Women’s basketball drops third straight game in 72-52 defeat to Oregon

Each of the Bruins’ four prior losses to the Ducks were by single digits.

This time, Oregon won a bit more handily.

UCLA women’s basketball (9-8, 2-3 Pac-12) dropped its third straight game Sunday, losing 72-52 to No. 5 Oregon (15-1, 4-0) in a wire-to-wire defeat in front of its largest home crowd of the year. A 21-point third quarter kept the game within reach for the Bruins, but the Ducks put together a 15-2 run in the opening minutes of the fourth to put the game away.

Coach Cori Close said the Bruins’ inefficiency on the defensive glass was the main reason for the lackluster performance.

“Obviously, the challenge that we couldn’t meet was the defensive rebounding,” Close said. “We forced the kind of shots – first-shot misses – that we want, and (then) they got second shot opportunities. It was just too much to overcome.”

Oregon outrebounded UCLA 21-15 on the offensive glass and racked up 25 points on second-chance opportunities. A majority of the Ducks’ offensive rebounds were a result of their 20 attempts from 3-point range.

“A lot of those box outs (led to) long rebounds,” Close said. “Those are not internal rebounds. Those are long, guard rebounds that (the guards) need to get involved (in).”

Oregon – the nation’s fourth-best 3-point shooting team – shot 8-of-20 from beyond the arc. Seven of those 12 misses were corralled by Ducks, and seven of those rebounds led to 14 points.

“I think that’s where our lack of focus came is guard rebounding and the box outs on the outside,” said senior guard Japreece Dean. “I think we just had a lack of focus when we were in zone.”

Two of Oregon’s starters – forwards Ruthy Hebard and Satou Sabally – stand at 6 feet, 4 inches, but UCLA’s tallest starter is 6-feet, 1-inches tall, a mismatch Close said gave the Bruins’ offense fits.

“They’re so long that they can contest and make you think as a shooter, especially as a smaller guard, ‘Can I get this shot off?’” Close said.

The Bruins shot 35 percent from the field and not a single player posted a positive plus-minus.

UCLA’s top two scorers entering the game were sophomore forward Michaela Onyenwere and senior guard Kennedy Burke, but the two combined for 19 points on 24 percent shooting.

Onyenwere said despite the off-night, the Bruins have still elevated their play since the end of November and have taken away important lessons from their matchups against the top teams in the conference this weekend.

“(It was) finding our identity sort of and finding a way to play together,” Onyenwere said. “And I think that we’ve done that since those games and starting the Pac-12. … That just goes to show how much we’ve worked on learning how to fight together. … As we put those things together, I think we can continue to keep doing well in conference.”

Women’s tennis starts 2019 with tournament matches against San Diego, Stanford

The Bruins played their first matches of 2019 this weekend.

Three members of No. 8 UCLA women’s tennis – senior Alaina Miller and freshmen Taylor Johnson and Katie LaFrance – travelled to La Quinta, Calif., to participate in the National Collegiate Tennis Classic.

No. 8-seeded Miller earned a bye in the round of 32, but fell to No. 3-seeded Stanford player Emma Higuchi 6-3, 6-4 in the round of 16. Miller is 2-3 this season after going 23-5 last year.

Johnson beat San Diego’s Sophia Chow 6-3, 6-1 in her debut for the Bruins before losing to No. 4-seeded Stanford player Janice Shin 3-6, 6-4, 6-3. Johnson beat Ole Miss’ Allie Sanford 6-4, 6-3 in a consolation match.

LaFrance lost to San Diego’s Daniela Morales 6-0, 6-1, moving to 1-2 on the season.

On the doubles court, Johnson and Miller were paired together for the first time. The duo received a bye in the round of 16 and then beat San Diego’s duo of Kati Kukaras and Gemma Garcia in the quarterfinals. They moved on to face another San Diego duo – Maria-Paula Torres and Solymar Colling – in the semifinals, winning 6-1 to advance to the final.

They beat the San Diego duo 6-1 to advance to the final, which was not played.

Miller is now 0-1 this year when playing with senior Ayan Broomfield and 3-1 with sophomore Abi Altick.

Freshman Elysia Bolton – who is 10-4 this season – is the highest-ranked Bruin at No. 11. The only other ranked UCLA player is Altick at No. 113.

The senior duo of Gabby Andrews and Broomfield, who are 10-1 this season, are No. 6 in the doubles rankings, while the combo of redshirt junior Jada Hart and Bolton – who are 9-3 this year – are No. 12.

UCLA will travel to Las Vegas next weekend to take part in the Freeman Memorial Championships.

Global Citizens fellow aspires to improve health care discrepancies in Thailand

This post was updated Jan. 21 at 6:20 p.m.

When Emma Gillette got into a motorcycle accident while studying abroad in Thailand in 2017, she was thrown into Thailand’s medical system and saw the disparities between the health care provided to rural and urban communities.

This prompted her to teach emergency medical techniques to local Thai communities as a Global Citizens fellow.

The Global Citizens Fellowship at UCLA awards $5,000 grants to at least one student each year to complete a project of their own design in a foreign country.

The fellowship, founded in 2012 by two UCLA students, was formed with the goal of supplying funding for students to pursue service projects overseas, said KC Bui, program coordinator at the UCLA Vice Chancellor Student Affairs Office who works with the fellows. Students who applied were expected to have established contacts in the community they hoped to work in and propose extensions of previous work they had completed in that community, Gillette said.

Gillette, a fourth-year neuroscience student, was the sixth fellow in the program in 2018. She completed her project abroad last summer in Mae Sot, Thailand, partnering with the Mae Tao Clinic to teach basic lifesaving techniques to residents in local communities.

“The plan was to teach the teachers and the student leaders of the schools,” Gillette said. “We trained them how to teach this material in the classes so that the clinic would be able to hold its own classes even after the summer ended.”

Gillette added that her previous experience in the country’s medical system led her to realize that access to ambulatory care and emergency services was not affordable to many citizens in the local population, and was only available at larger hospitals in urban areas.

She added that, upon receiving the fellowship, she decided to provide lessons in CPR, first aid and Stop the Bleed techniques to locals in the clinic as part of her project.

CPR and Stop the Bleed techniques, founded by the American College of Surgeons, were created to teach the general public how to effectively stop life-threatening bleeding, Gillette said.

While Stop the Bleed was created in response to mass shootings in the United States, Gillette applied the techniques to accidents that local populations in Thailand might experience, working with both Thai communities and Burmese refugees to teach in the clinic and expand the lessons to local schools.

Madhu Narasimhan, a UCLA alumnus and one of the founders of the program, said the fellowship also teaches students about general cultural practices and political systems of the country they are working in.

Gillette added that cultural norms played an important role in determining how she taught her lessons in Thailand.

“Cultural norms were acknowledged in my lessons, as I changed my plan to include the use of a washcloth to stop the bleed instead of expecting students to remove their own shirts as they may do in the United States,” Gillette said.

Bui said the fellowship is competitive due to the rigorous application process, which requires essays, letters of affiliation, recommendation letters and an interview with the board.

Narasimhan said students who complete the fellowship become campus ambassadors for the program as seniors to inform potential candidates about the program.

He added the program hopes to expand their range of initiatives to support fellows immersing themselves into their region of work, providing grassroots services and applying their experience to larger issues.

Gillette added she feels encouraged to see the lasting impact of her work and hopes to continue working in a similar field.

“I like the fact that this can be self-sustaining and that the people I worked with will continue the lessons that I began in the summer,” Gillette said.

UCLA program alleviates Medicare costs, addresses multiple dimensions of dementia

This post was updated Jan. 21 at 2:35 p.m.

A UCLA program has decreased costs for Medicare and provided benefits for dementia patients through partnerships with community organizations.

The UCLA Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care Program has helped Medicare save nearly $2,500 per patient annually and delayed nursing home admissions for patients, according to a study conducted at the program. This has allowed patients to live at home for longer periods of time. The program collaborated with other community programs in Los Angeles, including adult day care centers, caregiver education programs and counseling services, to provide patients with services beyond typical medical care.

David Reuben, chief of the Division of Geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the program’s director, said trained caregivers have played a central role in the program’s success. Dementia care specialists, specially trained nurse practitioners, are trained to address the complicated interactions of social, medical and behavioral issues associated with dementia.

The nurse practitioners can provide medical care and reach out to the community to provide support for individual patients. Zaldy Tan, the medical director of the seven-year-old program, said they are crucial to the program’s success.

“They become the bridge between the medical system and the community,” Tan said.

Michelle Panlilio, one of the three dementia care specialists within UCLA’s program, said they have served approximately 2,700 patients and their families since the program began. She added that addressing both the social and medical effects of dementia helps provide a more holistic treatment for patients.

“Our program is vital because dementia will touch every person in society, whether someone is diagnosed themselves or have a loved one who develops this diagnosis,” Panlilio said.

Tan said he thinks the program’s partnerships allow patients to take advantage of different resources in the UCLA community to enhance their holistic care. Many needs of dementia patients, such as social support and caregiver education, cannot be met in a medical center alone, he added.

“We realize that we can address the medical needs of people with dementia who come to UCLA, but not their entire needs,” he said.

The program has formed partnerships with local groups to provide care beyond just medical treatment. Tan said they identified key partners in the community, such as Alzheimer’s Los Angeles and WISE & Healthy Aging, to provide comprehensive dementia care. This allows them to provide more treatment that emphasizes the social benefits of familial support, which delays nursing home admissions.

Tan said both patients and caregivers benefit from the program. His research has found that participation within the Dementia Care Program helps mediate patients’ behavioral issues. Decreased lengths of stay and improved health outcomes may also decrease Medicare costs. Reuben said caregivers also benefit because their community partnerships reduce the pressure of their jobs, causing their stress levels to go down and their self-efficacy to increase.

“It views the person with dementia and the caregiver as a dyad,” Reuben said. “Both need support and care.”

Tan said more people are at risk to develop Alzheimer’s disease or dementia nowadays, due to increased life expectancy in the U.S. In addition, he said these illnesses remain underdiagnosed because early symptoms, such as forgetfulness, are often associated with and dismissed as stages in the typical aging process.

Reuben said he hopes the program’s model will spread to other health care programs around the country. Reuben, Tan and other UCLA researchers will continue to look into how lifestyle changes can impact people’s’ risk for Alzheimer’s and dementia and help benefit those who have already been diagnosed with the disease. While they do not expect to find a cure, researchers are looking to stop the disease’s progression.

“Our ultimate hope is that we will find a way to prevent, treat or halt the condition,” Tan said.

Angela Davis features at social justice summit, shares personal experience

Activist Angela Davis expressed hope for the future of social justice during a summit held at a school that had fired her twice.

“It is young people, who have not had very much experience in this world, who have the hope, and who know they have to do something to change the world because otherwise they know they will not have a future,” she said.

Over 1,000 people attended a social justice summit hosted by the UCLA Black Alumni Association and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. The panels analyzed topics including mental health, music and activism and were led by artists, professors and activists, including Davis and rapper and activist Common.

Tabia Shawel, the assistant director of the Center for African American Studies, said she thought the summit was important because it could help initiate activism and change.

“It provides an opportunity for exchange of knowledge, and to also build resources, and then from there, hopefully, shift policy,” Shawel said.

Davis said she had been reluctant to return to UCLA for many years after she had been fired by former California Gov. Ronald Reagan and the University of California Board of Regents in 1969, and again in 1970 after successfully contesting her first firing in court. She was fired for her affiliations with communism in an era of anti-communism.

Davis compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the 1960s-era Black Panther Party. The Panthers, she said, emerged as a way to police the police.

“(Now) a lot of the activists of Black Lives Matter, you know, we’re not going to talk about the individual police people,” Davis said. “Because we can keep targeting individual police and the apparatus remains exactly the same.”

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution and a former Ohio state senator, said while she thinks President Donald Trump has created a toxic political climate, blaming him will not solve systemic issues. Our Revolution is a progressive activist group inspired by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“We have to be reminded we do repeat history as human beings,” Turner said. “If we don’t remember … how important it is to know from whence we came, as James Baldwin once said, we will never really know the path we need to go.”

Panelists also explored hip-hop’s rise and social justice, touching on questions such as whether white rappers were appropriating an African-American art form.

Shawel said the panel’s parallels between early hip-hop and today’s mainstream music interested her.

“These messages of social uplift are connected to shifting policy,” Shawel said. “(They) are really important, not only to sustaining the hip-hop movement, but to making change throughout our entire society.”

Nidirah Stephens, a fourth-year African-American studies and political science student, said she was interested by the idea that artists are the curators of culture.

“(Culture) encompasses music expression and art but also encompasses politics, how we advocate for ourselves, how we change levels of thinking,” Stephens said.

Stephens is also the academic affairs commissioner for the Undergraduate Students Association Council.

Turner said she hoped the summit would empower students.

Davis said change is more than simple political organizing.

“It’s important that we ask ourselves, perhaps first, what we enjoy doing,” Davis said. “That we not assume that we’re going to walk in someone else’s footsteps. … You do your work through what do you do best, through what you love, through your talents.”

Sheri Momoh, a third-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student, said she thought the summit was inspiring because it brought together people who had experienced and overcome oppression.

“It’s just really inspiring to see people who have gone through it and are encouraging us to continue, even at our hardest moments, our lowest moments, where it seems like you’re not making any progress,” Momoh said.

The UCLA Black Alumni Association announced it had raised $50,000 for scholarships with the event.

Contributing reports by Shelby Dunagan, Daily Bruin contributor.

Theater review: ‘The Great Tamer’ interprets historical art in balance of real and irrational

A performer was already standing on the Royce Hall stage as the audience shuffled toward their assigned seats. He emulated the frozen stride of an Egyptian hieroglyph while his head gently pivoted on its axis to scan the space.

The show was about to begin, or had it already?

The man launched the experimental performance with his singular presence, taking off his shoes before stripping down entirely. However, it is from the performers’ unpredictable, yet precisely calculated scenarios that the show, created by 54-year-old Greek director and choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou, draws its moving power. Attendees witnessed mind-bending corporeal constructions peppered with embodiments of historical art scenes – such as Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” and the still-life genre. Snippets of Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” accompany the optical illusions created by the breaking apart and rearranging of human bodies in the nonfictional theater piece. Papaioannou and his team of 10 co-producers visualized and directed his most recent work, “The Great Tamer,” which is currently on international tour. The show premiered in the U.S. on Friday through UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, all the while comforting, disturbing and perplexing its audience.

As if in a dreamscape, the performers move in a world informed by recognizable props – a plain pair of shoes, a book, an orange, a slinky, a flower pot, a globe. While the medium seems familiar, the interaction between the people and the materials veers into the surreal. A barefoot woman wearing a toga and balancing a pot on her head emerges from left of stage, reminiscent of mythological and pastoral Greek motifs. Meanwhile, a nude body with a female torso and two disproportionate, hairy, backward male legs tiptoes diagonally across the stage like a one of Edgar Degas’ painted ballerinas. You have to blink twice.

Such bizarre body collages are achieved by meticulously covering the performers’ bodies in black bodysuits and leaving exposed only that limb which will contribute to the Frankenstein-looking superhuman form. One of the body collages consisted of six performers – a forearm here, another head there and another pair of legs at the base – exercising an acrobatic feat of balance. The body inches forward wobbling on the set’s platform before disintegrating into an unsettling heap of disjointed limbs. Watching the efforts transpire on stage is a philosophical sensation – one that hints at Papaioannou’s expression not only of the extraordinary composition of the human body, but perhaps the nature of human relationships and communities themselves. The images demonstrate just how intimately reality and the imaginary are intertwined, and that one need not look beyond what already exists to summon the unprecedented through magnificent and macabre metamorphosis.

Like the props and the performative bodies, the set instills a similar effect on the viewer in providing a legible space. The stage consists of a black paneled platform the uneven, sinuous form of which mimics the topography of the earth’s surface. But once again, it proves to be imaginary territory as figures and disjointed limbs emerge from and disappear into the ground.

An astronaut mills about the platform in slow motion, her labored breaths growing increasingly ragged as she lifts a black panel, reaching into the ground to pluck out a limp nude male. For a moment the imagery resembles art historical scenes of Christ’s descent from the cross, but in this case is contradicted by a context of birth. Beginning to examine the surroundings of his newfound world, the character acquires animation and eventually stands upright, assuming a contrapposto stance to emulate the many sculptural poses of antique masterpieces. Instances like these demonstrate Papaioannou’s effective approach to demystifying archaic and unobtainable qualities, such as idealized proportionality and beauty, that pervade artworks. When a real human body transforms into a breathing classical sculpture, it signifies the idea that art and life are one and the same.

Props and setting together create the ecosystem for a material world in which narratives might unravel, but only in the loosest sense. As soon as a vague storyline begins to take shape – a man’s possession of a slinky captivates a crowd until he falls off a ledge; another man is lured in by a goddess figure’s offer of nourishment – it is immediately recalled and disrupted by a nonsensical sword fight or an earsplitting noise that knocks any notion of reality off-kilter once again.

While some might find the lack of a distinct storyline frustrating, its effects are actually more long-lasting as they leave viewers with thematic treatments of struggle and growth, birth and death. The two-hour performance elegantly enacts metaphors about compassion and ambition in various actions, the most poignant consisting of performers repeatedly putting on someone else’s shoes, as well as one encounter in which a character liberates another from a full-body ceramic cast, doing so through slow, tender-yet-firm embraces of the figure’s every limb.

Returning to the initial action of one man looking at the audience as if it were the true spectacle elucidates the push behind the performance itself. The audience is indeed the source of inspiration for the director’s astonishing visions. The artist ensures he never loses his audience to oblivion or overwhelming confusion, maintaining a delicate balance between the dreamlike and what is known reality. The experiment processes and regurgitates humans reckoning with their environment, their bodies and one another. The saying “We are the universe experiencing itself” never seemed more applicable.

Upcoming YouTube series ‘Wayne’ uses violence thoughtfully based in character

Shawn Simmons watched a child get beat up by about five other children, only to stand back up and throw a rock at his tormentors.

Though he was only about eight years old at the time, the memory stayed with him and eventually inspired a scene in his YouTube Originals series, “Wayne.”

Simmons said the scene was the first part he wrote for the show a few years ago, with the boy manifesting as the eponymous character, Wayne. The show follows the story of teenagers Wayne and Del, who journey from Massachusetts to Florida to track down a car stolen from Wayne’s sick father. Showing in the James Bridges Theater as part of a Campus Events Commission sneak peak and Q&A, the show would not have been possible before the age of streaming websites, Simmons said, and it provides a mixture of romance and dark action he feels was uncommon in television in prior years.

“I came up with ‘Wayne’ in the end of 2015, and I sat on it, thinking nobody was going to buy this,” he said. “(YouTube) let us make this unique, strange, sad, heartfelt, romantic film that we made, that I don’t think anyone else would have let us make the way we did.”

Throughout the show, violence and coming-of-age themes work together to further the narrative, Simmons said. For instance, Wayne’s mother is not involved in his life and his father is deathly sick as the show begins, with his stolen car inspiring the plot’s action. The characters’ situations, decisions and backstories are supposed to feel real, he said, and audiences should feel immersed in the minds of two kids caught among troubles and heartache.

But in terms of the action sequences, Simmons said he felt it necessary to step back from the realism just enough to enhance the scenes in dark, creative ways. One of the more violent scenes, which can be seen in the trailer, even features a makeshift weapon fashioned from a garden gnome tied to the end of a chain.

“When you see the show, it’s really rooted in the real world,” Simmons said. “When we get to (the action) moments, I did want to … unground it just a little bit – make it a little bit heightened in the action sequences, just like a graphic novel or comic book.”

Rhett Reese and UCLA alumnus Paul Wernick, who wrote “Deadpool,” also played a part in the writing of “Wayne,” and Reese said the two share a passion for breaking their action scenes away from what could be perceived as stereotypical fistfights. The way characters execute their actions within the show should always either reveal something about themselves or be a distinctly memorable scene for viewers, like a scene in “Wayne” involving a flaming weapon, Reese said.

“There’s a lot of generic action out there where … you see someone punch someone, they fall down, they kick them and they fall down again,” he said. “That doesn’t really interest us, and we sort of pride ourselves on finding action that’s memorable or that comes from character.”

Wernick said he and Reese like to make their shows unpredictable, but the characters believable and relatable. At one point Ciara Bravo’s character Del was supposed to use a chainsaw, but Reese said because of her small stature, it did not feel believable that she could start the tool on her own. The solution – dropping the chainsaw and letting gravity pull the cord – also developed her character. Through a flashback, viewers discover she learned the chainsaw trick through trial and error in order to cut wood while her father sat inside and drank a beer.

Although the action of the show is meant to bring characterization, Simmons said violence is not meant to be the main draw of “Wayne,” but rather an avenue to enhance the story. Action defines many parts of the show’s opening episodes, but as the season nears its end and the duo gets close to their goal of finding the stolen car, the show begins to reveal more about the characters and focus less on just action sequences, he said.

“They’ll encounter things like in a ‘John Wick’ movie that get in their way, like in a hero’s journey,” Simmons said. “But the real story is these kids getting to know each other … on the road.”