2019 College Report

College Report 2019 30 31 spotl ight story for dance COCO DANCE FESTIVAL ( Contemporary Choreographers' Collective ) Trinidad and Tobago NICOLE WESLEY Associate Professor Theatre and Dance THE HAYS COUNTY FOOD BANK "SUPER-TEAM" San Marcos,TX MCKENNA STRAIN Student & Team Member Art and Design When Nicole Wesley joined the Fine Arts faculty in 2015, she brought with her a connection to the COCO Dance Festival in Trinidad. She co-founded the festival when she lived there from 2008 to 2012. For the last four years, she has taken some of her students – 19 last October – with her to the festival to teach Trinidad dancers and learn from them. COCO provides a platform for innovation and experimentation in contemporary dance for emerging and established choreographers in Trinidad and Tobago. Te mission of COCO is to inspire, encourage and serve the community through creative processes and collaborative endeavours. For the last two years, she has teamed up with Dance faculty member Kaysie Seitz Brown. Also for the last two years, Scott Vandenberg, lighting designer for the Division of Dance, has gone with them to lend a professional look in lighting to the dance productions. He was aided by graduate student Andrew McIntyre last year. “When you are pushed out of your comfort zone and immersed into a whole new culture that is not your own, it is life-changing,” Nicole says “I know how impactful travel can be, and I want to expose my students to that.” Tey say that their students are reminded of the resources we have here. With limited rehearsal space in Trinidad, classes were outside. And not everywhere is air conditioned. “Tey also see what you can do with limited resources,” Kaysie says. “You don’t have to have many resources to move!” Student Tate Navarro, who has gone to the festival for the last two years, says, “I learned that, as dancers, we should by T.Cay Rowe Queen's Hall appreciate every opportunity to dance. Te biggest impact the people had on me was their appreciation for life. Waking up eager every day with a readiness to take on the world!” Another student, Lilly Turman, remembers, “It was beautiful. It was a whole diferent kind of training. Tey implemented more hip action and jumping and colors. We are trained to be grounded; they are fying through space!” Recently the Texas State team has taken the festival to the community by going into elementary schools with the idea that we should start with children in fostering an appreciation for the arts. “We showed them how to create movement using local references they can relate to, like, ‘let’s sway like the coconut trees.’” Kaysie says. “I love the children’s free attitude, too. Tere is no ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘you’re doing that wrong.’ After a while they told us ‘we need more dance in our lives!’” “It was eye-opening for our students to see what an impact they made on these children’s lives,” Nicole says, “and I might add, what an impact the children had on their lives.” Kaysie adds, “One student jokingly told me that she was mad at me because she thought she knew exactly what she wants to do after graduation, but her experience in Trinidad forced her to rethink it all and do more work like we did with the children there.” Tate sums up his days in Trinidad saying, “Connecting two diferent cultures to create a unique art was an amazing experience that I hope to get to do again someday. It’s exhilarating. It’s addictive!” ■ Expanding horizons can mean learning from diferent cultures and subcultures, but it can also mean learning from diferent disciplines across campus. Several students in Communication Design have joined hands with peers from Business and Computer Science to help the Hays County Food Bank serve more clients more efciently. Faculty mentors are Grayson Lawrence in Art & Design, Janet Hale in the McCoy College of Business Administration and Ted Lehr in Computer Science. Team members are McKenna Strain, Stephanie Long and Marissa Servantez from Communication Design; Benjamin Bond, Samantha Hollensbe, Grayson Tacker, Phillip Tran and Hollie Wilson from Computer Science; and Joshua Avery, Cedrik Chavez, Jose Meza and Zachary Turov from Business. “We’ve learned a lot from each other,” Grayson Lawrence says. “We combine our talents to tackle a real-world problem.” Five years ago Texas State hosted its frst “Hack-a-thon,” where teams of students come up with solutions to a selected problem. In 2018 the problem was food insecurity. “We had so many good ideas from various teams that we thought ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could really do these things?’” So they formed one “super-team” with students across the disciplines in the spring of 2018 and began to talk with the food bank about how they could help. Te Hays County Food Bank, founded in 1954, serves low- income individuals and families with six public distributions a week, in addition to providing food for 40 partner agencies College of Fine Arts and Communication spotl ight story for art and des ign by T.Cay Rowe Hays County Food Bank such as youth and women’s shelters and the food pantry on campus. In 2016 the food bank recorded more than 100,000 client visits. “We started out with volunteering at the food bank, so we could see the operation from the inside,” says Stephanie Long. “We thought the problem we would face would be inventory, but it was way more complicated than that. It involved all of the work between food pick up and food distribution – things like temperature control, weighing, sorting, volunteer training and scheduling. We found that our task was to take the time- consuming administrative burden of volunteers.” Jessica Cruz, volunteer coordinator at the food bank, says the Texas State project takes a holistic approach. “In the past, we would try to solve one challenge at a time, so we are excited about this new way to work.” Students are testing their prototype for efectiveness and user friendliness during the summer for launch in the fall. Since the super-team formed, students have received a $1,000 prize and $5,000 in seed money from Microsoft and later attended SXSW to showcase their prototype. Tey will use the money to buy equipment and software for the food bank so that their system can be portable, easily handed of from one volunteer to another. McKenna Strain said the project has opened her eyes to what can be done by combining disciplines. “Dealing with the ‘what ifs’ is exciting – you build on each other’s ideas.” Stephanie believes that “Tis project gave me insights into how nonprofts work. It’s one thing to face a problem intellectually and another to work with other disciplines to solve it.” ■