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No Reporter next week
The Reporter will not publish next week due to spring break. The next issue will be published on March 20.
Dancers to be in residence at UB
HT Chen & Dancers, a company at the forefront of contemporary dance and Asian-American performing arts, will be in residence at UB March 18 through April 1. The two-week residency will culminate with a public performance at 8 p.m. March 29 in the Mainstage theater in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.
During the two-week residency, members of the company will teach 13 master classes for UB dance students and give lecture-demonstrations in several Buffalo schools, including the Elmwood Village Charter School, the Charter School of Applied Technology, Tapestry Charter School and the Lydia T. Wright School of Excellence. The activities are provided at no cost to the schools as part of the Center for the Arts’ community outreach initiatives.
HT Chen & Dancers was founded in 1978 by HT Chen (Chen Hsueh-Tung), who studied dance at New York University, the Juilliard School and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. After choreographing and performing for numerous years at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City, Chen decided to present his own work and formed HT Chen & Dancers. The company has appeared in many important venues for contemporary dance in the United States, and has toured in Europe twice and Asia seven times.
Tickets for the public performance of HT Chen & Dancers are $18 for general admission and $10 for students and are available at the CFT box office and at all Ticketmaster locations, including Ticketmaster.com.
Seminar to explore cyber security
The School of Management Alumni Association (SOMAA) will hold a breakfast seminar exploring cyber security for small businesses and nonprofit organizations from 7:30-9:30 a.m. on March 19 in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus.
The seminar, “Cyber Crashes, Disasters and Hackers: Be Prepared,” will be part of SOMAA’s Smart Business Practices Breakfast Seminar Series. It will include a full breakfast, panel discussion, presentations and question-and-answer period. Topics that will be addressed include wireless security, software patches, spam messages and filters, password security, network monitoring, directory security, user permissions, data backups, encryption and disaster-recovery planning.
The presenters will be Kristopher Meier, director of information technology for Algonquin Studios; David J. Murray, assistant professor of management science and systems in the School of Management; and Gregory S. Gartland, IBM-certified administrator, developer and trainer for the PCA Group.
The cost of the breakfast seminar will be $25 for SOMAA members, $30 for nonprofit representatives and $35 for others who are not members of SOMAA. Reservations are required and must be made by March 14 by calling 645-3224.
Science Exploration Day set
Although UB students will be on spring break Wednesday, the North Campus will be far from quiet as some 800 high school students come to campus for the 22nd annual Science Exploration Day.
Students from 30 local schools are expected to attend the event, which will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at various sites on the North Campus.
The annual event is organized by Rodney L. Doran, professor emeritus in the Department of Learning and Instruction, Graduate School of Education, who started it more than 20 years ago to interest area high school students in science.
This year’s keynote speaker is Diane Bollen, Athena Project coordinator for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University. Her talk, entitled “The Mars Exploration Rovers: Four Years of Martian Images,” will be presented at 9:15 a.m., 10:10 a.m. and 12:20 p.m. in Woldman Theater, 112 Norton Hall.
In addition to the keynote presentation, students will attend large and small group sessions and tour labs to learn about cutting-edge science from professionals who are involved in the fields of medicine, engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, geology and ecology. The scientists will share their research and increase students' awareness of fields of science that are not typically covered in the classroom.
Science Exploration Day is presented by the Niagara Frontier Science Supervisors Association and the Western Section of the Science Teachers Association of New York State. Additional sponsors include the College of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Education, Educational Technology Services, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Great Lakes Program, all at UB, and the New York Sea Grant.
For more information, go to the Science Exploration Day Web site. Anyone with specific questions should send an email to ub-scieneday@buffalo.edu.
Architecture firms to present panel
The School of Architecture and Planning will present a panel discussion on March 17 featuring Craig Borum and Ken Daubmann of the collaborative firm of PLY Architecture.
They will be joined by Vincent James, a principal of the architectural firm VJAA, and by David Miller, a principal of Miller Hull Partnership LLD.
The panel presentation by these national award-winning architects, which will be free and open to the public, will take place at 1 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall, South Campus, and will be followed by a reception.
PLY Architecture of Ann Arbor, Mich., is actively engaged in design, materials research and fabrication. It received the 2005 AIA Michigan Design Honor Award for its collaborative work with Tiseo Architects Inc. and the PEG Office of Landscape and Architecture, for Detroit’s Mies van der Rohe Plaza, a stunning space marked by a rich conceptual landscape of fissures filled with a subtle palette of plant materials.
The firm also recently received an award for its design of the Big Ten Burrito restaurant in Ann Arbor, in which the interior of the small restaurant is created through the use of an inexpensive and prosaic material dematerialized to alter the viewer’s perception and experience. This is accomplished by the interplay of decorative plywood panels that define two separate areas against a backdrop of rich red walls, floor and ceiling.
VJAA is an architectural practice based in Minneapolis that produces innovative, high-quality buildings through the synthesis of research and design. Among them are the Charles Hostler Student Center at the University of Beirut and the University of Cincinnati Gate House, both of which won 2006 Progressive Architecture Awards.
It has won many other awards as well for work published in Architecture, Architectural Record, Architecture Review (UK), A+U (Japan), The New York Times, Perspecta, and Praxis, and in a number of books in the U.S. and in France, Germany and Spain. In 2001, the firm received the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Miller Hull firm’s buildings focus on sustainability. Winners of the AIA Architecture Firm Award, they received a National AIA Award for housing in Chicago in 2007 and many, many other awards for architectural achievement.
The firm always has specialized in environmentally sensitive buildings, beginning with many award-winning, earth-sheltered and solar designs in the early 1980s. Its principles hold that sustainable development solutions create both economic and environmental value. “In this sense,” they say, “we are similar to the ‘total quality’ movement, which proved that it is possible to improve quality and reduce costs, in other words, achieve the seemingly impossible.”
Nazarian project opens in Lightwell Gallery
“Introversions,” an exhibition by architect and UB faculty member Shadi Nazarian, is on view through May 17 in the Lightwell Gallery in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.
In this project, Nazarian, clinical associate professor of architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning, frames and choreographs an architectural experience as audiences are drawn toward a responsive minimalist structure, seemingly hovering in midair. Working in the fertile intersections of art, architecture and emergent technology, she employs switchable liquid-crystal-layered privacy glass to explore cognition and think about the ways in which we navigate the environment we live in.
In the commercial sector, privacy glass has been used primarily for partitions, display cases and bank screens, and enclosures for conference rooms, and in dressing rooms and bathrooms. Presented in an academic and artistic context, “Introversions” seeks to discover how new materials such as privacy glass fundamentally alter spatial relationships and human perception. Nazarian isolates and enhances disorienting moments inherent to urban conditions that are triggered by reflections and other intriguing sights seen out of the corner of the eye by combining minimalist sculpture and architecture to generate uncanny optical effects.
Nazarian has worked as an architectural designer for I.M. Pei & Partners, and has taught at Cornell University. She has been teaching at UB since 1994.
“Introversions” is sponsored in part by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation of the Arts special opportunity stipends, as well as the support of Knema LLC, Polytronix Inc. and SMG-Harson.
Dave Brubeck Quartet to perform
The Center for the Arts will present the Dave Brubeck Quartet at 8 p.m. March 25 in the Mainstage theater in the CFA, North Campus.
Designated a "living legend" by the Library of Congress, Dave Brubeck continues to be one of the most active and popular musicians in the world today. During a career that has spanned more than six decades, his experiments with odd time signatures, improvised counterpoint and distinctive harmonies remain hallmarks of a unique musical style, unfazed by fad and fashion.
While increasingly active as a composer, Brubeck has remained a leading figure in the jazz mainstream, appearing at jazz festivals, recording, and touring internationally with today's version of the Dave Brubeck Quartet—Bobby Militello, sax and flute; Randy Jones, drums; and Michael Moore, bass.
Buffalo native Bobby Militello first caught Brubeck's ear at a jazz festival when he stepped out in front of the Maynard Ferguson band to take a "dazzling" flute solo. Brubeck asked Militello to audition for the quartet in 1982 and they have been playing together ever since.
British-born drummer Randy Jones joined the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1978 after having played with such greats as Ferguson, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Milt Jackson, Bill Watrous, Harry James, Cleo Laine, Tony Bennett and Billy Eckstein. He has recorded numerous albums and has performed with the quartet in the U.S., Japan and Europe.
The most recent member of the quartet, bassist Michael Moore, is an acknowledged master of his instrument, as well as a leader of his own duo and trio that feature the bass as a solo instrument. Born in Cincinnati, Michael started his musical training at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. After joining the Woody Herman band at age 20, he became an important player in the New York jazz scene, recording and performing with such artists as Marian McPartland, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, John Scofield, Tony Bennett and many others.
Tickets for the Dave Brubeck Quartet are $35 for general admission and $30 for students and are available at the CFA box office and at all Ticketmaster locations, including Ticketmaster.com.
For more information, call 645-ARTS.