The final weekend of an annual UCF arts event is taking over the Doctor Phillips Center for the Performing Arts with an array of artistic offerings, from visual arts installations to a full production of the classic Fiddler on the Roof to a tech-driven surprise: an improv-style show featuring actors and AI.
UCF Celebrates the Arts is a two-week festival that aims to share UCF’s artistic talents with the wider community in world-class facilities. Along with theater, dance, and music performances, students present their work in disciplines like drawing, painting, character animation, and technical design, among others.
Jeff Moore is the Dean of UCF’s College of Arts and Humanities, and the event’s founder. He pointed to the surprising ways the world of tech and the world of art overlap.
“[The event] creates a space for art students to be involved in tech-forward and interdisciplinary activities. Although the title of the festival is UCF Celebrates the Arts, it's really UCF celebrates everything,” he laughed.
The interdisciplinary approach pays off, Moore said, when “people see what we're doing in the arts, and they say, ‘Hey, I'm working on a simulation and modeling situation or a training for first responders. Could we use your material?’ ‘Could you help us make our instructional videos or the experiences that we're giving our people more immersive and more realistic, like your theater projects?’”
And vice versa,” he added. “When things happen in space and in tech with simulation and modeling, it informs the way we design stages and the way we design digital sets.”
He pointed to this weekend’s performance of Fiddler on the Roof as an example of tech-infused classics. “That is obviously a traditional musical theater and masterwork, and people love it, but to see it through the lens of our latest technology – wait until you see the sets and the way they interact to capture the environment and the way the audience will hopefully be immersed in the story!”
Conversely, the event this weekend also includes a cutting-edge tech/performance mashup called AI Cabaret.
Moore explained the concept of AI Cabaret as partly a Whose Line Is It Anyway-style performance interacting live with artificial intelligence, as a kind of participating cast member. It will also include sketches generated by running students’ scene ideas through AI.
One of Moore’s favorite events that happens annually under the umbrella of 11-year-old UCF Celebrates the Arts is called Inclusive Knights. It’s a sensory-friendly concert inside the Steinmetz Hall featuring the UCF Concert Band and it’s designed for the deaf, hard-of-hearing and neurodivergent communities.
“It benefits our music education students who are working to develop the skills to work with neurodivergent and special needs communities, and it helps our band students have a great performance with light, and dance, and the movement that happens in the audience,” explained Moore. “I just wish everyone could come and sit in the back with me and watch the interaction of the audience. They’re welcomed to a beautiful place like Steinmetz Hall with a performance that's been designed specifically for them.”
