Driven to be Creative with Professors Michael Sommers (Theatre Arts and Dance) and Guerino Mazzola (Music) January 27, 2012

Explorations of the concept of creativity from Michael Sommers (Theatre Arts and Dance) and Guerino Mazzola (Music).

Professor Sommers will present "The Creative Flow: Or how Experience Manifests into a Theatrical Event" -- an artistic presentation with puppets.

Professor Mazzola will discuss "When God meets puppets: Heinrich von Kleist's creative circle of grace in Marionette Theatre" and comment on Professor Sommers' presentation.

Trained as a visual artist, Michael Sommers has practiced the Theatre Arts as a designer, director, composer, performer, playwright and technician, both locally and nationally for thirty years. In 2000 he co-founded, with his partner Susan Haas, Open Eye Figure Theatre, whose original work has been presented at the Walker Art Center (Mpls.), in New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Winnipeg, Canada, Mexico and in their intimate performance venue in South Minneapolis.

Guerino Mazzola earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Zurich University, where he also qualified as a professor in algebraic geometry with Peter Gabriel and in computational science with Peter Stucki. Mazzola has profiled the European school of mathematical music theory since 1980 and has written six books on the subject, among them The Topos of Music, published by Birkhäuser, and proposed by the American Mathematical Society as the mathematics book of the year 2005.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/