Book Signing

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Three Carnegie Mellon Drama Professors to Read from and Sign Copies of Their Books


Contact:
Ali Haimson
ahaimson@andrew.cmu.edu
412-268-2967

When:
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
4:30-5:30pm


Refreshments will be served.
Where:
Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore
Upper Level
5032 Forbes Ave.
University Center

More info:
The event’s facebook page: http://bit.ly/2u0EMU
Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore’s website: http://www.cmu.edu/bookstore






About the event:

Carnegie Mellon School of Drama professors Janet M. Feindel, Michael M. Chemers and Wendy Arons will be reading from and signing copies of their respective books at the Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore. Light refreshments and drinks will be provided. In May 2009, Janet Feindel released The Thought Propels the Sound, a book outlining her successful approach to training vocal techniques to performers. Michael Chemers released Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show in November 2008, and co-authored a new translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata earlier that year. Wendy Arons is the author of Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing: The Impossible Act, which was published in 2006.


About the authors:

Janet Madelle Feindel’s career as a voice/text/dialect and Alexander specialist includes coaching alongside Cicely Berry on the critically acclaimed The Merchant of Venice, starring Academy Award recipient F. Murray Abraham, which played in NYC off Broadway and at the RSC Complete Works Festival, England. She has coached at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Canadian Stage Company, the Shaw Festival and others, as well as film and television productions including the US Queer as Folk. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, as well as being a tenured faculty at the CMU School of Drama. Her articles have appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail, The Alexander Congress Papers (STAT, UK), Canadian Theatre Review, The Performer’s Voice (Plural Publishing) and her play A Particular Class of Women is published by the Canada Playwrights Press. She presents at conferences and teaches internationally. She spent the 2009-2009 academic year as Visiting Professor at UCLA.

Michael Mark Chemers first came to Carnegie Mellon in 2003 as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Center for the Arts in Society, and joined the School of Drama faculty in 2004. He is the founder and director of the School’s Dramaturgy BFA Program. Michael holds a PhD in Theatre History and Theory from the University of Washington (2001) and an MFA in Playwriting from Indiana University (1997). With J.A. Ball, he adapted a version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata which has been revived at universities across the US. His playwriting has received many national awards and has been performed across the country. He has over two decades of experience in dramaturgy.

Wendy Arons joined the faculty of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University as Associate Professor of Dramatic Literature in 2007. Previous to that time she taught at the University of Notre Dame in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre. Her research interests include performance and ecology, 18th- and 19th-century theatre history, feminist theatre, and performance and ethnography. She is author of a book, various articles, as well as chapters in a number of anthologies. She has worked as a professional dramaturg with a number of leading directors, and has translated a number of plays from German into English. Arons is currently writing a second book that investigates performance practices associated with the agricultural sustainability movement. She is currently Director of the Performance and Ecology Public Art Initiative at CMU and is curating the Pittsburgh Eco-Drama Festival in fall 2009 as part of that initiative.


About the books:

The Thought Propels the Sound

"[Feindel's] book synthesizing pertinent knowledge and reducing it to the information most practical for voice and speech trainers is excellent, and overdue. It should be of great value in helping directors and voice trainers enhance the health and endurance of their actors' voices while enhancing their ability to express artistic emotion... The information in this book provides an invaluable introduction to the state of the art, and it should be read by anyone involved in voice training."
--Robert T. Sataloff, MD, DMA

Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show

“As a wide-ranging historian and dramaturg in a hands-on conservatory of theatre arts, Chemers knows that freakishness illuminates the conditions underlying all successful performance, because peculiarity, however stigmatized, can bestow eminence when effectively marketed. From the marriage of Tom Thumb to the firing of Frog Boy, Staging Stigma uncovers a history that will interest students of performance studies, disability studies, and American studies.”
--Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Yale University

Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing: The Impossible Act

“This book is a magnificent contribution to the discussion of gender performance back in the day of its literary and dramatic codification in bourgeois modernity. Arons examines the actress playing the antitheatrical, ‘natural’ woman as a site of female subversion, gender anxiety, and a disconcerting discourse on sincerity. This is a must-read for those who think gender performance is only a post-modern concept. Scholars of the novel, dramatic theory, and eighteenth century gender studies will profit from this nuanced study on the drama of performed naïve femininity.”
--Jeannine Blackwell, Dean of the Graduate School, University of Kentucky


About Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore:

Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore is one of only two independent college bookstores remaining in Pittsburgh. We sell: textbooks and general books, clothing, gifts, stationery, art supplies, computers and electronics. Our aim is to serve the Carnegie Mellon campus community by providing the products that they need to succeed.

--
Book Department Manager
Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore
412-268-2967

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