Title Photo

News & Events

Faculty Successes

Spring 2006 

Assistant Professor Jane Purse-Wiedenhoeft was awarded a KCACTF Region III nomination to compete at the national level. Nominees are those actor/teachers who best exemplify the educational mission of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) as established actors who wish to pursue artistic growth in their craft. She was guest director for the University of Saint Francis production of Her Women Were Called to Gather, a play about midwifery produced by Sophia’s Portico in October 2005. She performed in Give the Dog a Bone for the Indiana Theatre Association (ITA) at the Wheeler Center in Indianapolis. The play was a finalist at the ITA’s ITWORKS Conference last fall. Purse- Wiedenhoeft presented an acting workshop entitled “Improvisation! The Actor at Play.”

Associate Faculty Jane Rebekah Frazier was the assistant director for Merrily We Roll Along, Oct. 2006. She conducted an acting workshop for third through fifth graders at Hickory Center School in fall 2005. As part of the workshop, she took a Native American tale, “The Frogs and the Crane,” and adapted it into a short script for the students to perform.

Assistant Professors Mark Ridgeway and Shari Troy presented a workshop entitled “ Designing Ways to Use a Dramaturge” at the KCACTF Region III Conference in January. The workshop explored ways in which dramaturgs and designers might collaborate and bring their respective research methods together to help shape the conceptual creation of the production. They used the production Comedy of Errors to investigate this type of collaboration.

Shari Troy, assistant professor, had her papers “Opening Doors to Learning: The Mentoring Relationship in a Learning Community” and “The Contrast: The Later (Biblical) Plays of Royall Tyler” accepted to the American Theatre in Higher Education Conference that will take place in Chicago in August 2006. She and Jane Purse-Wiedenhoeft were copresenters of “Exploring the Director/Dramaturge Relationship: Where Does the Direction End and the Dramaturgy Begin? The Creative Journey of Producing Paul Sills’ Story Theatre through the Shared Vision of Director and Dramaturge” at the Director’s Symposium at the Mid-America Theatre Conference in Chicago, Ill.

Assistant Professor Thomas Bernard was invited to present a display of his computer-designed renderings for Hay Fever at the KCACTF. He is also one of eight people in the United States to be regionally nominated for a Summer Internship Fellowship in costume design (for his work in Hay Fever ) at the KCACTF in Washington, D.C., this summer.

Gary Lanier, VPA secretary, recently choreographed Big River at the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre and a piece in Purely Dance! at IPFW. In 2005, he received a special merit award for coordinating VPA’s participation in Student Orientation, Advising, and Registration (SOAR).