ARTS ELSEWHERE: Berkeley-Taipei Forum

Our colleague YEH Wen-hsin helped to engineer an incredible memorandum of agreement between UC-Berkeley and Taiwan’s educational ministry.  To celebrate, the university organized the Berkeley-Taipei Forum in which two distinguished alums and Taiwanese citizens—Stan Lai and Kris Yao—were invited to speak about their work in theatre and architecture respectively. Along the way, they chronicled the impact of what they referred to as “the Berkeley Spirit” on their art practice. It was a privilege to be a part of the gala, to be in the presence of Stan Lai whose work I have admired for so long, and also to meet so many alums in Taipei.  The attached video created by IEAS is long, but you can jump ahead to get a sense of the conversations.

ARTS Elsewhere: Performance Matters

London-based performance scholars and overall rainmakers Adrian Heathfield, Gavin Butt, and Lois Keidan of the Live Art Agency received a generous grant from the U.K.’s arts and humanities research council to fund a wide-ranging three-year research project.    It was inspiring to be a part of their first symposium on why PerformanceMatters, though it was also poignant to be with a wide network of U.K. artists and scholars on the eve of the coalition government’s announcement of drastic budget cuts to education and research. 

ARC Director Shannon Jackson