April 2023 Newsletter

Wrapping up Living ArtsEngine 2022-2023

We finished up our spring workshops strong with Introduction to Premier Pro taught by Ryan Wilcox of Groundworks, Dice-Making led by Peer Mentor Mya Enzer, Greek Dancing led by community member Anthony Balderas, and Graphic Scores with the student organization Touch of Blue! 

Our culminating event, the Living ArtsEngine Symposium, took place on Saturday, April 8th. Scroll down to read more about our celebration. 

Thank you all for a great and creative year! We hope you'll all keep in touch as you make your way into the next chapter at U-M. 

This summer we'll be reaching out with opportunities to apply to the LAE Student Programming Board and Alumni Board. Stay tuned! 

Program Highlights

Living ArtsEngine 2023 Symposium

Living ArtsEngine's Community Collaborative Projects were presented at the 2023 Symposium on Saturday, April 8th at the Duderstadt Gallery. Our teams showcased a variety of interdisciplinary projects focused on the prompts Inflation, Generation, and Facade. Please check out the video above highlighting some of the projects from the evening. You can also read through the teams' artist statements here.  Thank you for all of your hard work and creativity on these projects! 

We are currently recruiting for our 2023-24 Community. If you know a student who will be coming to U-M in the fall please share Living ArtsEngine with them. Applications are open now and close on Friday, May 5, 2023. 

Student Features

Q: What types of creative work do you like to do?

A: I mostly focus on drawing and painting. I’ve been filling up sketchbooks for years now, and especially during the 2020-2021 my sketchbook acted as a journal for me. I make little zines and large abstract charcoal drawings as well. I played piano and flute for quite a few years, and I love to listen to tiny desk shows and play along from time to time. 

Q: What  is a favorite activity or memory from your time in LAE so far? 

A: I had a really great time participating in this semester's makeathon. My group had a good balance of artists and engineers and we had a lot of fun bringing together our ideas. I did the photoshop work for the project, making designs for cut-out puppets and editing our logo onto different pieces of merchandise. I also helped put together our puppet stage and made an example shirt to present to judges. Our project had a lot of different visual components and I think that’s what made it unique. We worked until the last minute, winged our presentation, and ended up winning first prize, which was really amazing. 

Q: What is one fun fact about you that you'd like the community to know? 

A: I’m getting pretty good at special effects video editing in Premiere Pro.

Q: Has your experience in Living ArtsEngine impacted the way you approach your major?

A: Definitely; whether performing, painting, or designing robots, I believe everyone across the north-campus majors is an artist, and exchanging our creative ideas is always insightful. Additionally, catering to audience members who don’t play my instrument is incredibly beneficial. Violinists often get so caught up in instrument-specific aspects like tone and technique that we fail to move our non-violinist audiences in a profound way, and discussing with students of other majors on what they liked or didn’t like keeps me in check. This semester, I picked a piece for my studio recital that was much technically simpler but focused on making it compelling, since it was my one chance to perform solo for my LAE friends. It ended up a success for both non-musicians and musicians alike and was my best performance to date. That said, I have also made some amazing connections within SMTD thanks to LAE, including a composition student who has mentored me and recommended me to other composers for gigs. Sometimes I also give him feedback on his violin playing in return, and we both push each others’ perspectives on music.

Q: What is a favorite memory of yours from being in Living ArtsEngine?

A: I have so many fond memories from tea time, game nights, a spontaneous Pinball Pete’s trip, to simply sitting in the creative suite and hanging out, but my favorite memory was definitely the Festifools Makeathon. Spending 24 hours with my fellow mentors to forget all our sources of stress and simply have fun pouring our weekend into our project was an exhilarating experience. I’ll never forget the time we spent together working and laughing as we created the Bidrön Art Show. It was pretty lit if you know what I mean, and I will certainly miss getting to spend this much time with Ian, Michael, Tate, and Mya after this year.

Karl will present the premiere of his Chamber-Rock Opera “The Precipice” On Saturday April 29, 8:00 pm and Sunday April 30, 2:00 pm at the Riverside Arts Center Theatre in Ypsilanti.

Excerpt from an interview with Karl Ronneburg 

When did you attend UM and participate in the Living ArtsEngine program? What degree did you receive

I did my undergrad in percussion performance, and I was there from 2013 to 2016 and  participated in Living Arts (Engine) during the 2013 to '14 school year.

Right now you are living in New York?

That's right.

What did you pursue after leaving UM?

Straight after I graduated in 2017, I went to grad school for composition at The New School, Mannes School of Music in New York. And I did my master's there working with Missy Mazzoli who was my professor and I've been in New York ever since.

Grad school was an excuse to move to New York, but still, it was a great, also a chance to hone the compositional skills a little bit, get some formal training there. And then I started freelancing as a composer and percussionist here in the city, and I'm in the contemporary classical, experimental world a little bit.

Just over a year ago, I started working full-time at the Met Opera and I'm working as the assistant for new works commissions and dramaturgy. I work for the guy who's the head of new works commissions and he's the dramaturge, it's one of those weird terms that means a lot of different things to every different theater. Basically what we do is we work with all the composers and librettists that the Met is commissioning and working with and help develop their shows.

We bring their shows from beginning to life on the stage, and we facilitate the workshops and give them feedback on drafts. And we also oversee the super titles for new productions. It's been a wild job. I've really been learning a lot and getting into opera at that scale. New opera at that scale is a little different from the DIY type opera stuff that I've been getting up to with my friends. But it's great to have that bridge in my life, an opportunity to see how things are working at that scale.

What initially attracted you to the interdisciplinary aspects of the Living ArtsEngine Program? How did this play out in terms of your overall experience in the program?

Yeah, absolutely. I grew up outside of Seattle, in Redmond, Washington, which is the town that the Microsoft headquarters is in. And so my dad and a lot of my other friends' parents worked in the tech industry in Seattle and the area. And so, growing up, there was always a, "I'm doing all this music stuff, but maybe I should just go to engineering school." In high school, I was taking computer science classes and doing some things with electronics and some engineering ... I was on the robotics team in my high school, for example.

There was some interest in being around people who weren't just musicians and people who were engaged in those, as the Living Arts brochure I think, said, "Making disciplines." And so that was one of the things that attracted me to the program is that I would be around engineers and artists and architects and others from the School of Music, Theater & Dance that would help. It seemed like a good place to go and find people who were interested in doing stuff that was cross-discipline and collaborative.

Would you say that being in a dorm with students from different creative backgrounds had any impact on you as a musician and the work that you create?

It's interesting. I only realized this many years later when I had moved to New York. But one of the things I think being a percussionist prepared me to do, or maybe trained me to do, was to approach lots of different disciplines with a methodical and technique-based approach.

[As a] Percussionist, you have to be able to play all these different instruments and being able to pick up something new and try and learn how to make music out of it. It turns out those kind of skills, like physical coordination and timing, in a lot of ways opened me up to be able to get into the worlds of dance and the world of performance art. And then, just doing stuff with technology. Percussion is so contemporary-focused and world music-focused. There's drums from all over the world. And so a lot of those things were part of my percussion education as far as electronics and new music, contemporary music, and music from all around the world.

There's a microcosm of interdisciplinary-ness just within the world of percussion. And so coming into the Living Arts thing and being like, "Oh, I can do dance and theater and apply some of these other skills to engineering , it felt very natural to really start expanding into those directions and really exciting…….when I got my acceptance brochure and they were like, "Check out these living communities," something about that resonated.

 As someone who's walked through the university pathway in Music, what piece of advice could you give that student, say in their freshman year?

I think the main one is to go to stuff. I encourage students to go to as many things as they can without maybe overwhelming themselves. There's a lot of work to do –­ But to go to your friends' shows, go to those wacky performance art parties, go to what's happening down in the [Living ArtsEngine] lounge. Go to what UMS is bringing to Michigan because they're bringing some of the best artists from all over the world. Go to your friends' recitals and concerts and show openings and competitions and plays and as many things as you can. And talk to them about it and maybe do stuff of your own if you feel up to it.