January 22, 2024 | Kimberly Phillips

‘America’s Got Talent’ Alum, Soon-to-Be UConn Grad Marries Aerial Acrobatics, Animation

 

Abigail Baird ’24 MFA may have Radio City Music Hall on her resume, but an upcoming appearance at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre might just be the performance of a lifetime.

It’s the place where the show she’s had in her head for a decade and performed in bits on “America’s Got Talent” and “The Incredible Talent of France” will come to fruition in its entirety – even if she says it’s still a work in progress.

Baird says she designed “Nothing Really Matters” as a portable production and, yes, her 20-foot-tall rig for aerial acrobatics travels with her. That’s right: Baird is an aerialist who’s mastered and taught the skill of mid-air acrobatics.

Over the last 24 years, the Texas native has gone from circus school in Vermont to puppet school in Connecticut and traveled the world in between.

“I am a physical storyteller. I really like to tell stories nonverbally because it creates a universal language that can be understood among different audiences,” Baird, who also once trained as a mime, says.

Whether through hand-to-hand acrobatics with a partner or with the help of an aerial fabric sling held up by a four-legged pyramid rig, Baird uses movement to convey experiences, thoughts, and moods.

In “Nothing Really Matters,” she adds a backdrop of animation and puppets to the mix to ride a horse, get chased by a bear, fall off a cliff, and get shot out of a cannon, all while staying suspended mid-air in a sling.

That’s what’s fun about the show, she says, staying in the same place in the center of the stage yet traveling so far.

“I call it a one-woman show, but not a one-woman production,” Baird says. “I have a whole team of graduate and undergraduate students working on the show with me – animators, puppet arts students, lighting design students. This show really wouldn’t have been possible without their creativity and insights. I wouldn’t have been able to do this completely on my own.”

With support from Alison Paul, an associate professor of illustration/animation in the art and art history department, and Anna Lindemann, an assistant professor of motion design and animation in digital media & design, Baird’s show marries the varied departments in the School of Fine Arts.

“Animation has the power to transform time and space,” she says. “You can be miniature or giant. You can go into outer space. You can be one thing that suddenly becomes something else. But puppets breathe and they have life, and that life essence that relates to human movement is what makes them incredible storytellers.”

The convergence of animation and puppetry has been the focus of her UConn studies the last three years under Bart Roccoberton Jr., professor and director of the dramatic arts department’s puppet arts program, and John Bell, associate professor and director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry.

‘I can still remember hearing the applause’

But before that, in 2008, Baird started the company Aerial Animation pairing her physical skills with animations from a cartoonist friend who together came into their own as artists, she says, starting with simple line drawings and basic aerial acrobatics skills and progressing to what audiences saw in 2014 on “America’s Got Talent” and in 2017 on “The Incredible Talent of France.”

She made it to the semifinals – the next-to-last round – in both programs. With each performance, she and a growing group of animators created a piece of the full “Nothing Really Matters,” building on what had been previously done and, in the end, giving her large sections of the full show.

“I can still remember hearing the applause and rush of what it sounds like to hear 6,000 people clapping all at the same time,” Baird says. “I am so grateful for those experiences. They propelled my career and solidified my artistic voice. That was the first real maturity of my work. I toured the world afterward with those organizations and performed in Dubai, London, and Las Vegas.”

But she wanted to refocus on her art instead of entertainment.

“I’ve always wanted to be able to create my own stories and my own drawings,” she explains. “But animation is very expensive, and in order to be able to tell all the stories I want to tell, I knew I needed to have some of those skillsets of my own. So, by coming back to school, studying puppetry, and dipping my toe in the DMD and art departments here at UConn, I was able to access the resources I needed.”

Her equipment has overtaken the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre – in the back of the main Jorgensen stage – since mid-August, while she’s worked on the animations and shadow box and toy theater puppets for the show, which will be performed Jan. 26 and 27.

Ironically, the physically demanding “Nothing Really Matters,” funded with a Puppeteers of America Margo and Rufus Rose Endowment Grant, centers on sleep and rest, the body’s reliance for it, and one woman’s self-shaming need for it, Baird says.

“In our society, most of us have an internal struggle with our need for rest. People will say, ‘what are you up to,’ ‘what are you doing next,’ ‘what’s happening for you,’ and no one ever admits, ‘Oh, I just watched Netflix all day and it was great. I feel so much better today.’

“It’s an internal conflict we all have,” she continues. “Admitting that rest is part of our hero journey is hard for us even though it’s part of our ability to thrive. Success comes with moments of pause and reflection, and in that stillness new information comes that wouldn’t otherwise.”

She says it’s a topic adults can relate to and a show that’s exhilarating for children, making it ideal for any mix of audience members. After all, who wouldn’t want to see a bed do double-duty as a monster?

Perhaps some of the most beautiful and serene parts of the show are Baird walking through a stop-motion animation forest. It’s created using a technique that gives one-dimensional paper trees and leaves the illusion of depth.

Laser cut in a variety of colors, the trees change from season to season as she walks along. It’s an example, she says, of the synthesis of puppets and animation – the inanimate paper being manipulated to give it life as it scrolls across a screen.

She also has included in the show live-cued animation, just like sound effects or light changes layered into a narrative. Another area downstage near the audience shows off a smaller, second set of projections, these seemingly two-dimensional, or what she calls 2.5-dimensional.

“I would really like to see moving images and animation become part of university theater experiences alongside lights and sounds. It’s happening more and more on Broadway, and I think UConn is ready for it,” Baird says.

She is too.

“I always knew this is what I was going to do, but it’s been an evolution and I really believe that theater is a collaborative art form,” she says. “Allowing myself to be influenced by the opportunities that have been presented to me over the last two decades is what got me to where I am.”

“Nothing Really Matters” will be performed Friday, Jan. 26, at 8 p.m. and Saturday, Jan. 27, at 2 p.m. at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre. Tickets are free and can be obtained online. It’s one of eight shows in “RojoFest: The Jerry Rojo Festival of Original Student Work,” co-sponsored by the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and Connecticut Repertory Theatre. The festival runs Jan. 25-28 in multiple locations around campus. A list of shows and free tickets to performances are available online.

 

 

UConn Today Article: https://today.uconn.edu/2024/01/americas-got-talent-alum-soon-to-be-uconn-grad-marries-aerial-acrobatics-animation/

January 2, 2024 | Jaclyn Severance

UConn DMD Professor Documents Story of Latino Mental Health through Humanities Institute Fellowship

 

How can a documentary show us the inside of a person’s mind?

Crafting a visual representation of mental health is a challenge that visual artists frequently grapple with – painters can rely on textures and colors, sculptors can work with wood or metal or stone, dancers can use movement to invoke emotion.

“But how do you illustrate mental health in a documentary?” asks UConn’s Oscar Guerra, an associate professor of film and video in the Digital Media and Design Department at UConn Stamford and Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker.

“It’s really hard, because a lot of things happen in a person’s childhood, and a lot of things are happening in a person’s head, so you have to get creative to do it.”

For his latest project – supported by a fellowship from the UConn Humanities Institute – Guerra has taken on that creative challenge, aiming to present an exploration of mental health and the social, cultural, and political factors that can impact it – particularly for those who have been historically disproportionately affected, like members of the undocumented and working-class Latino communities who are frequently the subjects of Guerra’s films.

“In the same way that we all have physical health, we all have mental health. We also have different protections and vulnerabilities, or ‘risk factors,’ that will make us more or less likely to get some diseases and experience them more severely than others,” says Guerra. “COVID is a great example that we are all familiar with – for people of specific age groups, with certain health preconditions, or with socioeconomic disadvantages, COVID was more lethal than for the rest of the population.

“Mental health works similarly, not in terms of contagion – it’s not a virus that spreads – but in the sense of levels of risk. We all experience stress, anxiety, and sadness. That is part of the human experience. Still, some factors will make us more or less likely to develop mental health conditions such as depression, for example. These go from the individual level to the family, community, and broader social contexts. Some examples are childhood trauma, oppression, or systemic racism. Undocumented migrants are some of the most vulnerable sectors of the population, who are subjected to multiple levels of disadvantage, exploitation, and social rejection, making mental health a priority when we think about these communities.”

UConn Humanities Fellowships are opportunities for individuals to pursue advanced work in the humanities. For faculty like Guerra, fellowships offer a year-long opportunity to research, write, collaborate, and pursue work that extends and celebrates humanities scholarship.

Applications are accepted from all disciplines. Fellowship recipients are released from their teaching, departmental, and administrative duties, but are expected to produce scholarly articles, a monograph on a specialized subject, a book on a broad topic, an archaeological site report, a translation, an edition, or other scholarly tools.

For Guerra, the fellowship – which began in the fall semester and concludes this spring – offered the opportunity to build new connections as he dedicated his time to researching and producing a new documentary film.

“For this, I decided to reach out to certain people from prestigious universities,” he says. “When I was doing my literature review, I started getting a lot of big names from Johns Hopkins University, from the School of Epidemiology. I was lucky enough to get in touch with the doctors Carlos Castillo and Linda Bucay Harari, because I’ve read a lot of their articles.”

He also began working with Sarah Rendón García, a post-doctoral student at Harvard University and assistant professor in UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Human Development and Family Sciences department whose research involves the intersection of immigration studies, developmental psychology, and social justice.

“Sarah was the one who put me in touch with our main participant of the film,” says Guerra. “Her name is Ruth, and Ruth has an extraordinary story.”

Originally raised in Honduras and now mother of four who lives in Connecticut, Ruth came to the United States to live with her mother when she was 15 years old and pregnant with her first child. She’d been primarily raised by her grandparents while her mother worked in the U.S. to provide financial support to the family, and Ruth struggled not only with relocating to a new and different place but also with connecting with her mother.

“It’s a story about a very difficult relationship with mom and daughter, because usually we think that they have a reunion and everything is happily ever after,” says Guerra. “That’s not the reality for many families. They’re with a complete stranger.”

Ruth came to the project with a surprising openness and willingness to share her very personal story, a critical component for the success of the project, says Guerra, who worked hand-and-hand with his subject in a way that has become a signature of his documentary style.

“I think that her story is typical, but it’s very atypical, and hopefully in that, people can find inspiration,” Guerra says. “As a character, she’s just so lovable. The few people that have seen the cut were like, man, you start rooting for her right away. She doesn’t present herself as a victim, or as a hero. She’s like, I’m an average person with a lot of flaws, and I’m trying to make this work.”

Ruth also shared a trove of personal and family recordings – offering Guerra an opportunity to create a visual story of a life, and it’s struggles, in a way that he didn’t originally anticipate.

“She has footage from 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago – she has been documenting basically every year something, even starting with her mom, they were always buying camcorders,” he says. “In the documentary, you’re going to see footage from VHS-C, Super Hi8, MiniDV, early smartphones. You see her from when she’s really young. We start with pictures, but then you start seeing the changing technology, so I think that on its own is going to be interesting, and that’s what we needed to really illustrate certain parts of it.”

The mixed-media aspect of the project is something new for Guerra, who has made a name for himself with the personally crafted and close-up glimpses he offers into people’s lives through his films.

But what is similar, he says, is how inspired his work is by the stories of strong women and how relatable the stories he presents are, even while being extraordinary.

“I try to make sure that you as an audience are able to connect with the participant or the main character or one of the main characters, one way or another, because the reality is that we’re not that different,” he says. “We have very similar needs at the end of the day. As humans, as individuals, we have very similar needs – the need for affection, for understanding, of trying to do better for yourself and your family members.

“I try to go with the story and understand that we have complex realities, and I think that regardless if you’re Latino, if you’re undocumented or not, I think that you can still appreciate the value of the triumph of your own will and saying, ‘I have to do this and I have to get better at it, against all odds.’”

Guerra says he completed most of his production on the film during the first half of his fellowship. He hopes to have the film completed by the end of the spring.

 

For more information about faculty, graduate, undergraduate, and visiting fellowships through UConn’s Humanities Institute, visit humanities.uconn.edu.

 

 

UConn Today Article: https://today.uconn.edu/2024/01/uconn-dmd-professor-documents-story-of-latino-mental-health-through-humanities-institute-fellowship/