Explore your Creativity and Artistic Potential. The Departments of Art is preparing for our annual summer arts and design camp for current 8th graders through 12th graders. The student artists will receive daily, studio instruction & supervision from UNCG faculty and art education staff. We are offering a one week day or overnight camp followed by a closing student exhibition for the students’ artwork created at the camp. One-Week Day Camp: July 10 – 16, Overnight camp: July 10 – July 16. For more information click HERE.

Peggy Marshall, a second-year MME student at UNCG, whose full-time job is as orchestra director at St. Paul’s Middle School in Robeson County, NC where she teaches 108 orchestra students in a small, rural town south of Fayetteville, NC.

She applied for and was recently awarded a grant from Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation which will buy 7 violins, 5 violas, 2 cellos, 1 bass, 1 tenor saxophone, and 1 alto saxophone.

Of her extraordinary feat, UNCG Prof. John Salmon said, “It was a fairly tedious and time-consuming process, drawn out over four months, certainly beyond her normal teaching responsibilities.  As if public-school teachers don’t already have their plates full! Peggy is the sort of music teacher we want in North Carolina – dedicated to the needs of her students, committed to music education, tireless in her devotion.”

Congratulations to Peggy and the students at St. Paul’s Middle School!

Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, Peggy Marshall has a Bachelor’s degree in Music Education from UNC-Greensboro. While at UNCG she studied the violin under Marjorie Bagley and performed in the University Symphony Orchestra. She is currently finishing her fourth year as the orchestra director at St. Pauls Elementary School and St. Pauls Middle School in Robeson County, NC and serves as the strings department chair for the Public Schools of Robeson County. Ms. Marshall coaches and performs with the Fayetteville Chamber Orchestra, Robeson County Youth Symphony, and the Haymount UMC Chamber Orchestra, and co-founded her own chamber group, Orchid River Strings. Additionally, she teaches private violin and piano lessons and is pursuing her Master of Music Education degree at UNCG.

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A Taiwanese American, 5’2, and stylish woman, Cynthia Ling Lee, Assistant Professor of Dance in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance, has a dynamic approach to teaching cultural competence in the classroom.  Her loving approach to pedagogy introduces different dance forms unfamiliar to students in an engaging way. She emphasizes how her subject matter can relate to the lives of the students and current affairs, and provokes thoughtful discussion. I saw this displayed in her dance studies course, “World Dance Traditions.” Cynthia Ling Lee, dance professor, spends time and effort, teaching, demonstrating, and acknowledging the historical and political systems of power, colonization, gender, cultural identity, nationalism, government censorship, and the lived challenges of a multiracial and multi-religious society. This course examines these types of systems of power and others.  On this particular day, she taught a studio dance class and exposed her diverse students to Kathak, a classical dance form from the Indian subcontinent.

Making a tight knit circle within the hot and sticky studio which usually breeds claustrophobia, conversely bred intimacy this particular Monday afternoon. Professor Lee pulled at the cotton material of her top and slowly tied bells around her ankles, talking through the significance of Kathak. She moved her baggy pants–salwar–explaining that these pants are usually even baggier, as they are gender non-specific.

Later, her voice rang out, reciting the bols, or the rhythmic syllables of the taal, or metrical cycle. Her voice directed the students to place their arms up, bent, in the fixed starting position. The students, eyes closed, listened, and withstood the pull of gravity in this hard, tiring position for the few minutes until she was done. This is only a small and humble glimpse into the historical legacy of dancing Kathak. The students moved into various aspects of Kathak nritta, or abstract rhythmic dance, including rhythmic footwork, and turns along with Professor Lee.

That class ended with the enthused students gathered around a screen, viewing video of Professor Lee’s guru, Bandana Sen, performing the storytelling art of Kathak Abhinaya.  Wednesday’s session was spent in a classroom discussing historical context and engaging in a discourse around Kathak dance and gender identity.  While the students were US American black and white, and the professor Taiwanese American, the course content focusing on North Indian Kathak–when viewed through a lens of cultural appreciation–opened the conversation, as Professor Lee states, “to talk about systems of power.”

UNCG students come from 78 countries and 48 states as well as the District of Columbia, with 43% of students identifying as members of ethnic minority groups. You will find Chinese bible studies, the African Student Union, and Iranian social groups all on this beautiful, scenic campus. With this many different, eclectic identities it is important to teach cultural awareness and sensitivities.  The jargon for this mindset is recognized as cultural competence.  This teaching focus helps facilitate a peaceful campus, in which learning can happen both in and out of the classroom.

Quoting the National Education Association (NEA) website, “As NEA President Dennis Van Roekel has noted, ‘Educators with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes to value the diversity among students will contribute to an educational system designed to serve all students well,’ ” echoing an ethos of UNCG and the School of Music, Theatre and Dance. The NEA further defines cultural competence as “having an awareness of one’s own cultural identity and views about difference, and the ability to learn and build on the varying cultural and community norms….”

In unpacking her teaching, Professor Lee points out that there are two levels of cultural competency with which we work. The first is equipping teachers to deliver content beyond their background of values, beliefs, and norms. The second is asking students to open up and explore differences of other values, beliefs, and norms. Professor Lee remarks, “Students might not be exposed to this level of content if it were not part of the curriculum to value world histories.”

She adds, “It makes you a better human being when you think outside of your usual way of viewing the world, for example, in terms of race, power, and privilege.  I want to challenge my students to think about different ways of being in the world and to have a deep understanding and appreciation that makes our lives richer and more layered. And yes, it can be uncomfortable. However, the point is not to traumatize students, but to be honest about looking at your paradigm. And to me, that is delightful and fun.”

Cultural competence is taught in the dance classroom to help foster engaged citizenship.

In finding out why cultural competence is important to Professor Lee, I would like to add my own voice to the conversation as both a UNCG student and a citizen in our community: I believe that we have to teach these concepts of cultural competence because we all operate through conscious and subconscious biases.  Whether explicit (conscious) or implicit (unconscious), we all operate through these lenses of bias. By teaching cultural competence, tools are learned to help interrupt those biases. If we take a look into our world today, the constructed social categories, such as race, are often used in divisive ways that negatively impact people’s lives.  For example, “Black Lives Matter” is a movement highlighting how the race of a person determines how easily it is to dismiss their value. This movement is highlighting how this sentiment engrained in different US systems of power separates political leaders, religious groups, law enforcement, pedestrians, and so many more because we say, “Everyone matters,” but our actions tell a different story. And the work of aligning our actions with our words highlights the importance of bringing this real life lesson into the classroom to help examine these systems of power.

Professor Lee is dedicated to these types of life lessons in the classroom. Her teaching of dance within the School of Music, Theatre and Dance, emphasizes and explores cultural competence in the classroom.  Her welcoming approach to teaching allows for different dance forms to be explored that may be new to her students. Her emphasis on historical and current events and cultural sensitivity facilitates respectful discussions and thoughtful group projects. I get to see her interact with her students as a teaching assistant. I saw her pedagogy brought into the spotlight through her discussion of and interactive demonstration of Kathak dance and philosophies.  Her ability to connect dance history to individual experiences challenges our biased lenses.  Through class discussions students get to hear different interpretations of the same piece, and these interpretations are often different from each other. Because students are validated in their opinion, when they hear a different opinion, their biases are perhaps exposed and then, the fun can begin.

What makes art relevant?  How can you take a two-hundred year old art form and make it accessible to a 21st century audience?  How as an artist can you find echoes of your own voice in a score written centuries before your birth?  Well, when you dismantle the artifice of expectation and find the voice of a character, find the heart of a relationship, and see a piece of art for what it truly is – pure emotion, and a glimpse into the soul of another human – the confusion falls away, and you are left, hopefully, only with connection.

In UNCG Opera Theatre’s upcoming production of Dialogues of the Carmelites, we as students are tasked with the surmountable undertaking of connecting our modern hearts and brains with those of French Revolutionary Carmelite nuns.  None of us has ever been a nun, nor have we lived through the tumultuous and terrifying French Revolution – so how do we bring these women to life?  How can we authentically tell their story and make it relevant to an audience?  This is where our artistry comes in – what about these women can we connect to?  Their relationships: with each other, with the outside world, with their faith, and within themselves.  While none of us has had the particular experiences of our characters, we have all experienced our own trials and tribulations, frustrations and joys, and continue to thrive and grow.  The human experience is a universal one, and music is a universal language; so, at the end of the day, opera is one of the most honest expressions of humanity, and it should be shown as such.

Where to begin?  Well, in an opera, we have a creative team responsible for bringing the visual aspect to life.  This team can greatly impact the way we as performers view not only our characters, but the way in which we interact with each other and our surroundings.  Sets, props, costumes, and lighting can shift an otherwise static scene to one with higher stakes, or with wicked emotions bubbling beneath the surface.  In the case of Dialogues of the Carmelites, the idea of fear and shadows has helped mold the world in which all of the characters live.  Shadows can represent things that go bump in the night, or a shadowy past, or can be harbinger of dangers and dark times to come, and seeing the patterns of light and dark spilling across the stage can greatly affect the way one moves across the stage, or approaches another character.  

For me, knowing where the shadows are cast, and what places on stage are shrouded in darkness or bathed in light helps inform the way my character moves around the stage.  If she is afraid, then skittering from shadow to shadow will look and feel much different than if she is afraid of the shadows and slips from patch of light to patch of light.  The way she moves will be vastly different depending on what she is running from or running to, and that can shift the audience’s perspective of who she is even before any singing happens.

By the time we get to delving into the score, it’s playtime.  Getting to put the characters on their feet, create the relationships and flesh out the inner monologue in each moment – that is what makes this artform so special.  For me, the rehearsal room is the point of it all, it’s the creative playground that allows characters and emotions to jump off of the page and out of our hearts and heads – it’s grownup make-believe.  However, the stakes are so much higher than they were when we were children – the stories are more complex, the relationships often resonate deep within our own sense of self, and the music elevates it all.  

UNCG SMTD Senior, mezzo-soprano Megan Callahan describes her experience in the rehearsal process, “As a vocalist one of the most exciting parts of my job is getting out of the practice room and combining what I have worked on with what my colleagues have worked on. I remember the first time I heard the entire nun chorus sing the finale during our very first sing-through and I was nearly moved to tears. Through working with my colleagues, they each influence the way I think about my character and my singing through their artistry and dramatic choices. I absolutely love working off of such a talented group of individuals as they inspire new ideas in my own choices which ultimately leads to a stronger performance. In the future, I hope to continue to be as fortunate as I have been in coming into contact with such gracious, creative, and willingly collaborative artists so that I may continue to work off of their artistic instincts.”

There is something about the music, particularly in Dialogues, that plays at one’s heartstrings in a way that is not only expected but jarring in its honesty.  It is that honesty that we are charged with expressing to the audience.  That honesty is universal, and makes not only us as performers think, but hopefully those in our audience as well.  Again, my colleague Megan Callahan notes, “At the end of experiencing our production, I hope the audience will be able to empathize with the characters we have created and I hope they will wonder how we can avoid such religious intolerance in the future.”  

And what a time in our world to think about religious intolerance, or open the discussion regarding any intolerances that prohibit us from living in a peaceful communion?  This is why opera, and all art, is important, and relevant – to raise these questions in a powerfully moving way, to open the doors to discussion.  And hopefully, through this art, we are able to open the eyes of our audience to see the possibility of another side, another opinion, and to take the fear out of the “other” through recognizing the myriad of points of view.

As for myself, I hope that our audience is left with feelings and questions bubbling up from their hearts and minds, even if for a moment.  For every moment of impact through art is a catalyst for the future – being exposed to a new idea, a new feeling, or a new perspective helps change each and every one of us – including the performers.  It is a symbiotic relationship available only in the arts, and only through that transcendent language of music, movement, and imagery.  I hope that our audience comes away from Dialogues des Carmelites with one moment of connection – to a character, to a melody, to an image, to an idea – and that one connection changes them, if only to begin a dialogue.