Ballet from Boise, July 21 & 22

Trey McIntyre Project dancer Brett Perry. Photograph by David Harry Stewart. Copyright Trey McIntyre Project. All rights reserved.

It’s not often that the CFA features ballet, but when we do, we focus on companies who are contemporary, whose vibe and energy is of today.  Trey McIntyre Project is that company – they burst onto the scene only four years ago, and since then have become a touring sensation, traveling the country, and now the world, at least 22 weeks of the year.  And when they are not on the road, they are at their home in Boise, Idaho.

McIntyre is a choreographer who came out of the Houston Ballet and then became a free-lance choreographer working with many of this country’s leading ballet companies.  When it was time for him to start his own company, he didn’t decide to base it in New York or San Francisco – he decided instead to intentionally become engaged with a Western city who needed an arts infusion:  Boise, Idaho.  As we work with our students here at Wesleyan on how to use the arts as a vehicle for community engagement and social change, we welcome a company that is doing just that: dancing in hospital cafeterias, factory lounges and schools, demystifying ballet and growing an audience that now considers the Trey McIntyre Project to be their own.

Trey McIntyre Project is not only engaging with their home community, they are also engaging with the world.  The company was chosen by the U.S. Department of State and Brooklyn Academy of Music as one of four American dance companies to participate in DanceMotion USA and will tour to China, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam in spring 2012 serving as a U.S. Cultural Ambassador.

Tonight and tomorrow night at Wesleyan, they’ll dance to music by Roy Orbison and the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band – they are an intensely physical, joyous company in which each dancer is allowed to bring their personality onto the stage. Come and join us!   And P.S., the CFA Theater is air conditioned.

Trey McIntyre Project
Thursday, July 21 & Friday, July 22, 2011 at 8pm

CFA Theater
Center for the Arts

Wesleyan University
$22 general public; $19 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff; $10 students

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Marc Bamuthi Joseph at the CFA: “If You Surrender to the Air, You Can Ride It”

Marc Bamuthi JosephWhen I first saw Marc Bamuthi Joseph at New York’s Under the Radar Festival in 2005, I was struck by the fact that Marc is a spoken word artist who uses his whole body, his whole being to speak.  He is one of the few spoken word artists whose poetry is matched by his capacity as a dancer and mover, so that his body can serve as either a metaphor for his words, punctuate his words or even fight his words.

He is truly a hybrid artist and activist: a Broadway veteran, a National Slam Poetry Champion, a featured artist in Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam and founder of The Living Word Project, a company based in Oakland, California that creates verse-based work that is spoken through the body, illustrated by visual and sonic scores, and in communication with the important social issues and movements of the immediate moment.

In Marc’s words:

“I experience God as a verb, not a noun. I experience art in the same way. The music doesn’t live on a flat disc, it lives in the thing it does to your hips. So it is with my writing. I compose for embodiment. I write words with the intent to live it through movement. At the end of Song of Solomon, [Toni] Morrison writes, ‘…if you surrender to the air, you can ride it.’ If words are my air, dance is my surrender. In the intersection of movement and text, the collapsed space for breath to speak is like a different kind of oxygen. I am intellectually piqued by the physical journey it takes to meet the spiritual place I wish to occupy.”

Tonight at the CFA Theater, audiences will have the opportunity to see excerpts of three of his major works, Word Becomes Flesh (2003); the break/s (2008); and his newest work, red, black and GREEN: a blues (2011).  Hope you can join us!

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: The Spoken World
Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 8pm

CFA Theater
Center for the Arts

Wesleyan University
$15 general public; $13 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff; $10 students

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Jazz Great Kenny Barron’s Trio in Crowell Concert Hall

We are delighted to welcome the magnificent jazz pianist Kenny Barron back to Wesleyan tonight with the Kenny Barron Trio (Barron will be joined by Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and Lee Pearson on drums). Barron was here in the eighties when his older brother, distinguished jazz saxophonist, Bill Barron was on the Wesleyan faculty.  Bill Barron arrived at Wesleyan in 1975 and started the Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra.  He served as a distinguished member of the music department faculty, as well as its chair, until his death in 1989.

Kenny Barron is quite simply one of those jazz greats you need to make a point of hearing live…just last year, the National Endowment for the Arts inducted him into its prestigious Jazz Masters class of 2010.  In his words:  “I don’t think of myself necessarily as an innovator. . . But what I have contributed to jazz is keeping a commitment to the honesty of the music. I never do anything that’s too slick, and I play what I feel. I believe in having fun, which took a long time to discover—to not take myself so seriously.”  As a composer, arranger and bandleader, the Philadelphia native has spent five decades at the forefront of the jazz piano aristocracy starting out as a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s Quintet from 1962 to 1966.   An in-demand sideman in his early days on the jazz scene playing with, among many others, Chet Baker, Ron Carter, Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson, it’s his maturation as a leader that has brought him well-deserved recognition as a true jazz master.

Barron is also known as a transformative teacher (he’s currently on the faculty at Julliard). In fact, those of you who know the work of Middletown’s own Noah Baerman, may not know that his mentor and teacher at Rutgers University was Kenny Barron (look for Noah’s tribute concert to Barron at the Russell House on October 16).

Barron’s visit to Wesleyan is made possible by the Center for the Arts partnership with the Capitol Region Education Council’s Center for Creative Youth, a program for gifted and talented students in the arts.  They’ll be cheering in the audience tonight.

Kenny Barron Trio
Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Wesleyan University
$20 general public; $18 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff; $10 students

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts