![Cal Performances at Home: Beyond the Stage. Artist talks; interviews; lectures; Q&A sessions with artists, Cal Performances staff, and UC Berkeley faculty; and more! Cal Performances at Home: Beyond the Stage. Artist talks; interviews; lectures; Q&A sessions with artists, Cal Performances staff, and UC Berkeley faculty; and more!](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/beyond-the-screen_web-header_1920x900.jpg)
Cal Performances at Home is much more than a series of great streamed performances. Fascinating behind-the-scenes artist interviews. Informative and entertaining public forums. The Cal Performances Reading Room, featuring books with interesting connections to our Fall 2020 programs. For all this and much more, keep checking this page for frequent updates and to journey far, far Beyond the Stage!
Major support for Beyond the Stage is provided by Bank of America.
![Bank of America Bank of America](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/bank-of-america-logo-2020.jpg)
Beyond the Stage
Artist Conversation with Kronos Quartet: 2021/22 Season
![Jeremy Geffen, Mahsa Vahdat, David Harrington](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/jeremy-geffen-mahsa-vahdat-david-harrington-1920x900-1.jpg)
A Conversation with Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen
Kronos Quartet founder and violinist David Harrington and Persian music vocalist Mahsa Vahdat join Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen to discuss their upcoming performance at Zellerbach Hall, how the concert fits into the 2021/22 Season Illuminations theme of Place and Displacement, what informed Vahdat to create her portion of the program, how artists came to collaborate, and more in this Beyond the Stage artist talk.
This artist conversation video is presented in conjunction with Kronos Quartet’s Cal Performances 2021/22 visit on Dec 2.
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Artist Conversation with Vân-Ánh Võ
![Jeremy Geffen, Van Anh Vo](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/jeremy-geffen-van-anh-vo-1920x900-1.jpg)
A Conversation with Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen
Multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Võ talks with Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen about her path from traditional Vietnamese music and culture to her new Western community, how she selected her musical family here in the Bay Area, the importance of keeping the traditional arts alive, how her Songs of Strength program developed, and more in this Beyond the Stage artist talk.
This artist conversation video is presented in conjunction with Vân-Ánh Võ and Blood Moon Orchestra’s Cal Performances 2021/22 visit on Dec 4.
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Place and Displacement: Bias in Our Algorithms and Society
![Angelique Kidjo Bias in Our Algorithms](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/angelique-kidjo-bias-in-our-algorithms-1920x900-1.jpg)
Place and Displacement: Bias in Our Algorithms and Society
An Illuminations: “Place and Displacement” Discussion
As part of Angélique Kidjo’s artist residency with Cal Performances during the 2021/22 season, the UC Berkeley Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) collaborated with Cal Performances in hosting a discussion on “Place and displacement: Bias in our algorithms and society.”
The event featured Kidjo, in conversation with Jennifer Chayes, Devin Guillory, Nika Haghtalab, and Michael I. Jordan. UC Berkeley experts in computer science and machine learning, they explored how algorithms and machine learning tools reflect the biases of the people and data used to train them. It also touched on current research and promising interventions that aim to make algorithms more just.
This was a live, in-person event. Free and open to the public.
Jennifer Chayes is Associate Provost of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), and Dean of the School of Information, at UC Berkeley, as well as Professor in four UC Berkeley departments and schools: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Information, Mathematics, and Statistics. For 23 years, she was at Microsoft Research where she was Technical Fellow and Managing Director of three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. Chayes has received numerous awards for both leadership and scientific contributions, including the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Leadership Award, the John von Neumann Lecture Award of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (the highest honor of SIAM), the ACM Distinguished Service Award, and an honorary doctorate from Leiden University. Chayes is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chayes’ research areas include phase transitions in computer science, structural and dynamical properties of networks including graph algorithms, and applications of machine learning. Chayes is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are widely used for the machine learning of large-scale networks. Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision-making, and climate change. Chayes is deeply committed to increasing racial and gender diversity in STEM.
Devin Guillory is a PhD student in computer science at UC Berkeley where he works in the fields of computer vision and machine learning. Prior to Berkeley, he obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford and went on to serve as a Staff Data Scientist and technical lead of Search Ranking and Computational Advertising teams at Etsy. A founding engineer of Blackbird Technologies, Devin joined Etsy by way of acquisition. Throughout his career, he’s worked on a variety of machine learning problems in industrial and academic settings (e.g., computer vision, robotics, natural language processing, information retrieval, computational advertising, etc.) and has grown passionate about exploring areas where the theory and practice of machine learning systems diverge. His current work focuses on designing AI systems that perform reliably as environments change and that learn with limited supervision. Devin’s service as a director of Black in AI and publication of “Combating Anti-Blackness in the AI Community” illustrate his interest in the critical examination of systems that produce AI technology. Devin strives to participate in a technical community whose values center equity and positive impact.
Nika Haghtalab is Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She works broadly on AI and Theory and more specifically on learning in presence of social and strategic interactions. Her work focuses on creating a mathematical foundation that can both be used for guaranteeing that AI systems and algorithms will continue to perform well even when their environment is impacted by changing realities of our social and economic life, and for ensuring the integrity and equitability of social and economic forces that are born out of the use of AI systems in practice. Examples of application domains supported by this mathematical foundation include understanding belief polarization and biased beliefs in media, supporting platforms that enable collaboration in machine learning, and quality and equitability of AI methods that are used for making consequential decisions that impact humans. Haghtalab has won several awards for her work, including CMU School of Computer Science Dissertation Award and SIGecom dissertation honorable mention. She is a co-founder of Learning Theory Alliance.
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive and biological sciences, and have focused in recent years on Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, kernel machines and applications to problems in distributed computing systems, natural language processing, signal processing and statistical genetics. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He received the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015, and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. He is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, ASA, CSS, IEEE, IMS, ISBA and SIAM.
![Cal Performances Illuminations Cal Performances Illuminations](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/clr_IllumLogo_fullcolor-scaled.jpg)
![Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Jonathan Logan Family Foundation](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JLFF-logo-positive-3000.png)
Lead support for Illuminations is provided by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation—empowering world-changing work.
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Music, Diaspora, and the World A Conversation with Angélique Kidjo
![Angelique Kidjo Music Diaspora](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/angelique-kidjo-music-diaspora-1920x900-1.jpg)
Music, Diaspora, and the World A Conversation with Angélique Kidjo
An Illuminations: “Place and Displacement” Discussion
One could say that, by definition, music is the most diasporic of art forms. It is movement itself. It is hybridity. It passes from place to place and from time to time, heedless of natural or social borders. Music belongs everywhere, and yet it is always from somewhere. Diasporic themes and histories have been central not only to the creation and commodification of new musical forms, but also to the emergence of global identities and solidarities.
In this conversation, the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Social Science Matrix would like to take advantage of the precious residency of Angélique Kidjo on the Berkeley campus to open a conversation about the global circulation of African musical forms and musicians, its worldwide significance, and its social power. How are we to think about notions of “traditional music,” “ethnic music,” or “folk music” at the current time? Where and how does musical innovation take place, and how is it recognized and received in different parts of the world? How do we think about the entanglement between music and the struggle for social justice?
For this wide-ranging discussion Ms. Kidjo is joined by Berkeley faculty members Tianna Paschel, Ivy Mills, and Victoria Grubbs.
Co-sponsored by Townsend Center for the Humanities and Social Science Matrix.
Cal Performances 2021-22 Illuminations: “Place and Displacement” series of programming examines the fraught and often devastating effects of migration, exile, dislocations, and separation, on both hyper-local and international scales, through five main stage performances and related online and in person programs with artists, creators, scholars, activists, and thinkers who are part of the outstanding brain trust that is the UC Berkeley community.
![Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TownsendLogoNewWebsiteDarkerPeriwinkle-copy.png)
![Cal Performances Illuminations Cal Performances Illuminations](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/clr_IllumLogo_fullcolor-scaled.jpg)
![Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Jonathan Logan Family Foundation](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JLFF-logo-positive-3000.png)
Lead support for Illuminations is provided by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation—empowering world-changing work.
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Artist Conversation with Ballet Hispánico: 2021/22 Season
![Eduardo Vilaro](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/eduardo-vilaro-1920x900-1.jpg)
A Conversation with Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen
Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen sits down with Ballet Hispánico Artistic Director and CEO Eduardo Vilaro to take a deep dive into the program for their upcoming visit to Berkeley and why it was chosen, as well as discuss what the last 18 months has been like for the company and its dancers, the incredible unexpected gift the company received, and much more in this Beyond the Stage artist talk.
This artist conversation video is presented in conjunction with Ballet Hispánico’s Cal Performances 2021/22 visit on Nov 6.
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Artist Conversation with Harry Bicket of the English Concert: 2021/22 Season
![Harry Bicket](https://calperformances.org/wp-content/uploads/blog/2022-23/jeremy-geffen-harry-bicket-1920x900-1.jpg)
Artist Conversation with Harry Bicket of the English Concert: 2021/22 Season
A Conversation with Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen
Harry Bicket, Artistic Director of The English Concert, joins Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen for an in-depth discussion about Handel and his operatic masterpiece Alcina, as well as how theatrical productions have changed over the centuries, The English Concert’s multi-season commitment to bringing Handel’s operas to Berkeley, and more in this Beyond the Stage artist talk.
This artist conversation video is presented in conjunction with The English Concert’s Cal Performances 2021/22 visit on Nov 7.