A unique performance hits the stage at UB's Center for the arts tomorrow night blending music, art and dance. WBFO'S Focus on Education reporter Eileen Buckley says student artists are required to go beyond traditional performing to provide the audience with a first-ever experience.
"We're able to kind of build a show that deals with contemporary issues that features contemporary music, as well as older music by Chopin and Schubert," said Eric Huebner, Assistant Professor of Music at UB.
Huebner is an accomplished pianist, who has attracted world-wide acclaim. He performed as young as 17 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Huebner selected an eclectic mix of music for this stage creation.
"It's just tremendously entertaining and fun to watch, and experience," noted Huebner in a WBFO News interview.
The performance was created with the assistance of a New York City arts professional, Doug Fitch, an internationally known producer, designer, artist and choreographer. "How do we do what? How did we get here? How did we get in this big mess," stated Fitch while in our WBFO studio, as he referred to the title of the show. "It leaves something for your to think about, hopefully."
Fitch was selected to serve as the WBFO Visiting Professor in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. Each year, through a University endowment, UB selects visiting professor.
"You're named after the radio station," said Huebner. "I am," said Fitch. Fitch leads Giants are Small. It's considered an 'out-the-box' production companies, collaborating with many of the world's orchestras and opera groups.
Fitch has dubbed this the 'opera of images'.
"The narrative was actually written, I guess you could say, by drawling pictures and so the pictures themselves are the vehicle for the main narrative story," said Fitch.
"Everything else was there to support this story of images."
"The narrative was actually written, I guess you could say, by drawling pictures and so the pictures themselves are the vehicle for the main narrative story," said Fitch. "Everything else was there to support this story of images."
20-undergraduate students make up the cast. Student Connor Grahman performs in one of the lead roles he discusses it during a rehearsal that appears on a UB YouTube video.
"The character is going on this journey through this play in his mind," noted Grahman. "A person who's just trying to sort of figure out life and where this sort of place fits within the world."
The student performers must stretch their acting skills and imaginations, performing in scenes of crowd surfacing depicting a walk through the stars in the sky, a volcanic eruption and fishing for giant sea monsters created by Fitch.
"Yeah we've got a volcano on stage. We've also got a sea monster that has a very exciting 'blow hole' that shoots water out," said Fitch. "The music has this quality that resonants a very serious thing is going on the whole time and on stage there is this kind of absurdness."
Professor Huebner notes the bizarre and strangely woven 'How did we...?' brings together a theme of new age mixed with the classical sounds of Schubert's string quintet.
"One of the things that I think is so interesting about work like this is that it places pieces, which you might normally hear at a concert setting, it suddenly gives them this much larger than life context," noted Huebner.
Another music piece blends simultaneously -- Chopin's Waltz and a new age piece written by UB student Su Lee -- called Melting Crystal. This odd mix of music brings together one of the scene called the 'tea party' .
"As educators too, in a University setting, to see the extent to which the students can embrace this work and really get behind it and be excited about it," said Huebner.
"As educators too, in a University setting, to see the extent to which the students can embrace this work and really get behind it and be excited about it," said Huebner
With Huebner's music composition and Fitch's wild-mind -- out of the box -- creation for an original show, it clearly displays a collaboration between the arts, music, theater and dance departments at UB.
"That was really the intention of bringing Doug here, was to come up with something that we really could kind of all get behind and be very excited about and proud to work on," said Huebner.