On November 20, 2023, Nitza Melas, a professor at The Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics (KCGI), a singer-songwriter based in Montreal, Canada, and a main vocalist for Cirque du Soleil, and Kyoko Tagawa, a professor at KCGI and a renowned pianist who has been teaching at KCGI since this fall, gave an Autumn recital at the new hall of the main campus of Kyoto Institute of Information Science in Kyoto, Japan.Students from KCGI and Kyoto Computer Gakuin (KCG) also joined the recital, which was attended by invited members of the board of directors of the Japan Federation of IT Organizations (IT Federation), of which Wataru Hasegawa is president and first vice president.
The highlight of the show is the collaboration between the performance and the video footage.The students attending Professor Melas' lecture "Performing Arts and IT" took the lead in creating this recital as an entertainment show together with the students attending Professor Tagawa's "Introduction to Music" class.The stage backdrop is a large screen that covers an entire wall.The students discussed the production of the video projection, lighting, and stage setting, and also edited the video.In the show, eight songs were performed, including Beethoven's piano sonata "Moonlight" and Chopin's "Raindrops," as well as "Moon River" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water," which were performed in collaboration between the two professors, amid autumn-like images and fantastic lighting that matched the music.
At KCGI and KCG, students have participated in the planning and staging of the "MUΣA Live Show" and other events as part of the practice of IT-based stage direction, gaining comprehensive learning experience by applying the knowledge and skills they have learned in the real world.This time, we took on the challenge of creating a new type of show with a new pianist, Professor Kyoko Tagawa.
