From ‘Guiding Light’ to guiding students
The Tribune, July 1, 2008
By Dan England
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20080701/NEWS/791768327&parentprofile=search
Ken Womble longed for the stage, even as he performed on the basketball court in front of cheering fans, the kind of adulation actors rarely receive.
He always wanted to be in plays, but growing up, sports were emphasized, not the arts, and that was OK with Womble, as stage fright lurked deep in the bowels of his belly.
Once he got to Florida State University as an underclassman, however, he gave himself permission to try it. Universities tend to be more liberal about those things. You wanna try the arts? Try it. He did, and by his junior year, he got a lead role in "Bus Stop."
Before the first show he paced around backstage, trying to shed the shyness that had haunted him throughout his life. But once he took the stage, with Sandy, who would eventually become his wife, it melted, and Womble was in love.
The love affair led to a career, and now Womble teaches others how to make their own careers out of acting at the University of Northern Colorado.
You might recognize Womble. Just look at those baby blues. They're just made for a soap opera, aren't they?
Womble landed his first national tour, for "The Taming of the Shrew," soon after graduating from Southern Methodist University with a master's degree. He straighten up and flew right after that, ditching smoking, eating right, and whipped himself into the kind of shape you need to be in to make housewives' hearts throb.
"Guiding Light" soon came calling, and he did his first "Under 5," playing a cop who had five lines or less. He played a lot of cops, but as the sands through the hourglass fell, he got larger roles on other soaps, including "All My Children," "One Life to Live" and "General Hospital." He got to play a "seedy" justice of the peace for six years. He also played a "devious" Dutch colonel who turned out to be a spy.
He loved the work. He loved playing all sorts of characters, and given that he was in soap operas, they really were characters, like his devious Dutch. But eventually, the work grew stale.
"I initially was thrilled with the work," Womble said. "It was tongue-in-cheek and a real kick. But at some point you have to sit up and think, 'This Ain't Shakespeare.'"
And so Womble went from not doing Shakespeare to actually doing Shakespeare. He got an invitation to teach at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in Los Angeles, and that's where he fell in love with teaching.
He loved it so much, in fact, he retired from acting in the mid-1990s and moved around at various colleges and did some acting classes. As a part of his directing and teaching, he adapted two Shakespeare classics, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet." He didn't change them. He just shortened them, and they've been done more than 60 times as a result.
In 2005, he got the job at UNC as an assistant professor of theater, and as a part of that, he wrote and directed a short documentary on James Michener. He screened it as a part of UNC's Michener celebrations and still has hopes to turn it into a full documentary.
He gave up acting to teach, but as a part of his teaching, he finds himself acting more than he has in years. He has a large role in the Little Theatre of the Rockies production of "Picnic," written by the same guy who wrote "Bus Stop."
It's almost a full circle.
In fact, it could be. Part of the reason he loves teaching is getting to teach classes like Intro to Acting. The class normally would be a groaner for someone who spent his whole life acting professionally and who teaches some of the highest upper-level classes at a university.
But Womble loves it.
Sure, there are many in Intro to Acting who took the class because they thought it was an easy grade, or they wanted to relax before, say, Calculus.
But Womble also believes there are students in there who are curious about acting, and maybe they're a little shy about it. Maybe there's someone like him, in other words.
Maybe he can teach that one person that it's OK to take a chance and become a different person on stage, whether on TV, in theater or in life.
Creative Spaces summer arts camp returns June 2-13, 2008—Middle and high school students interested in dance, theatre and visual arts from Northern Colorado come together for a two-week program hosted by the College of Performing and Visual Arts at University of Northern Colorado. Each morning is dedicated to skill-building in the various artistic disciplines, and in extended afternoon workshop sessions, students choose theatre, visual art or dance as their main focus. Students collaborate to create original works of art to be shown in final sharing for friends and family on the last day. Find more information at http://arts.unco.edu/creativespaces/
School of Music
Vocal Quartet Places Second at International Competition – “Stiletto,” a barbershop harmony vocal group comprised of three current UNC students and one UNC alumna, recently placed second in the Sweet Adelines International Rising Star Quartet Contest in San Antonio. Music Education majors Neyla Pekarek and Teresa Argotsinger, Musical Theatre major Tiffany Van Cott and Musical Theatre alumna Ruthie Harden competed against college quartets from across the U.S. and as far away as New Zealand, China, and Germany. The group is currently preparing for the 2009 Rising Star competition by booking local performances. For more information, contact Argotsinger at argo3281@bears.unco.edu or visit http://www.myspace.com/stilettoquartet.
• During Marching Band Camp CHANNEL 9 news come out and filmed the band in preparation for the "Thriller" (Guinness Book of World Records) event we are planning for November 8th. The news piece aired on Channel 9 during the 6 o'clock news hour. For information about the Thriller event go to http://www.arts.unco.
• Dick Mayne, Professor of Music and director of the “Pride of the Rockies” marching band, took off for Atlanta, Georgia, during the summer where he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Band Association. Mayne also traveled to West Point where he spent time with one of our music alumna, Cary Winans, who is a member of the famous West Point Band.
University Bands recently released their latest CD entitled To the Summit.
• Dr. Ken Singleton traveled to China as a clinician for “A Colorado Band Salute to the 2008 Beijing Olympics” and he led performances in the Forbidden City Concert Hall and at the Great Wall. Singleton attended the Missouri Bandmasters Association Convention, and led clinics at the Colorado Bandmasters Association Convention as well. He is also in the midst of completing a new CD with the Denver Brass, a performance group he has conducted for many years.
• Marian Hesse was recently elected as Vice President of the American Hunting Horn Society. She took 12 UNC hornists to Denver this summer to perform at the International Horn Conference. Hesse, our horn faculty member, was also in Korea and performed five concerts with the Chestnut Brass Company, and she served as a juror for the International Brass Competition while she was there.
• Dr. Andrew Dahlke, the College’s saxophone professor, performed with the Capitol Quartet in up-state New York this summer and gave master classes at the Crane Youth Music Camp at the Crane School of Music. He also performed with the Capitol Quartet at the Penn’s Woods music festival hosted by Penn State.
• In late April and May, Dr. Galen Darrough, Professor and Director of Choral Activities, adjudicated over 125 choirs from Colorado and Oklahoma, the latter for the Oklahoma High Schools Activity Association at Oklahoma Baptist University, alma mater of our own Caleb Harris, Professor of Piano. In July, Galen took over the reins as President of the Southwestern Division of the American Choral Director's Association, and attended Leadership meetings in Oklahoma City as a member of the ACDA National Board. Primary duties are the planning and implementation of the 2010 Southwestern ACDA Divisional Convention to be held at the Hyatt Regency and Grand Regency Hotels in Denver, Colorado. The division includes the states of Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, and New Mexico, and the 7-state region holds biennial conventions in cities across the division.
• Dana Landry performed with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and dueled on the piano with such luminaries as Marvin Hamlisch and Randy Newman.
• Dr. Bob Ehle, composer and professor of music, has been traveling the globe transcribing folk music for his indigenous music recording project. Upon his return to Greeley, he has been spending his time arranging those songs for ensembles and solo performances. Ehle also received a grant from the University’s Diversity in Education Research Initiative to help support several student assistants in this endeavor.
• Professor of Viola, Juliet White-Smith performed this past June at the 36th International Viola Congress with viola professors from the New England Conservatory, University of North Texas and North Carolina School of the Arts in a program of duos, quartets and a solo piece by composer John Harbison, of Arizona State. Her term as president of the American Viola Society started on July 1st and continues through June 30, 2011. Dr. White-Smith also served on the faculty at the Bravo! Institute for Strings and Piano at the University of Minnesota during the last two weeks of July. In addition to teaching viola and chamber music, she presented a guest artist master class and performed on two faculty recitals. Juliet has also been accepted as a special Leadership Fellow for the next International Council of Fine Arts Deans conference in Portland, Oregon in October. She will be joining Assistant Dean Amendola and CPVA Dean Andrew Svedlow at the conference.
• Dr. Lauren Murray, Assistant Director of the School of Music, and Assistant Dean Vergie Amendola went to Provo, Utah, where Murray performed an English horn recital at the International Double Reed Society Conference and Amendola performed as her accompanist.
• Bil Jackson, professor of clarinet, had a full schedule of teaching and performing in the summer months. His activities included artist faculty of the Colorado College Music Festival, artist faculty at the Aspen Music Festival, and the Mammoth Mountain Chamber Music Festival where he was a chamber music artist. Jackson also was featured artist at the Japan Clarinet Society's Annual Conference in Tokyo, and taught master classes and gave performances in Bangkok.
• William Wilson, UNC voice faculty member, performed concerts and operas along with a group of School of Music students in our summer opera theatre program in Germany. The group, under Professor Wilson’s guidance performed in the operas Tosca and Carmen throughout Germany and at Versailles, France. See related story: http://www.arts.unco.edu/news/pdfs/OperaStudents.pdf
• Voice Professor Lesley Manring recorded songs by Richard Faith this summer, and she and musician Ann Ratcliffe were featured performers at the High Plains Chautauqua Festival at Aims Community College; as were Professors of Music Diane Bolden-Taylor and Charlotte Mills, who presented African-American Spirituals.
• Dr. Russell Guyver, our resident Maestro and Professor of Music, performed this summer with the Cascade Quartet and the Blue Rose Trio of Los Angeles. He conducted and played at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival in Alaska, and traveled from the northern extremes to the warm beaches of Brazil to be part of the Rio International Cello Encounter.
• Dr. Al Harding, the Head of our Music Education program, oversaw the running of our annual Orff Schulwerk Training Program at the end of June.
• Professor of Music Melissa Malde could be found performing on the stage of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts as a member of the cast of the impressive opera production of Nixon in China. Malde’s book What Every Singer Needs to Know about the Body, a project she completed during her sabbatical this past academic year, came out during the summer.
• Lei Weng, Assistant Professor of Piano Performance, was out and about performing and conducting master classes in conservatories throughout China, including his alma mater, the Central Conservatory in Beijing. Weng and piano colleague Caleb Harris were also busy as the organizers of the Colorado Piano Festival to be held November 14-16, 2008 at the Union Colony Civic Center in Greeley, Colorado. With three days of concerts, masterclasses and a precollege concerto competition, there will be exciting opportunities for music-lovers, pianists and students of all ages and levels. More information at: http://www.arts.unco.edu/cpf/default.html
• Bassoonist and Professor of Music Charles Hansen performed as the Assistant Principal Bassoon with the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra in Boulder this summer.
• Renowned pianist Lei Weng joined the UNC School of Music in the fall of 2007 as Assistant Professor of Music. Says Weng of his first semester, “I really enjoyed my first three months at UNC. My faculty debut recital/opening concert for Pathways to China went really well. It was a full house; people even stood on the back of the hall and sat on the steps. And I was so happy to see many Chinese people came, students, professors, and even people from Fort Collins and Boulder.” Professor Weng received a full house standing ovation and encored two pieces at his debut recital—a hearty UNC welcome!
Professor Weng looks forward to collaborating with his colleagues on these upcoming performances: Beethoven's Choral Fantasy with Dr. Galen on March 10th; a Tchaikovsky Concerto with UNC Symphony and Dr. Russell Guyver; a Mozart Concerto with Wind Ensemble and Dr. Singleton. Greeley Philharmonic director Glen Cortese has also invited Weng to perform an American piano concerto next year.
School of Theatre Arts and Dance Notes
• Gillian McNally made two big trips this summer—one to Adelaide, Australia as part of an international conference on theatre education and one a bit closer to home in Minneapolis where the she took part in the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre’s Neighborhood Bridges program.
• Gillian McNally and Connie Bethards planned and implemented the second annual Creative Spaces program for middle and senior high school students. For the first two weeks of June, thirty teenagers explored the theatre and visual arts and presented to the campus community a culminating exhibition of artworks in the Oak Room and an improv performance in Frasier 63.
• Josh Buscher, who graduated in May of 2008 from the School of Theatre Arts and Dance's Musical Theatre Program was just cast as Diesel in the new Broadway revival of West Side Story. Directed by the legendary Arthur Laurents (who just helmed the Patti LaPone Broadway revival of Gyspy) this new West Side Story will have its out-of-town tryout in Washington DC at the National Theatre from December 2 to Jan. 4th. Broadway Previews will begin on Feb. 23rd with a Broadway opening scheduled for March 19 2009!
• STAD alum Jenny Fellner has just been cast in one of the leading roles in the Roundabout Theatre Company's new revival of the classic musical Pal Joey!! The Roundabout is the largest non-for -profit LORT theatre in New York City. Previews for Pal Joey begin on November 14th. The show will also feature Stockard Channing, Christian Hoff and Martha Plimpton.
• Alumna Andre Dora Smith just filmed a commercial with Hugh Laurie and Uma Thurman for Mediaset Premium.
• Alumna Amanda Earls just completed a tour of the UK which included the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in a production of The Great American Trailer Park Musical.
• Alumna Alena Waters is appearing with Bette Midler in the Showgirl Must Go On at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
• Thanks to the work of Vance Fulkerson and Mary Schuttler, we were the first university in the country to be selected by the Educational Theatre Association (ETA) to cast and produce their annual high school production. Vance and Mary toured the country casting high school students from California to Miami, Indiana to Texas, and from high schools right here in Colorado. With the help of their colleagues in Theatre Arts and Dance, Vance and Mary have worked with these talented young people to put together a world class production of the musical Hairspray. Performances kicked off in Langworthy Theatre and the whole production traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska to perform at the national ETA conference. This Little Theatre of the Rockies production of Hairspray made the front page of the Sunday NY Times Arts Section in July!
• Anne Toewe, Head of Design and Technology in the School of Theatre Arts and Dance and a renowned costume designer, shared her prodigious talents with the Emerald City Opera and their production of La Traviata.
School of Art & Design
Dr. Dennis Morimoto, Director or the School of Art and Design, went to Oxford, England, to be part of an invitation-only conference on arts and technology. He facilitated a number of working groups dealing with contemporary advanced technology and the arts.
During the second week of June, Connie Stewart hosted the second annual summer institute for educators as part of the Center for Integrated Arts Education activities devoted to enhancing arts education in schools in Colorado. Over sixty arts teachers, classroom educators, school administrators, and parents from schools and school districts from Wheat Ridge to Timnath encountered nationally recognized guest speakers from as far a field as North Carolina and California. The impact of this institute and the work of the Center are being realized in an enlivened sense of the importance of the arts in our public and independent schools. The Center also received two major grants during the first weeks of June, $72,500 grant from the Erion Foundation and a commitment of $103,000 from the Colorado Council on the Arts.
During the summer months, Arts and Design’s Chip Coronel toured with 60 students through the ancestral puebloan structures of Mesa Verde and he traveled to numerous museums in California and Chicago doing research on his paper “A Fante Funeral” for the Oxford Scholar Press anthology on Pagaents and Processions.
School of Art and Design faculty member Lauren Eisen was awarded a commission this summer to create four paintings for the lobby of the new Banner Thunderbird Hospital in Glendale, Arizona. Earlier in the summer her painting, “Euonymus Frost” was accepted into the annual juried publication American Art Collector which comes out in October. Lauren’s works were reviewed by the Spark Gallery in Denver and she will be giving a presentation about her art at the Gallery in September.
Mark Fetkewicz, professor of graphic design had a very successful visit to England where he presented a paper at the New Views 2 International Conference at the University of the Arts in London.
Professor Anna Ursyn has been busy with projects with the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in LA and having some of her animations accepted for Squardi Sonori 2008, a Festival of Media and Time Based Art originating in Italy. Her work was also accepted for “Common Ground” an international traveling exhibition. She’s also been invited to deliver a talk at the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques hosted by ACM/SIGGRAPH 08. The list of her service on a number of conference and workshop committees in computer graphics and imaging has also kept Ursyn quite busy this summer.
