What is creativity? How does it work? Why is it important? Do we see reflections of the artist's creative process in the work of scientists and historians? How do we encourage creative people from different disciplines to talk to one another?
In early 2003, the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy, UW-Madison Arts Institute and the Center for the Humanities got together to discuss these questions. Conversations on Creativity is the first result. The program is a series of six public forums featuring UW-Madison faculty from the arts, sciences and humanities, who will present engaging talks on the role of creativity in their work. The series will stress dialogue and discussion, and all programs are free and open to the public.
Li Chiao-Ping
Professor of Dance, UW-Madison
Laughing Bodies/Dancing Minds
September 23, 2003
Madison Public Library, Central Branch
This event is one of the Conversations On Creativity events.
Founded in 1990, Li Chiao-Ping Dance has made Madison, Wisconsin its home since 1993. The company is dedicated to the creation and presentation of athletic works of movement, with striking visual design and the music of contemporary composers. The company has performed at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, the Jacob's Pillow and Bates Dance Festivals, Movable Beast Experimental Dance Festival, Cleveland Experimental Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Dance Now Festival, Highways in Santa Monica, CA, and many other national and international festivals and venues. Detailed information can be found at www.lichiaopingdance.org.
As a choreographer/director, Li Chiao-Ping has created, produced and performed over 60 works for the stage and screen, including several evening-length solos, such as the critically acclaimed Yellow River and Entombed Warrior. In addition to her recent award from the UW-Madison Arts Institute, she has received numerous grants, honors, commissions, residencies and awards. She has been nominated twice for a Bonnie Bird Choreography Fund Award. She also received first place awards in Choreography and in Performance from the Los Angeles Arts Council in consecutive years. In 1996, she was invited to be a U.S. Representative in the International Choreographers Program at the American Dance Festival. Ms. Li has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and Scripps/ADF Humphrey-Weidman-Limon and was selected for one of the first UCLA National Dance/Media Fellowships. She was awarded an Arts Consortium Faculty Development Award in the Creative Arts in 1998 and the prestigious Romnes Award in 1999. Her company has received grants from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission, the Madison Civic Center Foundation, Madison CitiArts, and the Kennedy Center Artists As Educators program.
Li's collaborative work with other artists is equally respected, especially her long-time creative work with visual artist Douglas Rosenberg. Their evening-length multi-media Odyssey was presented as a work-in-progress at the Cleveland Experimental Choreographers Festival, The Yard, and the International Video and Dance Festival of Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1997. Their latest collaboration is Venous Flow: States of Grace, a meditative journey through healing of the spirit and the body.
Richard Burgess
Professor of Oncology, UW-Madison Medical School
Creativity in the Sciences: Thinking Outside the Test Tube - Confidence to be a Renegade
December 9, 2003
Madison Public Library, Alicia Ashman Branch
This event is one of the Conversations On Creativity events.
Creativity has been defined as the novel juxtaposition of apparently unrelated ideas. Creativity results in new ways of thinking, new ways of doing, new ways of expression. Scientific creativity and artistic creativity are usually considered to be quite different, but I believe that are quite similar. They both require a desire to solve a problem, to clarify confusion, to communicate in a new, powerful way. This requires the willingness and self-confidence to challenge and question the establishment and the current dogma - to be a renegade. You have to believe that you can succeed in accomplishing something that has not been done before. We will discuss examples of creativity in the sciences and how one might stimulate the creative process.
Henry Turner
Assistant Professor of English, UW-Madison
February 24, 2004 @ 7:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Pinney Branch
This event is one of the Conversations On Creativity events.
Henry Turner specializes in Renaissance Drama, theater and print culture; early modern intellectual history, literary theory and early scientific thought; history of sexuality and the family; medieval literary, social, and intellectual history; contemporary critical theory, esp. Marxism, Foucault, and Derrida. His teaching has included courses on Dekker, Middleton, Jonson and critical concepts of everyday life, on "imaginary topographies" in early modern literature from More to Shirley, on Shakespeare, and on English literature from Chaucer to Aphra Behn. Turner earned his BA at Wesleyan University and his MA at the University of Sussex. He earned MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees at Columbia University.
Charles Casey
Professor of Chemistry, UW-Madison
Creativity in Chemistry
March 9, 2004
Madison Public Library, Alicia Ashman Branch
This event is one of the Conversations On Creativity events.
One of the primary goals of the chemical sciences is the creation of molecules and materials that do not exist in nature. By necessity, then, Chemists are called upon to be highly creative. Indeed, chemists spend their lives creating things; designing and synthesizing molecules to test theories, to produce new materials, or to make lifesaving drugs.
In studies of how chemical reactions occur, chemists often discover unseen intermediates that never build up to measurable concentrations and have extremely short lifetimes. The creative ability of chemists is challenged to come up with imaginative ways to probe this fleeting and unpredictable molecular world. Examples of the clever design of catalysts to create new materials will be presented.
With the need for creativity in chemical science so acute, how do chemistry graduate schools nurture creativity in their students? Can creativity be learned? Can it be taught? Can faculty serve in the role of a "personal creativity trainer"?
Charles Casey is Homer B. Adkins Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He focuses on mechanistic organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis. His research group studies mechanisms of important catalytic processes including hydroformylation, hydrogenation, and alkene polymerization. He teaches a one-semester organic chemistry course for non-specialists and a graduate course in organometallic chemistry (in which the major assignment is a creative research proposal). Casey received a B.S. from St. Louis University and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from M.I.T. After postdoctoral work at Harvard University, he joined the faculty at UW-Madison in 1968. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently President of the American Chemical Society.
Stanley Kutler
Professor of History Emeritus, UW-Madison
March 30, 2004
Madison Public Library, Sequoya Branch
This event is one of the Conversations On Creativity events.
Nietzchka Keene
Professor of Communication Arts, UW-Madison
April 13, 2004 @ 7:00 pm
Madison Public Library, Central Branch
This event is one of the Conversations On Creativity events.
Nietzchka Keene is Emily Mead Baldwin Bell-Bascom Professor in the Creative Arts at the UW-Madison. She is an independent filmmaker who earned her MFA from the University of California Los Angeles, and is currently editing a digital feature, Barefoot to Jerusalem, based on an original screenplay and shot in Madison and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship, a Wisconsin State Arts Board Fellowship, a Florida Division of Cultural Affairs Individual Artists Grant, and a Creative Arts Award from the UW-Madison Arts Institute.
