Archives
Horne continues global performing arts efforts
Faculty member receives SUNY award to offer program in Romania
By JESSICA KELTZ
Reporter Contributor
Maria S. Horne has worked to promote international performing arts at UB since she began teaching here in 1994. This year, her efforts have resulted in a new SUNY-wide study-abroad program housed at UB that will take students to Romania for a four-week for-credit course this summer.
Maria Horne received a Chancellor's
Award for Internationalization for a new study-abroad course she’s
leading this summer in Romania.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI
"This is a very competitive process," Horne says of obtaining the SUNY grant that will reduce the course's costs. "I believe it speaks very highly of UB and the international commitment of its faculty. We have a very solid group of scholars who are dedicating their research to the international component."
Horne, associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, College of Arts and Sciences, says that to qualify for the grant, which she received along with a SUNY Chancellor's Award for Internationalization, the program had to take students to a country they might not normally visit.
"What we're looking for is to expose students to places where otherwise they would not go, and to other languages, cultures and civilizations," she says.
Students who travel to Romania with Horne will take "Theatre, Cultures and Civilizations in Romania," which will feature a series of master classes and the opportunity to interact with students from 12 other universities, as well as trips to Bucharest, Northern Moldavia and Transylvania.
Horne, who was born in Argentina, also has taken groups of students to Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, France, Greece, Mexico and Spain to study and perform. She says that the experience provides both short-term and long-term benefits for her students. While abroad, students have the opportunity to compare their work with research being conducted in other parts of the world, she says.
"But at the same time, they develop a cross-cultural understanding and they create a network of international peers that they will draw on throughout their lives," she adds. For example, about six of her alumni will present papers at the Sixth World Congress of University Theater, to be held in Italy this summer.
In addition, Horne notes that traveling is just one component of her work in international performing arts; she has established a research lab on campus and brings artists here to perform and to teach as part of the International Artistic and Cultural Exchange Program, otherwise known as IACE, of which she is the founding director.
"The scope is much larger than taking a group abroad," she points out.
IACE has brought 20 productions from 15 countries to campus and hosted more than 50 performing arts scholars from 10 countries, as well as supporting the IACE Creative Research Lab, where a group of hand-picked students work on interdisciplinary research projects alongside faculty members.
This past February, three of her IACE creative research lab students traveled to San Jose, Costa Rica, as part of the "Promising Artists of the 21st Century" program, a prestigious, by-invitation-only annual series that honors eight major U.S. universities each year. In addition to participating in master classes and workshops, the students performed an original concept musical they created through months of collaborative research, Horne says.
The musical, "Coming, Staying, Leaving: The Stories of New York," developed by Thomas DeTrinis, Bethany Moore and Harold Lewter, along with a team of 25 collaborators, was attended by officials from the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica and Department of State Horne says.
Horne believes the performing arts encompass not just entertainment, but also scholarship. In the United States, she explains, theater tends to be "very much production-oriented," which is not the case elsewhere.
"Theater is much more than entertainment," she notes. "It is an art, and all arts require research."
She cites a number of examples of topics theater academics and students have explored, among them breaking communication barriers when addressing a cross-cultural audience and the utilization of technology in the performance arts. Her own research, she adds, includes the integration of, and the relationship between, scientific knowledge and performance.
In addition to her recent Chancellor's Award for Internationalization, Horne also is the recipient of a 2002 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and a Milton Plesur Excellence in Teaching Award. She serves as vice president of the International University Theater Association, and the U.S. Department of State has designated her as an American Cultural Specialist to Estonia, a Culture Connect Envoy to Paraguay, and a U.S. Speaker and Specialist to Costa Rica.
While it would be easy to concentrate just on her own career—which will take her to the Philippines in late spring as a U.S. representative to the International Theatre Institute-UNESCO World Congress, to Italy in July as co-chair of the Scientific Committee for the sixth International University Theatre Association World Congress, and to Belarus in October as chair of the Independent Jury of the III International Student Theatre Art Festival Teatralny Koufar—Horne stresses it's important to work at student involvement.
"I think it's part of our mission here: to share with our students and engage them as contributors to our research," she says.