Art and design student Adrian Gonzalez scours a thrift store before finding what he is looking for–an old vintage chair. When he gets home, he places it on the floor, cleans it up and takes a seat to try it out. He then stands, grabs an aluminum baseball bat and begins breaking the chair to bits. Gonzalez arranges the pieces on a canvas placed flat on the floor, adds blue and green shades of paint and dribbles water all over to create an “ocean feel.” He grabs his camera and begins taking pictures, rearranges the splintered wood, then takes more shots. He does this several times. Now back at his computer, he adds graphic elements and a title, “The Chairs,” to his piece, and to ... Read More
Art and Design
Faculty scholar Sharrell Luckett employs a ‘collective’ approach to teaching
Sharrell D. Luckett, assistant professor of theatre at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), is helping her students in the Performance Studies and Arts Research Collective “harness their artistic ingenuity” while discovering their true selves through the study of others. Established by Luckett when she arrived at CSUDH in 2013, the Performance Studies and Arts Research Collective in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance consists mostly of theatre and dance students, but also includes business, psychology, communication, education, mathematics, and music majors. Luckett said she designed the collective to engage students in opportunities that spark life-long learning as ... Read More
[VIDEO] Teatro Dominguez: The Best Kept Secret at CSUDH
It might be uncommon to see second and third grade students volunteer to pick up trash, but that is exactly what has happened during California State University, Dominguez Hills' (CSUDH) Teatro Dominguez community-based theater troupe performances at local elementary schools this semester. When the college student actors– in character as a coyote, an aardvark, a sea cucumber and other sea, land and sky animals–ask the young audience for volunteers, the children nearly launch from their seats with excitement, eager to save the environment with a quick demonstration on how they can help keep Earth clean. This semester, students enrolled in THE339: Multicultural Children's Theatre are ... Read More
Playwright Tarell McCraney talks ‘In the Red and Brown Water’
Theatre arts students at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) who are the cast and stage team in the upcoming university's production of Tarell Alvin McCraney's acclaimed play “In the Red and Brown Water” were treated to a rare examination of the play when the celebrated playwright stopped by campus for a visit. The play will run in CSUDH's University Theatre, Nov. 13-16, performed by students in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, and members of the Performance Studies and Arts Research Collective, which was created by assistant professor of theatre Sharrell Luckett, who began teaching at the university in 2013. Consisting of theatre, dance, biology, business, ... Read More
Professor Needham Shines Light on Cambodian Shadow Puppetry
Despite its name, shadow puppetry glows from a spiritually whimsical manipulation of light; although there was a time when an unfathomable darkness nearly wiped the little-known art form out of existence. From 1976 to 1979, nearly 90 percent of the artists in Cambodia, where shadow puppetry was created in the early ninth century, were killed along with roughly 2 million others during the Cambodian Genocide carried out by the regime of the Khmer Rouge. Thirty-five years later, most Americans still know very little about Cambodia's culture, let alone shadow puppetry which even in Cambodia is relatively obscure and today, for the most part, only enjoyed by the affluent. Professor ... Read More
