Thanks to the versatility, energy and spot-on acting by star Bella Merlin, Tilly No-Body: Catastrophes of Love, presented by the theater and dance departments, is truly spectacular.

Merlin, UC Davis professor of acting, plays Tilly Wedekind, the wife of famed German playwright Frank Wedekind. Though he was a genius playwright, Frank insisted on referring to Tilly as “Lulu,” a character from one of his plays. Tilly is forced to play various roles to fit her husband’s ideal of her in order to win his affection. The one-woman play documents the inner struggle that Tilly endured to fit into her husband’s twisted psyche.

Walking in to the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre, dim lights hang from the stage ceiling, almost resembling night lights because they give off a very serene and calm feel.

A circus theme gives a sense of hilarity and insanity all at once. The stage is set in a circus fashion with various props, such as a huge ball covered in stars, a trunk and an instrument that resembles a lyre. On the floor is a huge blue circle with one large yellow star on it. Upstage or toward the back wall of the theatre, there is an archway that looks aged, almost vintage. In a figurative and theatrical sense, the stage has definitely served as the character’s dwelling for quite some time.

The music is jazzy at times and changes all throughout the play, going from jazzy café to a foreign, perhaps European feel. The music is enjoyable and flows very well with each scene. Sound effects of trains and the lights flickering from time to time indicate that the audience is experiencing what it must have been like inside poor Tilly’s mind.

Merlin’s character of Tilly Wedekind narrates her own insanity well. In the beginning she flashes back to how it all began. She often speaks to people who aren’t there, as if she had many imaginary friends. She communicates the internal and external problems of Tilly very well. One minute it seems as though Tilly is trying to please Frank, and the next minute she’s trying desperately to fight her thoughts about what to do with Frank and her loss of self. Also, her knowledge of the German language is quite impressive. The words she speaks along with her accent sound confident and organic.

At one point during the opening night performance, Merlin stopped and said that she had forgotten her lines. She asked for her line and it was never audible to the audience, but she played it off so well because not too long after, she was back to her acting as Tilly. It was hard to distinguish between her as being serious or acting because Tilly was also an actress. Merlin made it seem as though it was Tilly who had forgotten her lines. Not many actors or actresses in plays can improvise that well.

The costumes show how Tilly was a woman who always had to “say the right thing” and perform for her husband, Frank. She is a clown and a circus ringleader at one point, and her costumes keep changing until she is in a nude-colored body suit, which symbolizes being naked. Every costume stands for something that happened throughout Tilly’s life, and the shedding of those costumes led her on a path to her own individualism once again.

Ultimately, Tilly No-Body asks how a person can survive once her identity has been stripped from her. Tilly’s husband Frank, whom she often impersonates in her conversations, always included Tilly in his award-winning work but never seemed to know how to separate business from pleasure. She never had time for herself, and Tilly’s happiness and well-being were never really addressed until after Frank’s premature death.

Tilly No-Body will give its final performances tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. For more information about tickets or the play, go to mondaviarts.org.

LEA MURILLO can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

When UC Davis fall quarter Granada Artist in Residence Lucy Gough sits down at the Black Bear Diner, she says she is ready for a hearty meal: turkey, gravy and mashed potatoes. “Is it really?” she asks, after learning that this is traditional Thanksgiving food. Hailing from Wales, Gough has only been in Davis – and the United States for that matter – for a month.

Here in Davis, her writing sanctuary has become the Granada Artist-in-Residence facility downtown. Gough is the latest participant in this quarter-long program that brings directors, playwrights, choreographers and filmmakers to Davis for teaching purposes as well as to create a work for public performance.

This quarter, Gough is putting on two plays called Hinterland and Mapping the Soul. Although she initially meant for them to be intertwined (titled Hinterland/Mapping the Soul), Gough and her assistant director Brian Livingston ultimately decided both plays would work better played separately.

At home in Wales, Gough writes in a commodious room overlooking vast fields with grazing sheep. “There are more sheep than people in Wales,” she laughs. When not writing in her room, Gough uses the old library in Albarisque – which overlooks the sea – as a writing sanctuary.

Gough described the plays as different forms of a similar story. One will be staged as classic live radio play, which Gough said is big back in England but has not made a name for itself as a medium in the states. After the intermission, they will stage the second of plays, which is a hybrid between stage and radio.

“It’s going to be a bit of a radio play gone wild, sort of an experiment,” Gough said.

Thematically, the productions brush upon the elusive concept of the soul in context with the imagination’s saving powers. Gough examines the multiple psychological forces that lead to attempted suicide, emphasizing fantastical thinking as a protective factor against melancholy.

“My play is trying to understand what brought the protagonist to the point of suicide while also trying to understand what would bring him back from that point,” Gough said. “My argument in the play is that once he has the facility of his imagination, he’s able to see past the sort of ‘nothing’ of his life.”

Since radio play taps directly in to the imagination, Gough’s decision to stage the production via this medium parallels one of her play’s underlying themes.

“I’m just fascinated by the imagination. I think it’s awfully under-rated and people are frightened of it,” Gough said. “But I think it’s an awfully powerful tool, because it can transform situations. Imagination gives birth to action. Even a thing like going to the moon, someone had to imagine it before it happened.”

Bella Merlin, chair of the acting program at UC Davis, describes the medium in which Gough is presenting her work as an interactive process.

“It works in vibrant dialogue with the audience: while the actors and the writer give 50 percent of the ideas, the audience conjures up the other 50 percent in their own imaginations,” Merlin said. “It is dynamic and exciting as a medium. Also, it allows you to hop from one location to another in a moment: from being a red blood corpuscle in a person’s vein to being the King of Persia in one fell swoop.”

Among the many projects on Gough’s repertoire is a theatre production of Wuthering Heights, which is about to go on UK tour. She is also writing for commercial and BBC television, has a radio drama Western Stars recording around Christmas for BBC Radio, and her radio play The White Hare has been commissioned for a film script. On top of all that, HBO and Fox have shown interest in her work.

When asked about “culture shock” between the states and her native land, Gough responds that the changes have been less a dramatic shift and more an amassment of minor differences. The cadence of speech, the cuisine, and the surroundings are three elements that Gough has been adjusting to in her transition. While in Davis, Gough will keep her ears and eyes open to inspiration for future projects.

“I’ve always wanted to write play about Jack Kerouac, and now that I’m here I feel like that even more lately,” Gough said. “I always thought, well I can’t, I don’t know his country, don’t know the culture. But now that I’m here, I feel even more inclined to do it.”

She says even though she is not fully familiar with it, she would still like to test the waters with a play about this epoch.

“That’s what literature is about – it’s about trying to understand why we’re here,” Gough said.

Livingston fully supports not only the work Gough is doing as a member of the program, but the vision she has brought to the theater community.

“I can only add that working with Lucy is a dream come true,” Livingston said. “Lucy has a stellar ear of sound and rhythm.  She is a great collaborator and delegator of responsibility to all the artists in the room and on the project.  She has a clear vision of the possibilities of what we can strive towards and accomplish as an ensemble here at UC Davis.”

ELENI STEPHANIDES can be reached at arts@theaggie.org

You may hear the term ‘artistic freedom’ being tossed around casually and think nothing of it.

But UC Davis School of Law professor Keith Aoki and Duke University School of Law professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins want you to think again. Aoki illustrated and Boyle and Jenkins wrote a comic book entitled Bound by Law (Tales from a Public Domain) about a filmmaker trying to make a documentary about New York.

The heroine runs into obstacles dealing with copyright laws attached to billboards, songs, images, etc. captured in her film. The book asks if she should compromise the content of her documentary by omitting these scenes or risk being sued.

Images, sounds, music, text and ideas you perceive everyday are a part of a system that can be protected by law, which often raises questions of who owns the material. In Bound by Law, Jenkins, Boyle and Aoki challenge these ideas and limitations by intentionally featuring images or thumbnails derived from copyrighted works.

On the other side, the public domain is a realm of materials, which is not protected exclusively by intellectual property rights. Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke School of Law is an organization dedicated to promote balance in this system.

“We have prepared a wide variety of materials to help people understand the important role of the public domain in creativity, culture, innovation and technology,” said Balfour Smith, program coordinator at CSPD. “The book [Bound by Law], a joint effort of Duke and UC Davis law professors, was created to teach a difficult subject – fair use and copyright – in a fun, easy-to-understand manner.”

Originally, Boyle organized a conference in which they met Davis Guggenheim, renowned director for An Inconvenient Truth, and other filmmakers and discussed copyright clearances for their works. As with director Morgan Spurlock, who ran into copyright issues with McDonalds while filming his documentary Super Size Me, other filmmakers were trying to sort out copyright conflicts limiting their artistic license to create.

“It became far more than making a comic book about the conference,” said Aoki. “It turned into coming up with a piece of writing and drawing that could be read by people who weren’t necessarily lawyers who needed to understand copyright. Copyright stature is about 136 pages and some of it is excruciatingly detailed. We wanted someone like a filmmaker who could read it and get the big ideas”.

Aoki wanted to utilize a medium that was visually accessible and appealing for those who may not be a lawyer. Before becoming a law student and professor, Aoki was an art student with a masters and bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Utilizing his skill and passion for comic illustrations, Aoki collaborated with Jenkins and Boyle to create Bound by Law.

“They’re two different ways of trying to understand the world,” Aoki said. “Law tends to be more analytical in terms of an intellectual sense. Art and drawing are types of analysis but with different kinds of rules which are applied. One area where art and law do come together is in the intellectual property, in particular copyright law and the law for protection in creative endeavors.”

Aoki is not simply referring to the realm of filmmaking and cinematography. This also includes the realm of art, music and discoveries in general.

“These copyright laws limit the circulation and ways in which people create,” Aoki said. “In particular with digital sampling – such as having GarageBand on every Mac, it’s incredibly easy to create collages which can be a problem.”

Random Abiladeze, a Davis hip-hop and spoken-word artist, said borrowing material from other artists is only a problem when money is involved, and he doesn’t feel inhibited by today’s copyright laws.

“Hip-Hop is based on sampling, so that’s never going to leave the essence of the genre. There is something to be said of creating “original” music (nothing is new under the sun), but sampling isn’t going anywhere,” Random Abilideze said.

With the help of Bound by Law and work-in-progress entitled Theft! A History of Music, Jenkins, Boyle and Aoki aim to help clear those fuzzy boundaries of fair use and copyright laws that can often interfere with creative expression.

“I believe that misunderstanding copyright law and the fair use doctrine poses a great danger to our culture and creativity”, said Smith. “Too often vague ideas of rights are invoked or litigation is threatened to stifle people’s rightful use of materials.  Through its comic books and other programs, I know that the Center is trying to help people understand their rights and responsibilities and still pursue innovative uses of our collective culture.”

Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins’ work has been praised for its inventive approach to its subject matter. Award-winning author Cory Doctorow says Bound by Law is as entertaining as it is informative.

“Bound by Law riffs expertly on classic comic styles, from the Crypt Keeper to Mad Magazine, superheros to Understanding Comics, and lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield,” Doctorow wrote in his review.

Bound by Law can be purchased or downloaded digitally for free at law.duke.edu/cspd/comics. For more information regarding Center for the Study of the Public Domain, go to law.duke.edu/cspd.

UYEN CAO can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

From the beginning, Mark “Stew” Stewart’s musical career was destined to be anything but typical.

For starters, the singer/songwriter/musician from Los Angeles formed a rock band 15 years ago in Los Angeles and named it The Negro Problem.

“If I was in a store looking through band names trying to figure out which records to buy, who was cool, if I saw a band called The Negro Problem, I would buy it immediately. ‘Who the hell is this? I want to know who was crazy enough to name their band this,'” Stew said in a phone interview.

“But on another level, it was a private kind of joke within the band. We thought if our music ever got to a record exec, they’d listen to the music and say, ‘This is OK, but the problem with the band is the black guy in front.’ So we used to joke that I was the “negro problem.” Those were different times, when black musicians playing rock music was a stranger thing.”

But doing what is expected of today’s rock bands has never been Stew’s style, and it’s paid off. In 2006, Stew and collaborator Heidi Rodewald wrote and composed an original stage musical called Passing Strange, about a young African American man who, with the help of rock-and-roll, travels the world in search of “the real.”

The show was picked up by Broadway in 2008 and ran for 165 performances. Stew won that year’s Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and director Spike Lee later adapted the show into a television movie.

Stew said that staying true to his own vision and concentrating on his music instead of fame helped make Passing Strange a success.

“I think if you try to get to Broadway rather than just trying to be a good artist or trying to be good at what you do, you might end up creating crap. It might be a better idea to just write good songs. Because who would have ever thought that a rock band would get to Broadway?” he said. “We decided to do exactly what we wanted to do no matter how much it made us outsiders, and look where we ended up.”

Now, for the first time since Passing Strange, Stew and The Negro Problem are back together. They’ll kick off the West Coast portion of their cross-country tour with two performances at the Mondavi Center this Tuesday and Wednesday.

“I think the one thing we consistently deliver is an experience unique to that evening and unique to that audience. I don’t think we ever play the same show twice,” Stew said. “For us, our job is not to deliver something that’s a product. We want to deliver a living artistic moment, as crazy as that may sound.”

It’s a philosophy that has stuck with Stew throughout his career. Even as a child, his focus has always been on the integrity of the music he creates.

“I grew up feeling that music was not just fun, but was important and somehow culturally significant, just like novels or poetry. I wanted to be a part of that from the beginning,” he said. “And every time you turned on a TV in the ’60s a band was playing. I thought I could form a band and have my own sort of gang. A gang that only hurts people with music.”

Ultimately, Stew said, he writes music that he wants to hear himself – for an audience of one.

“I’m just like a guy in a basement fooling around with a toolkit or chemistry set, trying to build something. I make something, and then I’m having fun making it, and then I’m done and if anyone else comes down to the basement that’s cool. And if a thousand people like it that’s great, too.”

ROBIN MIGDOL can be reached at arts@theaggie.org

As you begin trading in your shorts for jeans, your cute sundresses for heavy coats, and your free-spirited days of lying on the MU lawn for hours of studying in Shields, you may begin to lose the urge to be outside at all.

Don’t hibernate yet.

Aggies can enjoy the Arboretum and the arts at UC Davis by going to the Arboretum GATEways Arts Festival this Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The festival will contain a plethora of different activities and demonstrations to enjoy as part of the GATEways initiative.

“Through GATEways (Gardens, Arts and the Environment), the Arboretum works with faculty and students who are part of HArCS (Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies) to bring their work out of the buildings and into the Arboretum, where it is accessible to the public,” said Carmia Feldman, assistant director of the festival.

According to Phillip Daley, publicity director of the festival, the event will be a unique experience.

“It will present the audience with some opportunities that they wouldn’t ordinarily get inside,” he said.

Along with showcasing faculty members’ and students’ creative work, the festival will be featuring Minoosh Zomorodinia, a visiting artist from Iran who will be creating an art installation on-site at the Arboretum starting at 11 a.m. on the North Shore of Lake Spafford.

According to Hearne Pardee, a studio arts professor at UC Davis, Zomorodinia will be making tapestry out of natural materials that she finds in the Arboretum.

“It will be placed somewhere in the landscape near the lake,” Pardee said.

Daley said he is most excited about Zomorodinia’s exhibition.

“Her exhibitions are unique each time to each location,” he said.

Students interested in seeing other installations that are directly influenced by the nature of the Arboretum can check out Pardee’s “en plein air” painting demonstration, in which artists paint what they see in the landscape in front of them. Pardee’s demonstration will take place at 3 p.m. on the North Shore of Lake Spafford.

The students of Lucy Gough, who is the department of theatre and dance’s current Granada Artist-in-Residence, will also be performing original monologues that were inspired by the nature of the Arboretum. These start at 3 p.m. on the Wyatt Deck.

According to Feldman, there will also be live performances at the Wyatt Deck with a different performance every half hour starting at noon.

At noon, there will be a performance by the Gamelan Ensemble of Indonesia, led by new faculty member Ed Garcia. The music will be accompanied by a performance from dancer Ben Arcangel.

Following this performance, at 12:30 p.m., will be a lively showcase of the Brazilian “Samba School,” which will be led by faculty member Chris Froh. Instruments will all be played by UC Davis students.

Theatre and film will also be represented at Saturday’s festivities.

At 11 a.m., at the dance studio of the University Club, attendees will be able to catch excerpts from the spring 2010 student film festival. The screening will include the films “Apartment 9” and “Needed,” which won for best director and best animation, respectively.

For those who missed seeing them in theatre, excerpts of both Tilly-No-Body: Catastrophes of Love and the recent Slaughterhouse Project will be performed on Wyatt Deck, at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., respectively.

The art exhibit “Wonderers,” by guest curator Matthias Geiger, will also be on display in the Nelson Gallery.

Attendees are encouraged to bring their own food and drinks and picnic by Lake Spafford.

Feldman said she was excited to work with the Nelson Gallery and HArCS to put on the festival.

“I’m looking forward to making this event an annual occurrence,” she said.

ANNETA KONSTANTINIDES can be reached at arts@theaggie.org