Today’s News from the University of Kansas
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‘Breaking It Down’ explores audition techniques for minority actors
LAWRENCE — A new book from a University of Kansas professor titled “Breaking It Down: Audition Techniques for Actors of the Global Majority” (Rowman & Littlefield) is a guide to showcase and assess auditioning based on the experiences of actors of color in the entertainment industry.
Book details ‘conversation’ between Victorian literature, evolutionary science
LAWRENCE – The traditional literary scholarly view is that Charles Darwin changed the way novelists thought about plot and character, forcing them to represent heredity and human behavior as these are shaped across hitherto unimaginable stretches of time. In a new book, “Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction” (Routledge, 2021), a University of Kansas professor of English tells a far more complicated and colorful tale.
Collaborative rural health project wins AIA Regional & Urban Design Award
LAWRENCE — A rural health initiative developed by University of Kansas alumnus Tom Trenolone, director of HDR’s Great Plains studio in Omaha, Nebraska, in collaboration with the KU School of Architecture & Design has been awarded a 2021 American Institute of Architects Regional & Urban Design Award. KU faculty members and graduate students worked with HDR to explore environmental design solutions to assist the small farming town of Haxtun, Colorado.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
‘Breaking It Down’ explores audition techniques for minority actors
LAWRENCE — When Nicole Hodges Persley first started teaching acting at the university level, she realized that for many minority students, she was the first theater teacher they’d had who wasn’t a white male.
“It shifts the discussion because you’re able to give a whole different set of insights for what it takes to engage with and penetrate some of the boundaries that are systemically racist in this industry,” said Hodges Persley, associate professor of American studies and African & African-American studies at the University of Kansas.
Those insights are now available to everyone in her new book, “Breaking It Down: Audition Techniques for Actors of the Global Majority” (Rowman & Littlefield). It’s the first such guide to showcase and assess auditioning based on the experiences of actors of color in the entertainment industry.
“Mainstream audition books are often written from assuming the actor is raceless and none of that comes into play,” said Hodges Persley, who co-wrote the project with Dartmouth’s Monica White Ndounou.
“These books avoid discussions of race or gender or sexuality. They avoid intersectional standpoints. So we’re saying, ‘These are really important considerations that happen in the room, and whether you’re focusing on them or not, they’re things you can’t avoid.’”
Hodges Persley selected the title of her authorial debut for its multiple connotations.
“First, it’s Black vernacular for ‘let me break it down for you,’ meaning that I’m going to tell you the truth about what’s going on,” she said.
“Next, you have to break down a script as an actor to learn how to attack the story. Third, when you actually go out on auditions, casting directors and agents are looking at what are called breakdowns. These describe the various roles available in different TV, film and episodic projects.”
Since auditioning remains the crucial gateway through which actors advance their careers, they are always in need of advice on how to maneuver within this process.
What’s the biggest mistake actors make when auditioning?
“One is focusing on the audition itself instead of the work you’re presenting,” said Hodges Persley, who also took over as director of KU’s museum studies program in July.
“You’re so worried about getting the job that you don’t really concentrate on the skill set this takes to get a job. I tell students, it’s like going into Google and saying, ‘Oh my God, I’ve always loved Google. I’m so excited to be here.’ And they’re like, ‘Great, but what are you offering us and why should we hire you?’”
She compares casting directors to heads of HR departments; they must understand how to match the talent to the work.
“If you went in to Google ‘kind of sort of knowing how to write code,’ that would come through to the person who’s interviewing you. This is the same with actors when you come in shaky, don’t know the story and don’t know who you are in relationship to it. I can’t risk bringing you on to a set or a stage with other professionals if you’re going to slow up the production time,” she said.
Hodges Persley estimates she’s been on 500 to 600 auditions throughout her career. But race often entered into the process in ways that proved awkward … and sometimes wildly offensive.
“As a multiracial, racially ambiguous-looking Black woman, when I was heavily auditioning in the ’90s, a lot of casting directors wanted me to pick a box,” she said.
“I had casting directors advising me that I should tell people I wasn’t Black. Instead, I should claim I was anything from Puerto Rican to Israeli. That became traumatic after a while. You would never tell someone at a job interview, ‘Wow, you’re so African American. I really wonder if you could scale that back a bit.’”
A Detroit native, Hodges Persley came to KU in 2009, where she honed her expertise in African American theater performance and hip-hop performance. She is currently the artistic director of the KC Melting Pot Theatre, Kansas City’s premier African American theatrical company. Her directorial credits include acclaimed productions of “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Rachel,” “Sunset Baby” and “Ain’t No Such Thing as Midnight Black.”
“This is a labor of love of wanting to pay forward the things that I’ve been able to learn, not only in my professional work as an artist but also in my practical work as a theater professional,” Hodges Persley said of “Breaking It Down.”
“I want actors of color to feel spoken to, seen and heard. At a moment when folks are discouraged about fighting all the time for visibility and for audibility, I just hope they find this book encouraging.”
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Book details ‘conversation’ between Victorian literature, evolutionary science
LAWRENCE – The traditional literary scholarly view is that Charles Darwin changed the way novelists thought about plot and character, forcing them to represent heredity and human behavior as these are shaped across hitherto unimaginable stretches of time.
This may be true as far as it goes. But in her new book, “Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction” (Routledge, 2021), a University of Kansas professor of English tells a far more complicated and colorful tale.
Anna Neill explores how Victorian works that we now call “speculative” fiction speak back against a conception of the evolutionary past as deep and gradually developing, particularly where that idea served British imperial interests. Neill argues that by playfully undermining the gradualist model of evolutionary time, these works questioned British colonialist representations of so-called “savage” peoples as less developed and closer to nonhuman animals than their “civilized” conquerors.
For many Victorian writers, Neill said, “Evolutionary time became a convenient way of justifying the colonial resource-extraction economy and its importance to the Industrial Revolution.”
Those who took the opposite lesson from Darwin are the focus of Neill’s book.
Some of Neill’s chosen texts make intuitive sense. H.G. Wells’ gothic horror novella “The Island of Doctor Moreau” (1896) features a sadistic scientist who, determined to speed up evolution with his scalpel, discovers that the animal cannot be cut out of the human and that British men share deep affinity with wild “Beastfolk.” Similarly, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories (1865 and 1872) use nonsense to turn evolutionary hierarchies on their heads. Specifically, Carroll pokes fun at ideas of recapitulation and arrested development, which were powerful colonial concepts in the Victorian period.
But other choices are more surprising. One might expect works by Charles Kingsley (“The Water Babies” from 1863) and Rudyard Kipling (“The Just So Stories” from 1902) to reflect the colonialist and racist views of their authors. And yet, Neill said, the inventive distortions of evolutionary time in these texts necessarily challenged one of the foundational concepts of 19th century imperialist ideology — namely that some people are inherently more developed than others.
“Water Babies” is a thinly disguised allegory of the human soul as embryo on a journey of self-improvement through mature faith. Neill sees Kingsley telling a story about human and nonhuman potential in an environment that allows any creature to flourish. The story thereby becomes anti-colonialist despite itself. Kipling’s “Best Beloved” parent-to-child tales, for Neill, mock Victorian anthropology’s assumptions about the evolutionary distance between the primitive oral tale and the sophisticated forms of print culture.
“None of this is to excuse or mitigate the use these writers make of racial science elsewhere,” Neill said. “But by putting evolutionary science and Victorian speculative fiction into conversation, we can see how the latter challenges an entrenching racialization of the deep past that was hand-in-glove with British imperial interests.”
This is Neill’s second book dealing with the intersection of Victorian literature and evolution. The first was “Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel” (Ohio State University Press, 2013). She is also the author of “British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce” (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2002).
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Contact: Dan Rolf, School of Architecture & Design, 785-864-3027, [email protected], @ArcD_KU
Collaborative rural health project wins AIA Regional & Urban Design Award
LAWRENCE — A rural health initiative developed by University of Kansas alumnus Tom Trenolone, director of HDR’s Great Plains studio in Omaha, Nebraska, in collaboration with the KU School of Architecture & Design has been awarded a 2021 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Regional & Urban Design Award.
The project’s genesis came after HDR was engaged by the board of the health care system in the small farming town of Haxtun, Colorado, who were open to exploring creative solutions using environmental design as a way to not only improve the physical health of the inhabitants but revitalize the economic and social conditions of the community.
In spring 2014, HDR approached the Health + Wellness Design graduate program in the KU architecture & design school to explore ways the physical environment can be used to support and enhance rural communities in their search for improved health care services.
Spearheaded by Trenolone, the project launched in a Health + Wellness Design capstone studio co-taught by architecture professors Paola Sanguinetti and Kent Spreckelmeyer.
The students began the project by studying 24 communities across the United States that have similar key characteristics to Haxtun. They determined that the local hospital and K-12 education system were some of the most crucial indicators of rural communities’ health.
Based on this analysis, the team set out to improve and consolidate the health care facilities, focusing on the ways that clinics and classrooms, emergency rooms and gymnasiums, or cafeterias and birthing centers could become essential focal points of community life.
The final product combines three distinct design solutions that each tackle a specific problem. First, a concept called “Master Hub” consolidated essential community resources – health care and schools – positioning them within the historic center of the city. Second, a long-term planning strategy called “Small Town Synergy” situated the improvement of the hospital and school facilities as mutually beneficial and interrelated processes. Finally, a building process called “Modular Duality” called for the construction of the buildings to use environmental technologies that uniquely fit the rural community.
The full research report and project details were published in 2020 as “Rural Resolve: Imagining the Future Health and Wellbeing of Small Communities.”
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