Some students left campus over Spring Break, but during that time, campus took a turn for the dramatic.
Over the weekend, Purdue hosted the inaugural Midwest Cirque du Soleil Live Entertainment Workshop. Art-specific schools typically host such events, but Purdue was chosen from a pool of other locations across the Midwest, including those in larger cities such as Chicago and Indianapolis. Being selected is a high honor and speaks to the merit of Purdue’s well-respected liberal arts programs.
The workshop – featuring professionals from Cirque du Soleil, the largest theatrical production company in the world – offered students, faculty and staff the opportunity to interact and learn from the industry’s best.
“This is an incredible opportunity for students to network and meet people involved in the largest format and most challenging theater show running today,” said Mercer Aplin, a graduate student in the College of Liberal Arts and workshop volunteer. Aplin said Cirque du Soleil’s choosing Purdue was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity.
The three-day event ran from Friday to Sunday in 10 different locations across campus and offered participants a series of classes and performances. Each class was different, ranging from topics such as acting and performing to sound and lighting, and encouraged the audience to be inquisitive.
“(The workshop) was a highly professional environment where students were able to study with working professionals in a hands-on, experiential setting,” said Amy Lynn Budd, a graduate student in the College of Liberal Arts.
A “professional environment” in the lens of Cirque du Soleil is much different from what societal standards deem professional. For Cirque du Soleil, “professional” may mean having performers act as if they’re performing a typical, daily task as a human, then repeating the same task as an animal.
“When I worked on this individually, I was fixing breakfast and getting my yogurt and fruit out of the refrigerator and I turned into a lion,” said Budd. “It became increasingly difficult and frustrating to fix breakfast as a lion and my yogurt ended up all over the kitchen floor.”
Students weren’t alone in this exercise; the director hosting the class coached each student throughout the process, incrementally increasing the human and animal features of each participant. This forced the students to contemplate how basic motor skills contribute to the performance process, which made for beautiful theater and hilarious comedy, Budd added.
“Everything that’s grand and wild springs from a human being doing a simple experiment in a studio,” Budd said. “Then those ideas grow and expand.”
{ SOURCE: Purdue Exponent | http://goo.gl/Iwp4pA }
