Tagged This World Made Itself
PAGES Field Trip and Interview with Artist Miwa Matreyek
Miwa Matreyek performs in her play This World Made Itself. Image from her website.
Mandy Bruney and Dawn Brosnan’s students were able to visit the Wexner Center a few weeks ago as part of the PAGES program mentioned in a previous post.
Miwa Matreyek is an artist who performs live, projecting her shadow into worlds created through digital animation. Her work is very surreal and multifaceted; it includes elements of performing live, taking photographs, gathering information and research, curating music and creating digital animation among other things.
Students responded well to her performance of This World Made Itself (here is a clip). As students watched, they were to focus on emotions, themes and moments of transformation in the play. This would lead into a discussion and assignment later.
After the performance, Miwa answered student questions. One of the PAGES teacher-partners took some notes over her process which can be viewed here.
I took some notes as well, and here are a few things I thought were interesting.
- Matreyek started out as a physics major and was “amazed by the world and physics and wanted to ‘feel’ the process in a different way.” She felt she could do this better through the arts instead of the sciences.
- She then went to grad school for animation and was paired with a theater major through a class collaboration.
- Her art is a process of experimentation where she takes several approaches to see what works. It is a process of “tinkering, playing and inventing” with “plenty” of challenges.
- She was inspired by natural history, the earth from the sky while traveling by plane, and dioramas in the Natural History museum.
Matreyek’s personal history is fascinating because it defies the stereotypes of the artist and the artistic process being disparate from “left-brained” fields. In addition, her eclectic education provides an interesting context for considering the benefits of interdisciplinary studies. Through art, she was able to experience science in a new and engaging way.
Her process is interesting because it shows the artist as a critical thinker, problem-solver and innovator. These are all twenty-first century skills coveted by those in the field of education. I think it was valuable for students to hear how these skills are used across fields to navigate issues and find success.
Artist Visit for the PAGES Program: Tableau and Narrative
As part of PAGES, a literacy and arts integration program through the Wexner Center, a resident artist comes to the classroom before and after each of three art-integration field trips throughout the year. The visiting artist has a direct, real-world connection to the experience the students have while at the Wex. When I was part of the PAGES program, I had graffiti artists, cartoonists, actors, poets and others in my classroom working with students and co-teaching with me.
For Miwa Matreyek’s play This World Made Itself, theater educator Pam Decker came and worked with Mandy Bruney’s students using a technique called “tableau.”
Miwa Matreyek performs in her play This World Made Itself. This image is from her website.
For the activity, Bruney had taken pieces of students’ narratives and distributed them to groups of three to four students. They were asked to choose a beginning, middle and end of the story together. After they have chosen the three moments, they had to decide how to create a “frozen” re-enactment of the scene using body language and facial expressions. Each group then presented the three scenes to the rest of the class.
From watching Decker, I enjoyed how she “coached” students through the presentations. For example, she asked questions of the students presented, modeled facial expressions for them and provided formative feedback for improvement. This was a more “interactive” form of presentation that I had seen in the past. I feel like students learned more from this style where the end product was about “process” and not a “product.”
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