Initiative Category: Communication Arts

At the 2019 Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s (ATHE) annual conference in Orlando, Dr. John Sebestyen, associate professor of communication arts and director of theatre, took part in two sessions: “Getting Physical: Encouraging Physicality in Young Actors” and “Never Forget: Teaching the Holocaust Through Theatre.”

For the panel on physicality, Sebestyen spoke about “Increasing Awareness of Our Own Physicalities: Coaching Newer Actors to More Fully Inhabit Their Own Bodies Onstage.”

The issue is a particularly interesting one at a smaller college like Trinity, where many participants in the theatre program are not necessarily also studying theatre in the traditional classroom.  “Focusing on acting strategies for how actors can more fully embody characters onstage is an important component in connecting with the humanity of these characters,” Sebestyen said.

For the panel on Holocaust theatre, Sebestyen spoke on “Alertness to Oppression: Directing and Teaching Holocaust Plays in an Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Context.” His fellow panel members included Dr. Alvin Goldfarb, a nationally known theatre educator and administrator. Among other topics, Sebestyen talked about directing “Andorra” at Trinity in November 2015. The play, by Max Frisch, explores anti-Semitism in a European village 15 years after World War II.

The theme of the 2019 ATHE Conference was “Scene Changes: Performing, Teaching, and Working Through Transitions.” ATHE is a comprehensive non-profit professional membership organization. Founded in 1986, ATHE serves the interests of its diverse individual and organizational members, including college and university theatre departments and administrators, educators, graduate students, and theatre practitioners.

In the sprawling city of Los Angeles, you will find Olivia Winkowitsch ‘17 fulfilling her dream of working in the film industry. Olivia’s passion to grow in her career is met with her experience and ambition to do well, and Trinity played an important role in getting her to where she is today.

During Olivia’s high school years, a middle school group from a church in Illinois traveled to her hometown in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to participate in a mission trip. After getting to know the group well, Olivia kept in contact with her new friends and was invited on another mission trip years later. Following the trip, Olivia entered herself in a video contest put on by the church. She produced a “mockumentary” about what people outside of her hometown think the locals do for fun. This evolved into a project that brought together her friends and neighbors, ultimately earning Olivia the top award. “I had never felt so alive,” Olivia said.

This was the springboard into her studies in film.

When looking at colleges, Olivia knew she wanted to be close to the church she had first formed a relationship with all those years before. After visiting 10 schools in Illinois, Olivia knew right away that Trinity was the best fit for her. “I got on Trinity’s campus and I just felt immediately at home and at peace,” she said.

Eager to learn and gain experience, Olivia enrolled in classes working toward a communication arts degree with an emphasis in film and a minor in graphic design. Dr. Craig Mattson, Professor of Communication Arts, made a strong impact on Olivia. “Dr. Mattson is a brilliant man. He teaches so well to the individual in the midst of a full class.”

During her senior year at Trinity, Olivia spent a semester with the Los Angeles Film Studies Center, which is one of Trinity’s off-campus partner programs. Trinity aided Olivia in making connections on the West Coast, which ultimately led to an internship at a small production company, where Olivia read scripts and gave her feedback on the content.

After graduation, Olivia moved back to Los Angeles and has been there ever since. She found a job managing a photo studio for an e-commerce company, and also helped produce photo and video shoots. “My degree was really helpful in my first job. I used my producing and communications side but also used the graphic design experience I earned at Trinity.”

Olivia also did freelance work for nearly a year, which included working with a production team on Levi Strauss model shoots and temping in a production office for a film that’s set to come out at the end of 2019.

Today, Olivia is the production coordinator at Percival and Associates, an entertainment advertising agency, and is part of a team that creates movie and TV posters. “This job is the perfect marriage of my degree in film, my minor in graphic design, and my internship experiences.”

Fourteen Trinity students, along with Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Director of Theatre John Sebestyen, Ph.D.,  are traveling to the Region 3 gathering of KCACTF (Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival) in January, 2019.

This year, the conference is being held in Madison, Wis.

The students include:

National KCACTF Award for Theatrical Design Excellence
Andrea Taylor will present her Costume Design from Trinity’s Spring 2018 production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors in consideration for this award.

National Playwriting Program
Stephanie Rodriguez will attend playwriting workshops and presentations.

Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship Auditions
Four Trinity student actors were nominated to participate in this scholarship audition, by representatives of KCACTF who visited Trinity to observe our productions of The Comedy of Errors(Spring 2018) and Seeds (Fall 2018).  Each of the nominees is required to prepare a monologue and two scenes, with student acting partners who are not also nominees themselves.

–Nominee Emma Darcy, with scene partner Mateo Perez

–Nominee Breanna Eissens, with scene partner Jonah VanderNaald

–Nominee Ben Friesen, with scene partner Alexandria Eggert

–Nominee Morgan Limback, with scene partner Bethany Dadisman

Stage Management Intensive
Four Trinity students have been selected to stage manage events that are a part of the KCACTF conference/festival in Madison: Kyli Ayers, Megan Blok, Hannah Rodgers, and Sydnie Tiemens.

Launched in 1969, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) is a national theater program involving 20,000 students from colleges and universities nationwide annually. For 50 years, the organization has served as a catalyst in improving the quality of college theater in the United States. KCACTF has grown into a network of more than 700 academic institutions throughout the country.

Last week, NPR featured a podcast by Professor of Communication Arts Craig Mattson, Ph.D., as part of its “The Academic Minute” series.

In the podcast, “Better Feeling for a Better World,” Mattson discusses the messaging behind social entrepreneurship companies such as TOMS and Warby Parker.

As the podcast notes, Mattson is a rhetorician, and he studies how messages work, how they form relationships, how they create worlds, and how they open possibilities.

You can listen to the podcast here.

For social entrepreneurs, messaging and action need to be woven together, according to a new book by Dr. Craig Mattson, Professor of Communication Arts and Honors Program Director. Mattson’s book, Rethinking Communication in Social Business, was published in August of this year.

Mattson has been studying social entrepreneurship, or companies that take a business-focused approach to social problems, since 2007, when a student first asked about Product Red in a rhetorical criticism class. Subsequent faculty/student research on Bono’s campaign to harness the power of people and companies to fight AIDS in Africa led to Mattson’s own researching and writing articles on the topic of business-driven problem-solving.

But it was a big jump to go from writing individual essays to taking up a book project. He credits several colleagues with encouraging him to write a book about the topic, including Professor of English Michael Vander Weele and Professor of Philosophy Aron Reppmann. In October 2016, while preparing for his sabbatical, the prospective for his book was accepted by Lexington Press. He drafted much of the book while on sabbatical in the spring and summer of 2017. “I do feel like this was really a Trinity project,” says Mattson. “It came about from conversations with students and colleagues, and it represents the entrepreneurial spirit on campus.”

As part of his research for the book, he interviewed Chicagoland social entrepreneurs, including Laura Zumdahl ‘02, CEO of New Moms. “I wanted the project grounded in the experience of practitioners in the field,” he noted.

The book examines social entrepreneurial businesses of all sizes, from large companies like Warby Parker and TOMS, to smaller operations like Clean Slate and Zumdhal’s Bright Endeavors. According to the book, “These companies respond not only to a felt proliferation of humanitarian and environmental predicaments, but also to enormous shifts in in public feelings and technological sensibilities. These predicaments make social entrepreneurships urgently needed and remarkably complicated. But if social entrepreneurs deal with that complexity with a business-as-usual approach to making the world better—imitating, for example, corporate social responsibility initiatives by transnational companies—they will lose their vital distinctiveness and efficacy.”

In his book, Mattson attempts a transdisciplinary perspective, using close rhetorical analysis and qualitative interviews with social entrepreneurs, in order to argue that one good way to keep social business disruptive is to rethink how organizations model their communication. Most companies assume something like an information-systems model of communication, tidily organized around the relations of senders and receivers. But social entrepreneurship often enacts a performative model of communication that weaves effective messaging and affective investment.

Mattson said he enjoyed the book process so much he is crafting a proposal for another book—this one focused on the religious dimensions of social business.

What do the Bard, the “Carlton” dance, and the “Rachel” haircut have in common? For Trinity’s Theatre Department, they equal sold-out performances of this year’s spring play “The Comedy of Errors,” set in Chicago in the 1990s.

Directed by Dr. John Sebestyen, associate professor of communication arts and director of theatre, the comic farce about two sets of identical twins accidentally separated at birth ran for six performances in the Marg Kallemeyn Theatre in April.

The Foundations of Human Communication course recently offered four different socially entrepreneurial organizations analysis of their digital messaging.  The students wrote magazine-style white papers and produced a 2-minute video, followed by in-class visits with the social entrepreneurs feedback, sometimes via Zoom.  The four organizations are Blue Sky Bakery (a social enterprise that offers job training to at-risk youth), International Teams (a socially entrepreneurial incubator in Elgin), New Moms (a nonprofit organization serving homeless and at-risk adolescent parents and their children in Chicago), and Native Tongue (a magazine company addressing food scarcities in Woodlawn).

 

Comm Art’s Persuasive Speaking class recently offered Charlie Branda of Art on Sedgwick consultancy regarding oral presentations about her organization’s work with the public.  She hosted the class in her neighborhood on a Saturday morning, gave them materials from the company to draw from, and then came to campus to evaluate their final presentations. They offered her different variations on potential presentations: a 30-second elevator pitch, a 5-minute boardroom bid, an 8-minute TED-style talk.

Trinity is pleased to offer talented performances by our theatre and music departments.  All performances that require tickets can be found at our box office via phone, in person or the online box office.