Everything Nac

The Swingin’ Axes and Swingin’ Aces jazz bands at Stephen F. Austin State University will perform a variety of jazz styles when the student ensembles perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 25, in Cole Concert Hall on the SFA campus.

Directed by Dr. Deb Scott, professor of trombone at SFA, the Axes’ program will include a variety of styles including swing, funk and Latin music. Guest artist Adam Larson will be featured with the band. Larson, a saxophonist from New York and more recently Kansas City, has traveled the world playing jazz in such venues as the Bluenote, the Village Vanguard and many others. He has released five albums, including “Second City” from 2017, which was acclaimed by Down Beat and Jazziz magazines.

The band’s performance will feature songs by some of jazz’s most important composers including “Midnight Voyage” by Michael Brecker, arranged by Alan Baylock; “Go Go” by Bob Mintzer; “Mean What You Say” by Thad Jones; and “Bird Count” by Maria Schneider.

Directed by Dr. JD Salas, associate professor of tuba and euphonium at SFA, the Aces’ program will feature performances of “On Green Dolphin Street” arranged by Frank Mantooth, and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “No More Blues” with guest vocalist Autumn Mallard, sophomore Sound Recording Technology major from Mansfield.

The Axes will also be featured in the Piney Woods Fine Arts Association’s season and will perform at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24, in the Crocket Civic Center. Larson will also join the band in that performance. For more information about the Crockett performance, visit pwfaa.org.

Tickets for the SFA concert are $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and $3 for students and youth. To purchase tickets, call the SFA Fine Arts Box Office at (936) 468-6407 or visit finearts.sfasu.edu. For additional information, contact the SFA School of Music at (936) 468-4602.

Stephen F. Austin State University’s Office of Research and Graduate Studies has announced the recipients of its annual Research and Creative Activity grants. The RCA grant program was created to help support the initial research efforts of SFA faculty members and to help prepare them and their research for submission to national grant programs.

The Division of Academic Affairs and ORGS conduct a university-wide call for proposals, and the deadline for submissions is typically the end of October. The University Research Council conducts a blind peer review of all applications. Grantees are notified early in the spring semester. Projects are funded through the remainder of the fiscal year.

This year ORGS received seven applications. The council selected four recipients.

2022 Research and Creative Activity Grants:

Dr. Jaime Flowers – Department of Human Services and Educational Leadership, James I. Perkins College of Education

Development of an Adult Social Skills Rating Scale

Autistic adults are currently an underserved population. Social skills deficits are a common symptom of autism spectrum disorders, known as ASD. Adult social skills are an understudied area. Assessment and intervention research are primarily focused on autistic children. There is a large body of research on children and adolescents’ social skills, covering theory, assessment and intervention. But when looking at adults, the research on social skills falls short. To further treatment for adult social skills deficits, a specific social skills assessment tool for adults is needed. The purpose of this project is to norm the Adults Social Skills Rating Scale and determine if it has adequate validity for research and clinical practice.

Dr. John Brannon Gary – Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, College of Sciences and Mathematics

Developing Design Principles for Reox Noninnocence Ligands using Multireference Computational Techniques

Chemists often use transition metals to catalyze chemical reactions. The metals typically used are expensive and rare, such as platinum, palladium, rhodium and iridium. In contrast, nature uses cheap and abundant metals, such as iron, manganese, copper and zinc, in enzymes to perform similar chemical transformations. In order to use cheap metals, nature uses strategies to pair multiple metal sites to perform complex chemical transformations. This proposal aims to use computer modeling to understand what allows metal sites to cooperate to perform complex chemistry. With this understanding, chemists will have design principles to develop better and cheaper catalysts in the future.

Lauren Selden – School of Art, College of Fine Arts

Breaking Out of Isolation: Attending Residencies to Make New Art

The RCA grant will cover the costs of travel and materials associated with attending two competitive artist residencies, one international and one national. This summer, Lauren Selden will be spending a month at the internationally competitive studio residency program at Fiskars AiR in Fiskars, Finland, where international craftspeople, designers, visual artists, architects, industrial designers, performing artists, composers, musicians, curators, producers, journalists, writers and researchers compete for available research and studio space. Fiskars Village is a historic blacksmithing community that has become a contemporary art village. With Selden’s metalworking, sculpture, jewelry and blacksmithing backgrounds, Fiskars provides an ideal location and opportunity to expand her artistic body of work. Alongside 14 mid-career professional artists from across North America, she will also attend a retreat at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. These artists have become a professional network providing creative opportunities similar to that of an arts collective. Travel has served as a critical component to Selden’s art practice and is often the creative engine needed for designing, drafting and creating new original works. This grant will provide the necessary time and space to create new work.

Dr. Jianjun Zheng – Department of Computer Science, College of Sciences and Mathematics

Investigation on Security and Privacy Risks of Self-Disclosure on Social Networking Sites during COVID-19 Pandemic

Social networking sites contain a large amount of information that has been self-disclosed by users around the world. Some information is sensitive and private and can be used by hackers to launch social engineering attacks against the user or the company for which the user works. Due to the physical restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, more people turned to social media to stay connected with each other. They spent more time on social media and disclosed much more information than they did before the pandemic. This work develops an automated tool to collect and analyze publicly accessible data from Twitter to investigate the impact of the pandemic on the disclosed sensitive information. This work also studies the potential security risks and privacy concerns brought about by the disclosed information.

By Richard Massey, Senior Marketing Communications Specialist at Stephen F. Austin State University

“A fresh look at everyday life here and now” is what theatre patrons will experience when attending the Stephen F. Austin State University School of Theatre’s production of Thornton Wilder’s award-winning play “Our Town.”

Presented at 7:30 nightly Tuesday through Saturday, Feb. 22 through 26, in Kennedy Auditorium on the SFA campus, “Our Town” is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival and Tony Award for Best Revival. The play is universally acknowledged as a classic of American drama. It tells the story of the fictional American community of Grover’s Corners in the early 1900s through the everyday lives of its townspeople.

Although “Our Town” is one of the most-produced plays in the world, Theatre Professor Scott Shattuck has never before worked on it. However, he has seen it twice, and although he liked both productions, it was one conceived by acclaimed theatre director and stage, film and TV actor David Cromer that “had an enormous influence on my understanding of the play,” according to Shattuck.

“Cromer eschewed period costumes and regional accents and made the play more immediate, intimate and authentic than I had ever imagined it could be,” he said. “Sitting in that Off Broadway audience, it was suddenly unmistakable to me that the play is as much about Nacogdoches – or El Paso or Savannah or Seattle – as it is about Peterborough, New Hampshire, which is the village some believe is the model for the play’s fictional small-town setting.”

Cromer won the Lucille Lortel Award and Obie Award for his direction of “Our Town.” He also had the role of the Stage Manager, who narrates the play.

Shattuck’s first experience seeing “Our Town” live on stage was in 1990 at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., featuring the character actor Robert Prosky in the central role of the Stage Manager. Prosky, who most may remember as the desk sergeant in the TV show “Hill Street Blues,” was one of those actors who bring “intangible but undeniable depths of humanity to every part, a quality in evidence in that performance,” Shattuck said. Famous Stage Managers in Broadway revivals have included Henry Fonda and a late-career Paul Newman.

“It was hard to picture a typical college student in this role,” Shattuck said. “Fortunately, Bill Small, a part-time graduate student who has played the Stage Manager before, turned up at our auditions and we could instantly see that he brings a similar depth of soulful experience.”

Influenced by Cromer’s vision, the “Town” that SFA theatre-goers will see will look and sound like “Our” “diverse, unpretentious city and campus,” Shattuck explained.

“I asked each actor to speak in their own way, rather than affecting a New England dialect,” he said. “Our costume designer, Angela Bacarisse, immediately understood and embraced this approach and developed a look for the cast that is both subtle and timeless. We’re not looking to transport the audience a century and half a continent away, but rather to invite them into a fresh look at everyday life here and now.”

Shattuck said Cromer’s production climaxed with “the most moving ‘coup de theatre’ I have experienced in 50 years of playgoing.”

“Our resources do not allow us to match that precisely, but we have a surprise in store for the audience which is very much inspired by Cromer,” he said. “We hope it will help to give Wilder’s masterpiece its due in our modest venue.”

General ticket prices are: $15, adult; $10, senior (62+); $7.50, SFA faculty/staff; $7.50, youth; $5, student. Purchase tickets at boxoffice.sfasu.edu or call (936) 468-6407. For questions about the play, contact the School of Theatre at (936) 468-4003.