WACD Faculty & Choreographer Lionel Popkin's new evening-length premiere, The Oedipus/Antigone Project, takes its impetus from two of Sophocles' best known plays, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus; the journey that Oedipus and Antigone take from Thebes to Colonus as they struggle to protect each other within a civic code that confounds them. Popkin blends unexpected humor and resonant physicality to craft worlds that, according to The Washington Post, have "a flair for originality that periodically has you realizing that you are smiling to yourself in the dark," and approaches dance-making in a way that The New York Times calls, "as farcical as it is dead serious." His multimedia performance works have been called "a zenith of corporeal possibilities" by The Los Angeles Times and "by turns comical, creepy, and uncanny" by The New Yorker. PERFORMANCES- Villa Theater Lab: The Oedipus/Antigone Project - GETTY VILLA Auditorium - March 8,9,10 2019, at 7:30 pm Click here for tickets and more information.

Mary “Polly” Nooter Roberts, who passed away on September 11, 2018, was one of the world’s foremost scholars of African arts. She was a beloved professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, consulting curator of African arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and served as chief curator and deputy director of the UCLA Fowler Museum from 1999 through 2009. Polly helped found the Center/Museum for African Art in 1984, where she served as senior curator through 1994. Over the years, her exhibitions, books, and teaching concerned Humanities themes such as secrecy, memory, time, and the empowerment of women. Polly held a Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University and a B.A. in Philosophy and French Literature from Scripps College. Polly’s influence was deeply felt in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. She served as a mentor to a great many students interested in arts theories and practices, inspiring them to question their own identities even as they explored arts of societies throughout the world. Through her museum work, Polly reached out to many communities across the United States and around the world. She was decorated by the Republic of France for her service to francophone Africa, recognized through the lifetime Leadership Award of the Arts Council of the US African Studies Association, and as a Dai Sensei/Master Teacher to the Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles. As the latter award statement read, through Polly’s “remarkable teaching and speaking skills… the more we learned the more excited we became; the more we sought, the more she gave.” The Polly Nooter Roberts Graduate Fellowship will honor her enduring legacy at UCLA through summer awards to graduate students in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Priority will be given to those in their first year of study who are interested in museums as “contact zones,” African and African diaspora arts, and/or arts and cultures around the world. Click here to donate and for more information..

Visual AIDS asked WACD alum Kelly Gluckman to curate an online gallery this month to commemorate their yearly Love Positive Women celebration. Visual AIDS is an online registry, platform, advocacy project, and community that has been supporting artists living with HIV/AIDS for 30 years. They developed The Ribbon Project, where the AIDS red ribbon came from, that sparked the massive movement that we all know, of using colored ribbons to represent a cause. Here is a link to the gallery titled Love Poz Womxn , and here is a link to a page with some more information about Visual AIDS and their work in the community. Gluckman is proud of this work, and super excited to have worked with such an important institution in HIV/AIDS arts-activism.