Edelman Lecture: Will Weigler

Aesthetic Arrest!: The Dynamics of the “Aha!” Experience

Will Weigler is a theatre director, producer, playwright and the author of an award-winning book called Strategies for Playbuilding: Helping Groups Translate Issues into Theatre (Heinemann, 2001). Born and raised in Portland, Will has been involved for many years in “applied theatre”—theatre that is applied to the needs of a community. While in Oregon, Will co-founded and directed Young Actors’ Forum, a theatre company dedicated to giving culturally and economically diverse groups of children and teenagers an opportunity to create and perform their own plays about the issues that matter to them. The video adaptation of their play Turn Loose the Voices (taped at the old KPDX studio) won the top honor at the National Educational Film and Video Competition following its premiere on stage at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in North Portland.Will recently spent eight months in Darrington Washington, a small logging town seventy miles northeast of Seattle. He worked with the people in town and with the members of the Sauk-Suiattle (SOCK-SOO-ATTLE) Indian tribe just outside of town to create a joint music/theatre production with a cast and crew of over 60 people from both communities. The play was called Common Wealth and it celebrated their separate and intersecting histories and their mutual connections to the forests, rivers and mountains that surround them. Will lives in Canada where he is currently a doctoral student at the University of Victoria theatre department in British Colombia. His proposed dissertation project involves researching specific moments in 20th century theatre performances that have triggered epiphanies not just among individuals, but large numbers of audience members during every performance. He plans to analyze these moments to try to understand how people’s attitudes or preconceptions can be suddenly changed or challenged by the act of witnessing something presented onstage in a play.

Ticket info: Free and Open to the Public

Ellen Lupton

Excellence in Craft Lecture

Ellen Lupton: The Design-It-Yourself Revolution
Thursday, March 20 | 7 pm | PNCA Swigert Commons
General admission: $5, free for students and Museum members

Influential design writer Ellen Lupton will discuss “The Design-It-Yourself Revolution” and how technology is combining with social movements to create greater access to design tools and creativity. Drawing from her books D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, D.I.Y. Kids, and other projects, she will present ways to use design in everyday life, from making your own business card to making your own bed and publishing your own book.

Lupton is the Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She also directs the MFA program in Graphic Design at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.
Co-sponsored by PNCA and Museum of Contemporary Craft.

Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research