an assignment that had the potential to change lives.

The industrial design students were matched with students registered with the U. of I.’s Disability Resources and Educational Services and with members of the campus’s Delta Sigma Omicron service fraternity. The design students’ assignment was to work – one-to-one or two-to-one – with DRES and DSO students to create simple, low-tech product designs and prototypes that could enhance the abilities, independence and quality of life of students with disabilities.

The fruits of the teams’ collaborative labor are on view in an exhibition called “Disability + Design” at the U. of I.’s Illini Union Art Gallery, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana, through May 5.

For his project, Diebold was paired with Jonathan, a law student with quadriplegia who incurred a spinal cord injury through a swimming accident. After shadowing Jonathan for a week to better assess his everyday needs, Diebold decided to create a chin pointer that could help Jonathan better interact with his environment.

In effect, Diebold said, the device – a stick-like tool attached to a clear, acrylic strap, which can be worn around the neck when not in use – effectively serves as a functional substitute for Jonathan’s hands and arms.

In the past, Jonathan had used a mouth pointer or head pointer to enable him to reach objects, type, use a phone keypad and operate switches. Both had limitations. The mouth pointer caused jaw cramping and tooth erosion; the head pointer worked better, but required assistance each time it was used, making Jonathan highly dependent on friends and even strangers.

In text that accompanies the chin-pointer prototype in the exhibition, Diebold writes: “Instead of creating a new system for the old pointer, we decided to make a new pointer. Why adapt to the problem when you can solve the problem?”

Although a personal assistant must first outfit the wearer with the chin strap, the design allows the wearer to enjoy total independence for the rest of the day.

“When he needs to use it, he simply lowers his chin and scoops up the pointer,” Diebold said. “An elastic strap and rubber chin guard help keep the pointer on while in use.”

The chin-pointer prototype was a hit not only with Jonathan but with others who learned about it. The design resulted in Diebold being named a finalist for the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize, a major cash award given to a U. of I. student who has “demonstrated remarkable inventiveness and innovation.” He also has been meeting with representatives from the College of Engineering’s Technology Entrepreneur Center who are assisting him with plans to patent the device.

“This (experience) opens lots of doors,” Diebold said. “I really had no idea that it would turn into something so big.”

Other designs created by students participating in the course include a chair that can be used in the shower; accessible book shelves; an adjustable-height wheelchair cushion that can be folded and stowed in an easily accessible bag that attaches to the chair frame; a tool that enables a user with low vision to draw and cut a straight line; a stylish, customized purse that hangs around the wearer’s neck; and a reaching tool with a flexible plunger-like end that makes it possible to grab objects of varying shapes and sizes.

Another design solution, for a person who uses a high-tech prosthetic leg that can’t be worn in the shower, is a simple waterproof cushion that attaches to a shower wall, enabling a person to lean comfortably against a shower wall.

McDonagh said this semester’s course and exhibition originally evolved from a consultation initiated by M. Lydia Khuri, a program coordinator in the university’s Housing Division. Last summer Khuri volunteered to develop programming on disability issues for “If These Walls ...,” an annual campus program that calls attention to diversity and social-justice issues.” She approached McDonagh with the idea of organizing some type of art exhibition focusing on disability on campus.

After the pair teamed with Susann Sears, a DRES disability specialist, McDonagh said the trio quickly realized that with their respective experience and creative abilities, “the idea had much greater potential.”

And if everything goes according to plans, that potential has only just begun to be tapped.

McDonagh is hoping to secure funding to offer a course that would enroll design students as well as students with disabilities. In addition to the goal of involving the latter group in the design process in order to produce more effective assistive devices, McDonagh hopes the experience will be a catalyst for more students with disabilities to consider careers in industrial design.

“What motivated me to put these two things together was that there is nowhere else you could do that,” McDonagh said. “This is a totally unique campus. Along with the (academic) caliber of our students, we have the oldest industrial design program and the oldest program for disability education and rehabilitation.”

McDonagh’s ambitious plans don’t end with a hybrid design-disability education course. She also wants to do initiate a pilot study, perhaps at the U. of I.’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where she holds a faculty appointment.

And while the students in this year’s class created the designs on their own, her grander plan for the future would include collaborations with faculty members and students from Beckman, who could contribute to their technological expertise to the design process.

“This is my vision: an institute where students – regardless of their abilities or disabilities – would design housing, and design the desks, chairs and furniture that would be used on this campus,” McDonagh said. “It would be totally sustainable.”

The nature of the recent collaboration and conceived future collaborations that would bring together designers and individuals with disabilities is a perfect example of a basic principle of empathic design that the professor said she likes to emphasize in her classroom.

“There’s a quote I like to use: ‘Design is too important to leave to designers.’ ”

News Bureau, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
616 E. Green St., Suite D, Champaign, Illinois 61820-6261
Telephone 217-333-1085, Fax 217-244-0161, E-mail news@uiuc.edu

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CHAMPAIGN - Krannert Art Museum will host a screening of the documentary, A Powerful Noise, on May 6, 2008, 7:00 PM, in Room 62 with introductory remarks by the film’s executive producer, alumna Sheila C. Johnson.

The film A Powerful Noise weaves the inspiring stories of three ordinary women who have overcome gender barriers to spark unprecedented and remarkable changes in their societies.

- Nada is a survivor of the Bosnian war who has started a multi-ethnic women’s group to combat ongoing ethnic tensions and rebuild her hometown of Kravica. She fights fearlessly to increase the ability of women to participate in civic life and helps bring income opportunities to widowed mothers.

- Hahn learned she was HIV-positive after her husband and child died from AIDS. Though Hahn got the virus from her husband, his family and her Vietnamese community blamed and ostracized her. She now runs a self-help group that provides education and care for people living with HIV & AIDS. She is also working to erase the crippling stigma associated with the disease.

- Unlike so many girls in Mali, Jacqueline went to school and received an education. Today, she leads an impressive organization that rescues young girls from forced labor situations, teaches girls much needed job skills and encourages them to stay in school.

Krannert Art Museum

Room 62

May 6, 2008, 7:00 PM

Feature Documentary –
90 minutes – Bambara, Bosnian, Vietnamese with English subtitles

Sheila C. Johnson is an impassioned hilanthropist, visionary, and entrepreneur with a flair for business. She is CEO of Salamander Hospitality, LLC; President & Managing Partner of the NBA's Washington Mystics; and a partner in Lincoln Holdings, LLC. She also serves as a Global Ambassador for CARE, the humanitarian organization whose mission is to fight global poverty. Sheila Johnson is a graduate of the University of llinois where she received a Bachelor of Arts from the School of Music. She will be in town to serve as the keynote speaker for the Biennial Conference or Women.

As a film producer, she continues to support talented filmmakers whose stories shed light on issues about which she is most passionate. Her first film, Kicking It, premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT. And her second, A Powerful Noise, illustrating the inspirational tales of three courageous women, will premiere at New York’s highly regarded Tribeca Film Festival on April 30, 2008.

Complimentary tickets to this film screening are available on a first-come first-served basis. If you are interested in attending this private screening, please contact Heather Mowry at 217-333-1661 or send an email to Mowry@uiuc.edu and she will place your name(s) on the Will Call list.

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
217-333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

According to University of Illinois dance professor Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, published research on modern and postmodern dance was fairly sparse until about a quarter of a century ago. Most of what existed was limited to books on dance history or biographies of dancers and choreographers, or was otherwise narrowly focused.

“Then there was a burgeoning of dance scholarship in the 1980s; prior to that, I used to feel like I had all the dance books ever written on my bookshelves,” Nettl-Fiol said. And yet, she and Melanie Bales, a friend and colleague on the dance faculty at Ohio State University, believed a noticeable gap in the literature remained. Together the pair decided to try to fill it, teaming up as co-editors of “The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training” (University of Illinois Press), a recently published collection of essays and interviews with some of today’s most successful dance professionals.

“We wanted to bring the discussion back to dance itself – to what was happening in the studio,” Nettl-Fiol said.

The resulting book, which has at its core descriptions and discussions of current dance training practices and trends by leading practitioners of the art form “is unique in dance scholarship, and essential for future understanding of our discipline,” the authors note in their introduction.

Nettl-Fiol said the book’s content was inspired by the co-editors’ participation in a roundtable discussion at the “Dancing in the Millennium” conference in Washington, D.C., in 2000.

“People at the conference seemed to be really interested in dance training and how it’s evolving,” she said.

In extending the discussion into book form, the authors were motivated by a multipart goal: “We wished to know what people were doing, why they were doing it, and how it fit into their view of dance and themselves as artists.”

“As dance scholarship grows, it seems vital that so-called insider knowledge be integrated into the fabric of our field,” they said.

Before examining current practices, Nettl-Fiol and Bales briefly considered the history of the art form. Modern dance – distinct from ballet, which has been taught in dance academies and performed on world stages for centuries – is a relatively new performance art. And when it emerged in the early 20th century, it wasn’t classified as art.

Dance training programs at universities typically were housed in physical education departments, and eventually became part of liberal arts curricula.

“In other words, the idea of dancing to learn has shifted toward learning to dance,” Nettl-Fiol and Bales write.

As universities added fine-arts dance programs and faculties, which produced more and more dancers and choreographers, the logical progression was that more dance companies were formed, and universities played a larger role in producing professional dancers and dance makers.

In an earlier era, Nettl-Fiol said, those newly trained young dancers typically signed on with well-known, established dance companies and learned the style and method of dance promoted by a particular choreographer/company director. For instance, she said, they might learn the Martha Graham technique, or perhaps the signature style of Merce Cunningham or José Limón.

That’s not so much the case today.

“It was apparent in speaking with the vast majority of dancers interviewed that choreographers are no longer training dancers, at least not in the traditional sense of giving technique classes that train the dancers in their personal movement style separate from the rehearsal process,” Nettl-Fiol and Bales write in the book. “The rehearsal replaces training for many; dancers are expected to come to rehearsal warmed up.”

And they’re increasingly expected to enroll in what amounts to continuing education classes on their own time, on their own dime.

Though many professional dancers are still taking traditional classes, particularly ballet, the scope of their movement training is more far-ranging and fluid.

“Dancers today also are taking yoga, going to the gym, doing Pilates,” Nettl-Fiol said. It also is common for today’s dancers to augment their formal dance training with at least one of the so-called somatic, or “mind-body” disciplines, such as the Alexander Technique, Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals.

The editors themselves are proponents of integrating such study into traditional movement and dance training. Nettl-Fiol is a certified Alexander teacher who has studied Laban; Bales, a certified Laban/Bartenieff movement analyst who practices yoga.

As for today’s working choreographers and dance companies, their practices have evolved along with those of the dance programs and dancers, but over a slightly longer period, according to Nettl-Fiol and Bales.

For the past 40 years, they noted, there’s been a trend in dance they refer to as “going Hollywood.” Just as the tightly controlled Hollywood studio system eventually lost its firm grip on the film industry when small, independent producers entered the picture, the dance field has been affected by the proliferation of smaller, “pick-up” companies. Some of the old standards – such as the Merce Cunningham and resurrected Graham companies, Ailey Dance Theater and Mark Morris Dance Group – continue in their roles as fairly stable standard-bearers. But now those companies exist alongside the leaner, hungrier upstarts.

A related trend that has emerged since dance went “Hollywood” has been greater opportunities for dancers to hone their individual styles.

“Today choreographers are often interested in, and in fact inspired by, the idiosyncrasies of their dancers,” Nettl-Fiol and Bales write. “Dancers work to become more themselves rather than strive to mirror those they work for. Dancers become their own guides in putting together their training packages, according to their needs and interests at a given time.”

Cynthia Oliver, another Illinois dance professor and one of the dancer-choreographers interviewed in the book, is an example of that new breed of dance professionals.

While living and working in New York, Oliver, who spent her childhood there and in the Virgin Islands and has danced with the David Gordon Pick-up Performance Company and Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, and managed Urban Bush Women, insisted on sticking with ballet as a foundation of her continuing training. At the same time, however, she also returned to her own roots by studying Afro-Caribbean dance, took yoga classes and even mixed in dancing in clubs at night. After moving to Illinois, she continued the yoga work and also began working with a local Tai Chi master.

“Also, sometimes I take master classes, like the Zimbabwean class that was offered several years ago,” she said. While acknowledging that it’s somewhat awkward taking classes with her own students, “that’s how I am trying to keep up.”

Other dance professionals sharing training stories in the book are Chris Aiken, David Dorfman, Kathleen Fisher, Karen Graham, Angie Hauser, Sara Hook, Stephen Koester, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Jennifer Nugent, Tere O’Connor, Janet Panetta, Lisa Race, Kraig Patterson and Shelley Washington. Those contributing essays to the book, in addition to Nettl-Fiol and Bates, are Glenna Batson, Wendell Beavers, Veronica Dittman, Natalie Gilbert, Joshua Monten and Martha Myers.

Nettl-Fiol said the new volume of training stories and reflections on changing training practices is just a first step in communicating a larger, still-evolving history.

“It’s just a reader, not a comprehensive work,” she said. “We’re hoping it will serve as a prompter for conversation and dialogue. We just wanted to get that conversation started with this book.”

News Bureau, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
616 E. Green St., Suite D, Champaign, Illinois 61820-6261
Telephone 217-333-1085, Fax 217-244-0161, E-mail news@uiuc.edu

An eclectic mix of live music, a lecture-demonstration on Indian dance, and an academic symposium will signal the official grand opening of the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music at the University of Illinois April 18-20.

Die-hard fans of world music who just can’t wait to get started can attend a workshop on mbira performance, from 10 a.m. to noon on April 17 in 1180 Music Building, 1114 W. Nevada St., Urbana. An mbira is a Zimbabwean percussion instrument fashioned from a wooden board, with staggered metal keys.

The symposium, “Canons in Musical Scholarship and Performance,” begins at 9 a.m. on April 18 and continues through the day on April 19 in 25 Smith Hall, 805 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana. Free and open to the public, it will include presentations by six members of the U. of I. music faculty: Christina Bashford, Jeff Magee (reading a paper by Charles Hamm, an emeritus professor of music at Dartmouth College), Bruno Nettl, Gabriel Solis, Thomas Turino and Philip Yampolsky. Also participating will be Gage Averill, University of Toronto at Mississauga; Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Tomie Hahn, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Regula Qureshi, University of Alberta; Ted Solís, Arizona State University; and Ruth Stone, Indiana University.

More detailed information about the panelists’ topics is available on the School of Music’s online calendar.

Concerts and other performances are interspersed throughout the extended weekend schedule – on campus and in the local community – and include:
• Free “Traffic Jam” performance by Folklore Urbano, a Colombian folklore/jazz group from New York City.

The performance will begin at 5 p.m. April 18 in the lobby of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Goodwin Ave., Urbana.
• Concert featuring traditional Shona (Zimbabwean) mbira music by Musekiwa Chingodza and Bud Cohen, at 9 p.m. April 18 at the Iron Post, 120 S. Race St., Urbana.
• Free lecture-demonstration on bharata natyam, a style of South Indian classical dance presented by Aniruddha Knight and Douglas Knight, at 1 p.m. in 25 Smith Hall.
• Concert by the U. of I.’s Balinese gamelans and East/West Ensemble, featuring traditional and contemporary compositions for gamelan plus gamelan/jazz fusions, at 7:30 p.m. April 19 in Krannert Center’s Colwell Playhouse.
• Indian dance performance by Aniruddha Knight and Ensemble, at 3 p.m. in Krannert Center’s Great Hall.

The U. of I.’s world music center, located on the fourth floor of the Levis Faculty Center, was founded after the School of Music received a significant gift from the estate of Robert E. Brown, the ethnomusicologist credited with coining the phrase “world music.” The gift to the U. of I., announced in 2006, included Brown’s extensive collection of instruments from throughout the world. Among them are the pieces that make up several gamelan orchestras, which consist of percussion and string instruments, metallophones, gongs, chimes and drums. The gift also included contents of Brown’s significant library of recordings and books, and paintings and museum-quality artifacts from his private collection.

While the center’s grand-opening performances and academic sessions will provide a public glimpse of the new center’s agenda, Yampolsky – who came to the U. of I. last November as the center’s founding director – said much work is taking place behind the scenes to clarify its mission and shape its future directions.

Yampolsky said he envisions the center as “a service organization that seeks to bring challenging musical experiences to the community – first of all, to students in the School of Music, but also to other faculty, staff and students at the university, and to the community as a whole.”

“The focus will be on performance,” said Yampolsky, an ethnomusicologist who, before coming to the U. of I., worked for seven years as a program officer for arts and culture for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta.

Prior to that, he directed a 10-year project for the Smithsonian Institution that yielded a 20-CD “Music of Indonesia” series.

Already attached to the center is a resident Balinese gamelan ensemble, led by music faculty member I Ketut Gede Asnawa. Under Yampolsky’s direction, the center will augment that program with an academic-performance program in additional world-music genres.

Yampolsky said his plan calls for hosting at least one visiting artist from a different world region each year. The resident artist would teach a seminar on a genre of music, and students in the seminar would practice and perform with a related musical ensemble.

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Yampolsky hopes to inaugurate that aspect of the program by hosting an instructor-performer specializing in African drumming.

“There is already a community interest in Mande drumming, so I want to support that in order to intensify what already exists here,” he said.

Yampolsky hopes to secure funding to offer a “third semester” component to the instruction-performance initiative – a summer study-abroad option for students.

He also plans for the center to host a world-music concert series that would offer one to two public concerts per semester.

Finally, the director said his vision for the center includes developing an outreach component that would honor Robert Brown’s long-time commitment to sparking an interest in world music among children in public schools.

“We can take it directly to kids in the schools, or we can do it by combining music and world music in a concentration for music education students,” Yampolsky said.

In the meantime, Yampolsky is raising awareness about the center – along with funds needed to carry out its mutli-pronged mission.

News Bureau, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
616 E. Green St., Suite D, Champaign, Illinois 61820-6261
Telephone 217-333-1085, Fax 217-244-0161, E-mail news@uiuc.edu

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Additional events and guests – among them actor Timothy Spall – have been announced for the 10th annual Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, or “Ebertfest,” coming April 23-27 to Champaign-Urbana and the University of Illinois.

Spall, who has been seen most recently in the films “Sweeney Todd” and “Enchanted,” will be a guest for the opening-night showing of Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet,” in which Spall played the role of Rosencrantz. The actor also is known for his role as Peter Pettigrew in the “Harry Potter” films and for voicing the scavenger rat Nick in the animated film “Chicken Run.”

Ebert also has announced that Richard Roeper, his Chicago Sun-Times colleague and partner on the weekly movie review program “Ebert & Roeper,” will participate in some of the onstage discussions following screenings, as will Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips and Time magazine critic Richard Corliss.

Other onstage participants, in addition to those previously announced, will include film expert Mary Corliss; film scholars David Bordwell, Hannah Fisher and Kristin Thompson; RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson; Movie City News editor David Poland; Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker, and Sports Illustrated writer and U. of I. alumnus Bill Nack.

Added to the previously announced schedule of film screenings are two panel discussions on the U. of I. campus, both free and open to the public:
• On April 24 (Thursday), “What Does the Future Hold for Independent Film?” moderated by Nate Kohn, the director of Ebertfest and a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Georgia, 9:30-11 a.m. in the Pine Lounge of the Illini Union, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana.
• On April 25 (Friday), “Today’s Writer/Director – It’s Not Just Business, It’s Personal,” moderated by Eric Pierson, a professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego, 9-10:15 a.m. in the Pine Lounge.
On April 26 (Saturday), Hadjii, the writer-director of the film “Somebodies,” shown at the 2006 Ebertfest, will be signing copies of his book “Don’t Let My Mama Read This: A Southern Fried Memoir,” from 9-10:30 a.m. in the General Lounge on the second floor of the Illini Union.

Tickets for individual films will go on sale April 4 through the Virginia Theatre box office; phone 217-356-9063; fax: 217-356-5729. The price will be $10 each for regular admission and $8 each for students and senior citizens.

For additional details, check the Ebertfest Web site.