Painted in the last decade of the 8th century in the tropical rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, and brought to modern attention in 1946, the wall paintings of Bonampak reveal the ancient Maya at the end of their splendor. Sterling Professor of History of Art Mary Miller, a specialist in the art of ancient New World cultures explores the ritual artwork of the Late Maya court.Using the most complex and luxurious palette of pigments known from pre-hispanic Mexico, a small group of trained artists...

In film, sound is the partner to the image. The ultimate compliment to sound designers, mixers, and editors is when no one actually notices the work. Sound designer Ren Klyce brings a professional's view to cinematic sound as a subtle, supporting character to the image, and the reasons why it is so often misunderstood and underappreciated. Our work is not just about the aesthetics of understanding how sound and dialogue enhance a film creatively, but it requires an understanding of human...

The talk will feature a conversation about visual culture, history, and sexuality studies between an eminent film studies scholar, Linda Williams, and a pioneering community activist and writer (and UCSC alum), Susie Bright. Between them, Williams and Bright represent a generation of thought and activism in the popular and scholarly study of sexuality, obscenity in art, and feminism. In January 2013, Bright gave a "Sexual State of the Union" lecture at Cornell University on the occasion of...

In the theatrical arena, actions take place with in vivo urgency while being freed by the artifacts of staging from normal expectations and consequences. "Staging Live Art "is the subject engaging speaker Sally Jane Norman, Professor of Performance Technologies at the University of Sussex. The ways we instate life as art evolve with the artifacts of staging: those used in ancient amphitheatres differ from contemporary devices which complexify notions of presence and immediacy. In settings...

Dancing connects us to ourselves and to the world. Creating dance—and the study of the thinking behind the doing of dance—is about this connectedness, believes Theater Arts professor Ted Warburton, not so much of the elements of dance, but of bodies and brains, minds and communities enacting dance. By maintaining a “dancerly point of view,” on the issues, problems, and paradoxes that arise when the dance is approached both as creative practice and scholarly investigation, I aim to show how...

Richard Taruskin is an American musicologist, historian, and critic who has written about the theory of performance, Russian music, 15th-century music, 20th-century music, nationalism, the theory of modernism, and analysis. As a choral conductor, he directed the Columbia University Collegium Musicum and Cappella Nova. He played the viola da gamba with the Aulos Ensemble from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Dr. Taruskin received his doctoral degree in historical musicology (1975) from...

Special guest Dr. Åse Vigdis Ystad gives a talk as part of this year's Arts Divison Lecture Series, “Engaging the Mind,” presenting work obtained through a lifetime of research on Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler.) Dr. Ystad is visiting UC Santa Cruz as part of The Gynt Project and the associated conference “Peer Gynt in a Digital Age.” Her visit is sponsored by UCSC's Cowell College and the Gary D. Licker Memorial Chair. The lecture: From the start...