Daily Bruin – Page 55

Dance duo makes social discourse accessible through movement

Jon Boogz and Lil Buck established Movement Art Is in 2016 with just one mission – to inspire change through dance.

The dance group uses movement artistry to voice its concerns about social issues like mass incarceration and racial injustice, Boogz said. The duo has performed in venues across the United States and will showcase “Love Heals All Wounds,” a 10-person dance performance Thursday at Royce Hall.

“We touched on mass incarceration and police brutality, climate change, missing children, … anything that kind of inspires us in that realm,” Boogz said. “(The topic of American social issues is) not really an exclusive thing – it’s inclusive, it can involve multiple people in multiple races.”

Street dance has been ingrained in the duo since childhood. Buck grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, where he picked up on Memphis Jookin, a local dance style. Meanwhile, Boogz started dancing as a child in Philadelphia. When his family moved to Florida, he found his true calling. It was on the streets of Miami where Boogz said he started to witness and empathize greatly with social issues, which he intertwined into his dances.

Boogz said the duo considers it their duty to continue the traditions of past generations across various cultures. Historically, indigenous groups throughout the world have used dance to convey their stories. In more recent times, African slaves conveyed secret messages through dance, Boogz said. As African Americans, he and Buck realized early on that dance has roots in storytelling and emerged even before language did, Boogz said.

“Dance is a universal language in itself,” Boogz said. “We’re carrying the lineage of what was already laid before us; we touch on the stories that are meaningful to us.”

In the past, Boogz and Buck have also worked on multiple films such as “Am I a Man?,” which is about mass incarceration and racial inequality, and “Color of Reality,” which uses fine art and dance to communicate the dangers of gun violence. They strive to bring their short films to life onstage as they recreate the scenarios and messages they have conceived through dance and spoken word. “Love Heals All Wounds” is an accumulation of different topics addressed in their films and choreography, Buck said, focusing on how climate change and social justice are connected.

“Every story that we touch on or create – whether it is a short film, a live show – we’re pretty passionate about every last one of them, because they all come from a real place in both of our hearts,” Buck said.

Reimy Jones met Boogz and Buck when the three danced for Cirque Du Soleil, which ultimately led to her joining M.A.I. Jones is white and Japanese and spent most of her childhood in New Zealand. Despite differing from the duo in her cultural experiences, she said she has faith in the messages of Buck and Boogz’s stories.

“I actually even felt uncomfortable to dive into (American social issues) just because I was like, ‘I don’t even know if I’m worthy to be talking about these things or to be dancing about these things,’” Jones said. “But obviously, the cast is amazing, and their No. 1 goal is to spread the message to everyone.”

The accessibility of American social issues is something the pair aims to emphasize in its work. In doing so, Buck and Boogz hope their message will resonate with audiences, ultimately resulting in a call to action, Buck said.

“We want to really build you up to question yourself,” Buck said. “And with that, you can start taking action,” Buck said.

Artist explores many emotional dimensions of childbirth through collage project

This post was updated on May 23 at 12:59 p.m.

Over two thousand childbirth photographs covered the walls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2018.

Society often depicts birth as agonizing and grotesque, but artist Carmen Winant aims to break the stigma through her collages. The alumna will give a talk at the Hammer Museum on Thursday discussing her artistic process, specifically in regards to her MoMA project, “My Birth.” She said she will speak about her journey as a collage artist and the reasons she was drawn to such unconventional subject matter.

“I wanted to explore projects that made me feel vulnerable but also artistically challenged,” she said. “Taking pictures of pictures can be beautiful, too.”

At first, Winant felt skeptical about creating collages because she thought it fit into the stereotype of crafting as an art form exclusively for women. And Winant said she didn’t want her artwork to appear domestic or limit her creativity in any way. And as a young artist, Winant thought she would have to portray herself as more masculine in order to make radical changes. She said her own internalized sexism made her believe she would never be taken seriously.

But after taking a class with UCLA professor Catherine Opie, she said she began to trust her creative impulses, regardless of societal stigmas or stereotypes. The ability to explore multiple perspectives within a single piece drew her to collage art, as she was able to create a new visual language, she said.

“My artwork is representative of a journey,” she said. “It’s a window into a very private world that is often tainted by mainstream media, pop culture and entertainment.”

Before the birth of her first son, Winant said she didn’t realize how underrepresented childbirth was in the art world and how little it is talked about in everyday conversation. Its lack of prevalence makes it mystifying but leaves room for misconceptions, she said. Childbirth is spiritual, shocking, unpredictable and beautiful, Winant said, and she wanted to convey those distinct emotions through intimate imagery of the atypical subject matter.

At times the women appear strong and confident. At other times the images feel raw or frightening, because they portray the birthing experience in an unfiltered and graphic way, she said. Winant said she overlaps found images to create collage work that allows people to question the norm.

Along with collage, Winant also wrote and illustrated a book based off her childbirth-themed project. Bruno Ceschel, publisher of “My Birth,” said the book is a collection of photographs and writings that explore themes of both literal and figurative rebirth.

The book incorporates images from the artist’s family albums and narrative reflections written by Winant herself. There’s a chronological story being told, with Winant’s mother as the recurring protagonist. Her work is a visual representation of topics that are often considered taboo and are rarely explored through art, Ceschel said.

“It’s a visceral experience for viewers and readers to be confronted by such graphic images and stories,” he said. “But her art poses questions that form a powerful gender framework.”

Much of Winant’s work focuses on feminist ideology, Ceschel said. Winant said she integrates themes of female resilience into her work, featuring images of women at varying points in the birthing process to elicit different emotions or experiences.

Expanding on the topic of female dimensionality, Winant also has a body of work entitled “Who Says Pain is Erotic?” in which she illustrates the complex intersection of pain and pleasure. Fabiola Alondra, co-founder of the Fortnight Institute in New York, said her gallery displayed work from this project, which features images of women’s bodies coated in red food dye. Alondra said she was drawn to Winant’s art because of its strong political message.

Winant’s collages question why women are often portrayed as the primary receivers of pain, questioning how intimacy can quickly turn to violence, she said. Winant uses her collages as instruments for social change and women’s empowerment, Alondra said.

“The underlying feeling in my work is the underlying feeling in my life. I try to peel back the harmful social layers that we so willingly accept,” Winant said. “The patriarchy is oppressive in every corner of the world, in profound, horrifying and striking ways.”

Karma is a satanist magician avenging middle school slights, in grad student’s play

Sometimes, a multimillionaire satanist magician can be the answer to one’s prayers.

The concept might not be realistic, but Jeffrey Limoncelli used it as a means to explore past sins and revenge. Limoncelli, a graduate playwriting student, will present “The Answer to Your Prayers” at the School of Theater, Film and Television’s New Play Festival. The play follows Zachary, an alumni outreach cold caller whose visitation rights with his daughter are at stake. But Zachary’s prayers for a solution are answered when a potential donor – a masked satanic magician named Crow – offers him all the money he needs on the condition that he flies to Las Vegas to meet with him.

“I was interested by the thought of a very serious donor who makes a very generous offer but with conditions of some sort,” Limoncelli said. “I wanted to focus it on the conflict of interest being just the two characters, the donor and the guy that picks up a phone.”

The deal backfires on Zachary, and the rest of the play deals with the consequences. Limoncelli didn’t want to present an ideological agenda through a central Catholic figure, so instead he aimed to present a more whimsical story through the idea of a satanic magician, he said.

After receiving an email from his Catholic high school, Limoncelli said he was amused by how different his life had become since attending a conservative East Coast school. Because of this contrast between his life as a child and his career as an adult, Limoncelli said the original plot for the play involved a school official being offered an excessive amount of money on the condition that they must take religion out of the curriculum. However, Limoncelli eventually decided not to go for an ideological play and instead transformed his original idea into a play that uses religion as a backdrop to explore a darker conflict between two people.

“The play doesn’t delve into the minutiae of Christianity and Satanism – it actually has nothing to do with that.” Limoncelli said. “It’s about if he can swallow his personal beliefs and safety to save his job and do the right thing.”

Oscar Revelins, the first-year theater student who plays Zachary, said the challenge of portraying Zachary is in dissecting the character’s possible history. In the end, he found Zachary is someone who is simply trying to make up for the past and trying to justify the mistakes he has made as a bully in high school. He is trying to be a good Catholic man, but his mistakes keep coming back to haunt him, Revelins said.

“Zachary and (Crow) have an entire history that shakes him to his core,” Revelins said. “Zachary is forced to confront all the things he thought he left behind.”

The human issues at the core of a very eccentric play are also what fascinated Frank Demma, the second-year theater student who plays Crow. Getting in the head of a character that manipulates another for their own gain was particularly challenging, Demma said, but it helped that Crow is essentially an actor himself. Spending rehearsals fanning out cards, Demma said he found a way to relate to the character’s performative personality.

Each task Crow performs to manipulate Zachary corresponds to something terrible Zachary did back in high school, Revelins said. As the play goes on, it becomes less about Zachary keeping his job, or even about religion, and more about facing the mistakes he made as a kid, he said. Zachary is a character who can alter the audience’s perception when he is revealed as someone with many secrets, making them rethink the accuracy of first impressions, he said. Revelins said he hopes that when audiences come to see the play, they are able to grasp the idea that people are not always as they seem at first glance. Along those lines, Demma hopes that while the audience enjoys the show they can also realize this is a play that deals with issues at the heart of emotional and physical manipulation.

“It’s a good pulpy piece of theatre,” Demma said. “It’s meant to be enjoyed; that’s the primary function, and it does not hide from that fact behind any ideological agenda.”

Art to Heart: Digital media artists’ synesthetic storytelling enlivens and humanizes history

This post was updated on May 23 at 1:31 p.m.

Art, the universal language, can transcend space and time to reach a diverse audience. We hear this all the time, but do we truly feel the weight of these words? A cloud of elitism envelops the “art world,” alienating the perspectives of some while glorifying those of others. In efforts to challenge ideas that reinforce the intrinsic validity of one individual’s take on art over another’s, columnist Lisa Aubry will explore different creative spaces and outlooks on art and reconcile the fields of arts and sciences through discussions.

The aesthetic appeal and meditative effects of a wild mouse’s taste bud certainly came as news to me.

Using imaging technology to work with the unconventional material, Art|Sci artist-in-residence Patricia Olynyk created the artwork “Dark Skies,” which investigates the biological and psychological impact of darkness. After scanning electronic micrographs of the nocturnal animal’s minuscule taste bud, Olynyk said she rendered its texture as a three-dimensional, enlarged wall. Olynyk then projected the clips of a sunset onto the resulting mountainous surface. Vivid oranges and pinks gradually fade toward darkness, paired with audio field recordings of nocturnal animals at twilight in the Rocky Mountains during high summer. The visual and audio combination creates an immersive experience for viewers to reflect on the calming natural effects of darkness.

“I’m interested in what it means to be put back in your body and be made aware of the world around you in a world that is so technologically mediated,” she said.

Her paradoxical use of technology to expose its fraught consequences – such as light pollution – demonstrates the love-hate relationship between technology, science and art. And yet, where there is conflict, there is surely room for fruitful connection too.

Just as Olynyk’s “Dark Skies” mixes scientific discovery with viscerally affecting artwork, another of her pieces, “The Mutable Archive,” exposes underlying biases found in scientific methods and collections. For the work in progress, Olynyk said she is photographing 17th-century anatomist Josef Hyrtl’s medical collections of human skulls. Hyrtl’s team documented and “tattooed” the skulls post-mortem with short descriptions of the identities and causes of death of the deceased: “A celebrated Viennese prostitute. Francisca Seycora, 19 years of age … meningitis,” translates one, and another, simply, “Idiot.”

By studying this collection, Hyrtl wanted to disprove eugenics, a popular scientific theory that sought to explain death and behavioral patterns through cranial structures. The skulls’ transcriptions are eugenicists’ attempts to organize the deceased into such categories. But Hyrtl held that differences in physiognomy were simply natural variations, not evidence that a long nose and broad forehead indicate murderous tendencies in a person.

“These kinds of collections continue to fascinate us because the conditions that put them in place originally are conditions that are still alive and well today – the preoccupation with difference and othering,” Olynyk said.

But the “scientific” transcriptions show a complete lack of neutral analysis, she said. The construed data is less telling of medical trends than of how society perceived and ranked a person’s identity. In efforts to reinterpret the medical collection through artwork, Olynyk said she has commissioned writers to script speculative biographies about the people’s lives, hoping to contextualize their situations and humanize the dead. The writers’ informational and poetic scripts will be compiled into a video that illustrates the reinterpreted storylines.

“It is not just memorial work, but also a way of bringing to life the conditions and biases that go into scientific collections and trying to explode our presumptions about the value-neutral nature of scientific collections,” she said.

Another artist who mixes emotional storytelling and technology is Ina Conradi, associate professor at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media in Singapore. Conradi, a new media artist and Art|Sci resident said she aims to break away from traditional two-dimensional easel painting and move into a three-dimensional virtual space. The unison of morphing color blocks and introspective characters that tap into a range of moods harken to elements of painting. The straightforward, singular angle mimics the eye of the painter who looks upon an ever-changing canvas, she said.

Infusing her “paintings” with deeply emotional themes provides not only personal catharsis but also helps challenge ideas that digital media art is distant and calculated, Conradi said. She created “Elysian Fields,” a short film about war, to honor her late father’s military service. The animation immortalized the memory of her father in a scenery of tenebrous skies, fighter planes, and finally a serene and surreal afterlife, she said.

Moving away from figurative representation and toward abstraction, her “Emote Project” deals with the neuroscience of emotion, sight and sound. Conradi collaborated with her partner, Mark Chavez, to test whether viewers would emotionally react to her audio-visual animations the way she intended them to. The duo conducted electroencephalography to record electrical activity in the brain and calibrate emotions while participants viewed the clips. Conradi said she hopes the resulting data can further prompt the use of animation for emotional and cognitive results, such as inducing concentration and relaxation.

“I don’t want digital art to remain cold, I want it to have a soul and be current and move people,” she said.

Conradi said she also manipulates how her paintings are presented to garner audience responses. She segments her animations into scenes or chapters to project onto multiple gallery walls, creating an audio-visual experience to immerse the viewers. Moreover, the viewers’ mobility in the gallery space and liberty to explore at their own whim disrupts the rigid notions of storytelling characterized by defined starts and endpoints.

By themselves, century-old skulls or abstract digital art would not necessarily elicit reevaluation of oneself or society – instead, art and storytelling achieve this. Although powerhouses in their own right, the pillars of science and technology can only be further fortified by audio-visual appeal and genuine observation.

Administration ignores concerns of Campus Safety Alliance, focusing on PR instead

Four times a quarter, administrators and student advocates come together to discuss the safety of the nation’s top public university.

Students raise their concerns after weeks of interfacing with communities on campus.

And each time, administrators pretend they’re listening.

The Campus Safety Alliance was revived earlier this school year after being disbanded back in recent years. The alliance is made up of student representatives from campus groups, such as the Panhellenic Association, the Undergraduate Students Association Council, the LGBTQ center and Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA. The coalition aims to bridge the gap between students and administrators to better promote campus safety.

This kind of alliance is important. UCLA saw a measles outbreak earlier in spring quarter that posed a threat to the entire student body. A professor emeritus in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television pleaded no contest to charges of sexually assaulting two children for several years.

UCLA clearly has no shortage of campus safety issues the administration prefers to ignore.

Transparency is crucial for such a major university. The fact that this program had to be brought back is indicative of the university’s lack of due diligence in enacting necessary safety policies while appropriately consulting with students.

Even with this alliance and the student input it has received, the administration hasn’t made substantive changes. Student concerns still aren’t being heard in a meaningful way.

Mick Deluca, UCLA assistant vice chancellor of campus life, said CSA is an important way for students to work with administrators to raise critical concerns.

“The opportunity for student leaders to work with campus administrators … builds trust and creates the opportunity to share perspectives, raise issues, ask questions and then interact directly on the issues or topics of concern,” Deluca said in an email statement.

But the university’s high-level decision-makers’ interests aren’t always aligned with students’, and often prioritize promoting positive PR at the expense of student interest.

Students are frequently not informed about UCLA policy changes. Policy 133, for instance – proposed in fall quarter – aimed to centralize data collection from the security camera system already in place across campus.

This policy, while intended to address safety concerns on campus, compromised students’ privacy and was heavily prone to misuse – potentially even making it easier to out undocumented and LGBTQ students.

Robert Watson, the 2019-2020 USAC president and former internal vice president who revived CSA, said UCLA isn’t transparent when moving forward with these kinds of policies.

“Transparency is the biggest thing we as a school need to work on,” Watson said. “Administrators make these decisions and set policies like Policy 133, and students are usually left in the dark on most of the issues.”

Watson added CSA facilitates discussion between students and administrators before these policies are implemented, which allows for more transparency and student input.

But those exchanges seem superficial. The coalition brings forth safety concerns, but those issues often do not elicit any sort of administrative action.

Watson said the alliance confronted UCLA about instances of racial profiling this year. Yet the administration’s mitigation of the problem seemed to involve only issuing an apologetic email from Chancellor Gene Block.

Similarly, despite concerns from the coalition about UCLA’s response to the measles outbreak, the university only doubled down on its uncommunicative approach to securing the campus.

That’s because the university is often primarily concerned with its public image and fails to address student concerns when faced with safety issues. The existence of the alliance serves as a cop-out for administrators to not go out and find where their policies harm students or fall short in promoting safety. On top of that, they don’t even heed the concerns of the coalition.

Watson said he wishes the coalition would have power to implement policies and make tangible changes on campus, and that the administration would be required to run these policies by CSA for approval.

That hasn’t happened yet, however. CSA, as a student-run organization, works with a very small number of students and lacks the necessary tools to enact policies. The most it can do is facilitate discussions and host town halls to raise visibility of student concerns – conversations UCLA seems insistent on tuning out.

Certainly, it might seem administrators – not students – are in the best position to designate what safety concerns are most pressing. However, students are the ones most affected by university policies – there are 45,000 of us on this crowded campus after all. CSA is a representative group of some of this university’s most marginalized communities. The fact that the issues it brings to light do not merit administrative action indicates how UCLA’s participation with the alliance is more for show than it is for student well-being.

Campus safety can only be assured when the people in power make a concerted effort to hear the concerns and viewpoints of all communities on campus.

Students are speaking up. But administrators are tuning it all out.

Editorial: In shelving SB 50, Legislature bypasses yet another chance to tackle housing crisis

Hoping for change is a mistake in California – especially on the housing front.

The Golden State was on the verge of a breakthrough in its housing affordability crisis. After years of wrangling over specifics, legislators seemed set to pass Sen. Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 50, which would have eased zoning restrictions in parts of the state, paving the way for denser housing in transit corridors and “jobs rich” areas.

Then everything came crashing down, thanks to Sen. Anthony Portantino. Portantino, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee arbitrarily and unilaterally shelved the bill for the year, saying he preferred incentives over mandates and that he worried about the bill causing gentrification.

And so any hope at fixing the state’s housing crisis evaporates for another year. In the meantime, fret not – Portantino has a miracle idea to solve homelessness.

Vanity plates.

The senator introduced a bill last month that would authorize the creation of a “California Housing Crisis Awareness” specialized license plate program. Revenue made from issuing these plates would apparently aid a fund that helps moderate-income Californians buy homes.

You can’t make this stuff up.

This whole charade proves two things about California’s Legislature: It doesn’t understand the gravity or comprehend the urgency of the state’s acute housing crisis.

More than half the state’s renters are rent-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on paying for the roof over their heads. The number of rent-burdened tenants has increased by 3.7 million since 2000. The median price of a home is $548,000, almost two and a half times the national average. And 22% of the country’s homeless population resides in California, a state that has 12% of the national population.

None of this is normal. In fact, it calls for drastic action. Even SB 50 was not drastic enough. Rather it was the result of years of compromise: Wiener’s first attempt at a bill died quickly after opposition from community activists and labor unions. His second iteration came after he worked with them on a compromise, giving certain “sensitive communities” a grace period from the bill to avoid gentrification.

Even that wasn’t enough, since Wiener had to still amend the bill to match the needs of smaller counties and coastal communities. Even the watered-down bill couldn’t please everyone, with some legislators from suburbs still opposing its sanded-down teeth.

Legislators like Portantino have vouched for broadening the conversation before passing anything. But these legislators had years to voice their concerns and work with Wiener to advance a bill that assuaged their concerns. Killing SB 50 in committee was the path of least resistance.

Now we’re stuck with some flashy license plates and the farcical legislator who proposed them.

Certainly, fixing California’s nonsensical zoning laws would only address part of the problem. Providing housing for low-income and homeless individuals is part of the wholesale solution.

But existing zoning laws prevent headway on these fronts as well. And there can’t be any progress until these laws are amended, as much as they are cherished by homeowners who want to preserve the cache of single-family neighborhoods.

The moment calls for decisive political action – not punting on viable solutions. Legislators could have done nearly anything to alleviate California’s crippling housing crisis.

Instead, they gave us vanity plates.

Researchers find 25 genes linked to increased risk of ovarian cancer development

UCLA researchers identified specific genes associated with an increased risk of developing ovarian cancer.

Researchers from UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, Cedars-Sinai Cancer and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute identified 25 genes associated with higher chances of developing ovarian cancer. The team published its findings May 1 in the journal Nature Genetics.

Bogdan Pasaniuc, an author on the study and associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said this project used data from prior studies that identified 40 regions in women’s genomes related to the risk of developing ovarian cancer.

“We’ve integrated this large-scale genetic data with other types of data that look at what types of mutations disrupt what genes,” Pasaniuc said. “Having these two pieces of data side-by-side can help prioritize the genes that are responsible for this association.”

While previous research had established which genomic regions are related to increased risk to ovarian cancer, this study identified specific genes correlated with increased risk of developing the cancer.

Pasaniuc said the link between ovarian cancer risk and family history indicates genetics may play a role in increased susceptibility to cancer.

“For example, a woman that has a first-degree relative who has ovarian cancer has a threefold increased risk for developing the disease as compared to women with no family history,” Pasaniuc said.

Pasaniuc said determining the specific genes associated with increased susceptibility would help doctors detect tumors earlier.

Kate Lawrenson, the co-lead author and an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Cedars-Sinai, said tumors associated with ovarian cancer are difficult to detect early on because they do not display distinctive symptoms.

“Most tumors are very challenging to diagnose early because the symptoms women have are not specific to this disease,” Lawrenson said. “The best way to stop women from dying from ovarian cancer is to either detect the tumors early or even try novel ways to prevent tumors.”

Beth Karlan, an author of the study and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine, said using family history to predict the presence of such genetic mutations may not be ideal since these genes have no clear pattern of inheritance.

“Your likelihood of inheriting an ovarian cancer risk is just as common from your father as it is from your mother,” Karlan said. “Most of the women who have these inherited risk factors for ovarian cancer don’t even know it.”

Lawrenson added studying genetic risk factors would help determine how the formation of tumors changes specific processes in the cell. This would help develop more efficient methods of detecting ovarian cancer and preventing its development, Lawrenson said.

Karlan said testing for the presence of these genes can establish a family history and benefit both patients and their family members.

“All ovarian cancer patients should have genetic testing because not only is it important to them because there are new targeted therapies that improve their own survival, but also half of their relatives will also have the same gene and that information can save their lives,” Karlan said.

For this project, Lawrenson studied tissue samples donated by women undergoing surgery for different reasons to establish a pattern between their genes and their cells’ functioning.

“If you can collect a few hundred specimens, then you’re able to look for the more subtle changes in the molecular profiles of these cells and see where do those gene expression signatures correlate with your risk of ovarian cancer,” Lawrenson said.

Although each individual mutation in the genome only slightly increases susceptibility to ovarian cancer, having a large number of these mutations can significantly increase the risk of developing ovarian cancer, Pasaniuc said.

“If you happen to have the risk of mutation that you inherit from your parents, all 40 of these regions, then your risk gets higher and higher,” Pasaniuc said.

Lawrenson said the team will be continuing similar studies, growing the sample size to detect more genes and focusing on factors that impact the regulation of the expression of these genes.

Pasaniuc added the team will experiment with the identified genes to determine how they affect cells’ processes.

“We’re following up with looking at more data where we can disrupt these genes and see their impact on that particular cell,” Pasaniuc said.