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Authors explore practical, political effect of theatre studies
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas professor has edited a new book, “Performances That Change the Americas,” which looks at both top-down and bottom-up uses of acting skills to cause political change in the Western Hemisphere. Several chapters focus on recent, grassroots uses of theatricality to create social change, particularly by marginalized groups.
KU Debate qualifies 3 teams for NDT, places 3 teams in Final 16 at American Debate Association tournament
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has qualified two additional debate teams to compete at the National Debate Tournament this month at James Madison University. The team of Graham Revare, sophomore from Shawnee, and Ryan Snow, senior from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, qualified through a district tournament. The team of Jimin Park, junior from Topeka, and Jet Semrick, junior from Prairie Village, was selected as an at-large team by the NDT Selection Committee. They join the team of Mickey McMahon, junior from Leawood, and Michael Scott, junior from Glenview, Illinois, who had been selected as an automatic first-round, at-large qualifier based on ranking as one of the top 16 teams in the country.
Youth math competition part of KU Math and Statistics Awareness Month activities
LAWRENCE – To celebrate the month of April as national Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, the University of Kansas Department of Mathematics will offer a series of educational events for area students. Events will include the department’s annual math competition April 2 in Snow Hall for third- through 12th-grade students. The registration deadline is March 31.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Authors explore practical, political effect of theatre studies
LAWRENCE — Stuart Day is both a professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and dean of the University of Kansas School of Professional Studies and Edwards Campus in Overland Park, which focuses on training, often for nontraditional students. So what is he doing editing a new book titled “Performances That Change the Americas” (Routledge, 2022), which looks at both top-down and bottom-up uses of acting skills to create political change in the Western Hemisphere?
“The idea is to explore the question ‘How does classroom learning apply to the real world, and how does social change come about?’ in a fairly explicit way,” Day said. “It really is asking ‘How does formal training in theatre performance impact the world around us?’ Everything we do at the Edwards Campus is very focused on that. How are we applying studies? How does training impact the world? So it might be in an American Sign Language & Deaf Studies degree; it may be in another area like biotechnology. But if you look at social change, a lot of change agents have some theatrical and some performance background. So I thought it would be interesting to study.”
In fact, Day has long had a long career in performance studies, having written the book “Outside Theater: Alliances That Shaped Mexico” (University of Arizona Press, 2017), among several others. For the new book, he said, he sought contributions from experts in other regions, such that the content spans cases from Canada to Argentina.
Several chapters focus on recent, grassroots uses of theatricality to create social change, particularly by marginalized groups, including “Carnival in hell: kinetic dissidence and the new queer carnivalesque in contemporary Brazil” by Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa of the Universidade Federal do Ceará.
Day highlighted the essay “The queer/muxe performance of disappearance: Lukas Avendaño’s butterfly utopia” by Antonio Prieto Stambaugh of Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico. Muxe is a word in the Zapotec language that can be translated as “third gender.” Prieto Stambaugh tells how Avendaño theatrically demonstrated outside Mexican government buildings and elsewhere, seeking to address the 2018 disappearance (and, it turned out, the murder) of his brother, Bruno Alonso, in the state of Oaxaca.
And while eventually Alonso’s body was returned to Avendaño’s family, perhaps as a result of his activism, Prieto Stambaugh “argue(s) he is also gesturing toward a queer utopia where political, aesthetic and sexual dissidence merge, where violence and impunity fail to destroy hope.”
The content of the book is so fresh that Day noted that Alonso’s “body was found shortly after that chapter was written, so we added an epilogue.”
Sometimes, Day writes in his introduction, a performance itself is the change.
“Sometimes you’re trying to raise awareness,” he said. “Sometimes you’re trying to get attention. But sometimes you’re just speaking to people; someone whose voice isn’t heard otherwise has an opportunity then to express themselves, so that incremental change does happen. At least, we had better hope it does.”
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Contact: Scott Harris, KU Debate, 785-864-9878, [email protected], @KansasDebate
KU Debate qualifies 3 teams for NDT, places 3 teams in Final 16 at American Debate Association tournament
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has qualified two additional debate teams to compete at the National Debate Tournament, to be held at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, March 31-April 4. The team of Graham Revare, sophomore from Shawnee, and Ryan Snow, senior from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, qualified through a district tournament. The team of Jimin Park, junior from Topeka, and Jet Semrick, junior from Prairie Village, were selected as an at-large team by the NDT Selection Committee. They join the team of Mickey McMahon, junior from Leawood, and Michael Scott, junior from Glenview, Illinois, who had been selected as an automatic first-round, at-large qualifier based on ranking as one of the top 16 teams in the country.
Only six schools are allowed to qualify three teams for the National Debate Tournament. This is the seventh consecutive year that KU has qualified three teams for the NDT. The other schools qualifying three teams are Emory University, Harvard University, Liberty University, the University of Michigan and Wake Forest University.
KU Debate entered four other teams in the American Debate Association National Championship Tournament at Emory University March 4-7, where three of the teams advanced to the top 16 and one reached the quarterfinals of the national championship tournament. The ADA is an open tournament for schools who are members of the American Debate Association. While most of the field consisted of teams qualified for the National Debate Tournament, KU entered teams not qualified for the NDT and a new pairing of two of its NTD-qualified debaters.
“Since only three teams from a school can qualify for the NDT, and our program has more than three teams talented enough to compete at the NDT, we wanted to give some of those teams a chance to compete at a national championship tournament to measure themselves against some of the top teams in the country,” said Brett Bricker, KU associate director of debate.
The team of Scott and Snow, paired up for the first time this year, finished the preliminary rounds with a 5-1 record, including a win over the team from Northwestern University ranked second in the country. They received a bye through the first elimination round as the fourth seed and defeated Missouri State University in the octafinals before losing to an NDT first-round, at-large qualified team from the University of Michigan. Scott was the fifth-place individual speaker at the tournament, and the team finished in fifth place.
The team of Lily Ottinger, senior from Shawnee, and Samir Rahaman, freshman from Chicago, advanced to the elimination rounds with a 4-2 record as the 17th seed. They defeated the University of Kentucky in the first elimination round to advance to the final 16. They lost a close debate to the NDT First round at-large team from Liberty University, ranked 10th in the country, in the octafinals.
The team of Ethan Harris and Jacob Wilkus, freshmen from Lawrence, advanced to the elimination rounds with a 4-2 record as the 15th seed. They defeated a hybrid team composed of a debater from Columbia University and a debater from Washington University St. Louis in the first elimination round, before losing a close debate to the second-ranked team in the country from Northwestern University, who would go on to win the tournament, in the round of 16.
A fourth KU team composed of Ye Gang Lee, freshman from Halstead, and Will Soper, sophomore from Overland Park, finished with a 3-3 record in the preliminary rounds and just missed qualifying for the elimination rounds.
Scott Harris, the David. B. Pittaway Director of Debate at KU, said, “We are very proud of the performance of our students at the ADA tournament. It is very rewarding to have so many of our students demonstrate that they can compete against the best and brightest debaters in the country.”
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Contact: Gloria Prothe, Department of Mathematics, [email protected]
Youth math competition part of KU Math and Statistics Awareness Month activities
LAWRENCE – To celebrate the month of April as national Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month (MSAM), the University of Kansas Department of Mathematics will offer a series of educational events for area students.
Third- through 12th-grade students from the region are invited to participate in person at the department’s annual math competition April 2 in Snow Hall. The competition has three levels: third through fifth grades, middle school and high school. All students are encouraged to participate. The registration deadline is March 31.
The mathematics department will also host workshops for fifth graders and feature invited talks open to the public. The mayor of Lawrence and governor of Kansas traditionally offer proclamations of April as a month to observe MSAM. Over the last 30 years, this important outreach program has enabled thousands of students in Kansas to engage in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
For more information on all of the MSAM 2022 events at KU and a detailed schedule, visit the MSAM website.
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