University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Don’t miss the 52^nd Annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Art Center. A dozen artists with ties to UALR are exhibiting this year.

They are current students Ted Grimmett, also a UALR employee; Anne Haley, Steve Hollis, and Katherine Monroe; alumni Latoya Hobbs, Erin Lorenzen, Dennis McCann, Jason McCann, and Mary Shelton.

UALR faculty members with works at the exhibition are Marjorie Williams-Smith, Liz Noble, Carey Roberson, and Dominique Simmons, who is also an UALR alum.

UALR’S Department of English and the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance present the 2010 Shakespeare Scene Festival from 9:30 a.m. to noon, March 17 and 18 at University Theatre of the Center for Performing Arts.

The Shakespeare Scene Festival brings together students from a variety of Central Arkansas schools to perform scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.

A performance of a Shakespearean scene integrates several elements of literacy and literacy education including: intensive study of the English language, cooperative learning, process-based theatre as well as the discipline, creativity, and organization required to rehearse and perform a scene.

“In this process, every student in the classroom can find a niche: as performer, script editor, director, technician, or backstage crew member,” Brad Minnick, assistant professor of English and director of English education, says. “The active engagement of working on Shakespeare from inside the text provides opportunities for students to understand more fully plot, character motivations and language issues. An additional obvious advantage of teaching students Shakespeare through the medium of performance is that the students are actively engaged in some aspect of the performance; it is not possible for them to sit passively by as others do the work.”

Each performance will last approximately 25 minutes. Students serve as the audience for the other classes of performers.

Admission is free and open to the public.

For more information, visit www.ualr.edu/shakespeare or contact Minnick at jbminnick@ualr.edu.

Update (3/2): Dr. Marlatt is unable to make it to Arkansas at this time. The lecture will hopefully be rescheduled.

UALR’s Psychology Department will present guest lecturer G. Alan Marlatt in a discussion on “Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention” at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 4, in the Dickinson Hall Auditorium.

Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Tommy Poling, the department’s coordinator of continuing education, at 501-569-3589 or thpoling@ualr.edu.

Marlatt, professor of psychology and director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington, will focus on a program he has developed that uses mindfulness based relapse prevention in the treatment of addictive behaviors.

The innovative group therapy program combines cognitive-behavioral relapse prevention with mindfulness meditation as a meta-cognitive coping skill, helping people learn how to deal with craving and urges and other triggers for relapse.

Marlatt’s major focus in both research and clinical work is the field of addictive behaviors. In addition to over 200 journal articles and book chapters, he has published several books in the addictions field, including “Relapse Prevention,” “Assessment of Addictive Behaviors,” and “Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS): A Harm Reduction Approach.”

UALR history professor Moira Maguire will present “Whose Holiday is it Anyway? A History of St. Patrick’s Day” as part of the Evenings with History series at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 2, at the Historic Arkansas Museum, 200 E. 3rd Street in Little Rock.

The Irish celebration of St. Patrick’s Day has changed significantly since the 1970s. This presentation examines the transition of this Irish saint’s day from a somber occasion with church services, military-style parades, and pub-closings, to the riotous and not particularly sober event of today. Maguire will show how the Irish accommodated growing American tourism to give the Americans the type of celebration they were used to in the United States.

The Evenings with History series is sponsored by the University History Institute, which is a nonprofit organization of private citizens interested in history and supporting UALR.

An individual can subscribe to the series for $50 annually, which includes admission to all six lectures. A joint subscription to the series, at $90 annually, offers savings of $10 to couples and friends.

At $250 annually, a Fellow of the Institute receives the previous benefits, plus an invitation to special presentations for fellows exclusively, including private evenings with noted authors. The Institute also offers a life membership at $1,000 that can be paid in installments. Subscriptions and donations to the institute are tax deductible as allowed by law.

Subscribers to the series help support historical research. Presenters donate their time, and the University History Institute uses all proceeds from the series to encourage research at UALR. In recent years, annual institute grants, made possible by the Evenings with History series, have made major purchases of historical research materials for UALR.

For more information, contact the UALR History Department at 501-569-3235.

UALR’s Artspree, the University’s performing arts series featuring diverse and celebrated artists and musicians from around the world, presents Gabriel Bianco on guitar at 7:30 p.m.  Sunday, March 7 in the Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall of UALR’s Fine Arts Building.

Tickets are $20 for the main floor, $17 for the balcony, $10 for non-UALR students, and free for UALR students. Group discounts are available. All UALR faculty and staff will receive a free companion ticket with a purchase of an individual ticket. For more information, call 569-3288.

Having performed concerts regularly for the last five years, Gabriel Bianco has earned first prize in multiple competitions in Austria, Germany, France, Poland, and Portugal. His most recent win at the 2008 Guitar Foundation of America Competition has earned him the coveted 50-concert tour in the United States, Mexico, and Canada with additional concerts in China, Colombia, and Brazil.

Bianco has performed in over 30 music festivals across the world in France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Portugal, Slovakia, and Thailand. At the age of 12, he performed for French television and later appeared on Romanian television.

Born into a family of musicians, Bianco received an early start on the guitar, receiving lesions with his father at age 5. A few years later, he began his studies in Paris with Ramon de Herrera at the Conservatoire National de Region, Conservatoire Superieur de Paris, and later at the Conservatoire de Musique et de Danse de Paris where he received the highest performance distinction under the teaching of Olivier Chassin. Since 2005, Bianco has studied with French virtuoso Judicael Perroy.

Bianco’s first major recording was released in 2009 by the Naxos label.

For tickets and more information, call Artspree at 569-3288.