LSDR INTERLUDES - The Improvised Process
Butch Roy
http://hugetheater.com/butch-roy
Butch is currently Executive Director of HUGE Improv Theater.
It all started 21 years ago when he began performing on the street at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival - which led to studying improv at the Brave New Institute to formally learn the art of long form improvisation. This would change the course of the rest of his life as well as define his pattern of making decisions based on passion instead of practicality.
While performing at the Brave New Institute's student showcase he got behind the light and soundboard and developed a new style and discipline of "technical improv" which later led to becoming the Technical Director at the Brave New Workshop, a position he held for eight years until leaving to earn a BFA in animation from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
In 2002, Butch founded Improv A Go-Go, a weekly, all improvised showcase meant to provide a place for improvisers to perform on a regular basis.
In 2006, Butch started the Twin Cities Improv Festival (TCIF), a four-day event featuring shows and workshops. Held each June, TCIF has grown every year, attracting some of the most well-respected and talented improvisors on the continent.
In 2008 HUGE Improv Theater began the long and tedious process of becoming a corporation, then a non-profit organization before securing a space in the Uptown area to call their own. On December 5th of 2010, HUGE opened its doors to the public and has been running improvised and unscripted shows of all kinds 6 nights per week in addition to teaching classes and corporate workshops.
Michael Barone
http://pipedreams.publicradio.org/about
Building upon a curiosity which began in his teens, Michael Barone has been involved with the pipe organ for more than 50 years. As host and senior executive producer of Pipedreams, he is recognized nationally for his outstanding contributions to the world of organ music. Pipedreams began in 1982, and it remains the only nationally distributed weekly radio program exploring the art of the pipe organ. Michael’s talent and commitment have been recognized with numerous awards.
LSDR PRESENTATION
Consorting with the King (of Instruments)
Organ music is many things to many people. One thing which it is definitely not is commonplace and dull. This presentation will show you why.
The pipe organ has a tone unlike any other instrument and easily displays a multiple personality—oboe, trumpet, flute, or a sound all its own. The usual display of tall pipes is just the outward manifestation of the pinnacle of physical creation in architecture, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, acoustic science, and woodworking. It is over 2000 years old and for centuries no other tool of culture was more complex.
This organ attracts the artistry of some of the world’s most outstanding musicians who astound us with their intense vision and beguile us with their humanity.
Chris Downey
http://arch4blind.com/
Christopher Downey, AIA, is an architect, planner and consultant who lost his sight in 2008. Today, he is dedicated to creating more effective and enriching environments for the blind and visually impaired. Whether working as a planning and programming team member or as a client representative, he draws on his unique perspective as a seasoned architect without sight. His approach is rooted in the idea that designing better environments for the visually impaired enhances the experience for all people. As one of the few practicing blind architects in the world, Chris has been featured in local, national and international media stories and speaks regularly to architects about issues relative to visual impairments. He is teaching a class on ADA and universal design at the University of California, Berkeley and is also the second vice president of the Board of Directors for the LightHouse for the Blind in San Francisco.
LSDR PRESENTATION
Outsights in Architecture
Chris has found a new passion for his work and a wealth of insights since working without sight. His talk will explore issues ranging from the blind and visually impaired perspective to an insider's view of accessibility for the visually impaired. Other perspectives will span from a look into the implications of Universal Design for non-visual users to questions of aesthetics and delight in architecture when you can't see it. The topics of discussion will expand further to include a range of issues from the non-visual mechanics of how he works as an architect without sight to his strategy for rebuilding a career through the unforeseen strength of his new disability. Along the way, he will share unexpected insights - or Outsights - that he has gained since losing his sight.
Carl Haensel
http://namebini.com/about.htm
Carl Haensel is an educator, biologist, photographer, writer, and fishing guide. Together with his wife Cindy they own Namebini, located between Duluth and Two Harbors. There they focus on ecological restoration, with opportunities for guest lodging, guided flyfishing, education and research. Currently they have a long-running trout stream restoration and research project in progress on the Sucker River in cooperation with UMD, Trout Unlimited and the Minnesota DNR. Carl has guided and taught flyfishing since 1996 and has authored dozens of articles on flyfishing techniques, tips, flies, and locations, as well as children's educational literature. He has fished extensively throughout North America, and his outdoor photographs have been widely published. He has served as an educational consultant and enjoys secondary and post-secondary teaching.
LSDR PRESENTATION
Exploring and Restoring Lake Superior's Rivers and Streams
Carl Haensel will talk about his experiences immersing himself in the lives of the streams and rivers that flow into Lake Superior. From habitat restoration work at their home, Namebini, to tying flies through the winter, Carl and his wife Cindy are drawn to water. When working as a fishing guide, focus draws in on observing the details of flowing water and the seasonal changes of the land surrounding it. Restoration work at Namebini looks at the long term health of the forest, river, and land as a single interconnected entity. Tying flies through the winter allows for reflection on the interconnectedness of life's processes, from the art of wing of the mayfly to the sip of the trout in the water.
Megan Q. Bachman
http://www.countercurrents.org/bachman230410.htm
Megan Quinn Bachman has written and lectured since 2003 on solutions to global climate change and peaking oil production. She has organized six national conferences on peak oil and climate change, spoken before nearly 100 groups, published numerous articles and appeared in Harper's Magazine and on MSNBC. Bachman co-wrote and co-produced the award-winning documentary film, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006). She received a Bachelor of Arts in Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and a Master of Science in Environmental Education from Wright State University in Dayton. She is a reporter and photographer for the weekly Yellow Springs News in Southwest Ohio, a columnist for the Ohio-based environmental newspaper EcoWatch Journal and former outreach director for the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, a Yellow Springs nonprofit. She teaches courses on sustainable agriculture and global ecology at Antioch University Midwest and is a board member of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil – USA, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
LSDR PRESENTATION
Planning Past Industrial Society: Why Peak Oil and Declining Net Energy Mean the Relocalization of Our Lives
Global oil depletion fuels resource wars abroad. Carbon dioxide emissions destabilize the climate. Mushrooming debt threatens economic stability. And toxic pollution infiltrates our food, air and water. At the heart of today's greatest challenges is an industrial way-of-life which impoverishes the majority of the planet and its people by exploiting natural resources and human labor while concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. But as global oil production begins to plummet and alternatives fall short of meeting the same useful energy requirements, industrial society may face a long, slow decline. As individuals and communities we can reduce our dependence upon this doomed system by working together to provide for our essential needs — such as food, shelter, healthcare and security — closer to home. Megan Quinn Bachman will discuss how the collapse is beginning to unfold and explore relocalization strategies, including ways to invest locally in the people, businesses and technologies that directly sustain us and will sustain generations to come.
Calvin Brook
http://brookmcilroy.com/profile_about.php
Calvin Brook is an architect, urban designer and planner and a founder of Brook McIlroy - an architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and planning studio based in Toronto and Thunder Bay Ontario. Brook McIlroy was founded on the ambition to create a truly multi-disciplinary practice to address the diverse challenges of contemporary city building. Cal holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto and a Master’s of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University.
LSDR PRESENTATION
Redefining an Urban Image:
The revitalization and theoretical enquiry on Thunder Bay's downtown waterfront
In March 2006, the City of Thunder Bay commissioned a team led by Brook McIlroy to undertake the design of a new mixed-use village that extends Prince Arthur’s Landing to the edge of Lake Superior. The redesign of the City’s historic port provides residents with a truly unique waterfront destination.
Just south of the Prince Arthur’s Landing site is the Iron Ore Dock (IOD) - a 500-metre long structure designed by C.D. Howe and built in 1944. The IOD site embodies one of Canada’s most brutalized eras of resource extraction while overlooking an iconic northern landscape. In 2010, the Brook McIlroy studio explored a series of theoretical transformations of the IOD as a dynamic element in the City’s public spaces. The transformed structure provides an opportunity for a reinvigorated community identity grounded in its heroic industrial legacy.
Together these projects explore ways of defining an authentic, revitalizing urban vision for northern communities through recognition of their unique and sometimes eccentric attributes and resources.