CFA Theater

Fall events include U.S. & New England Premieres, Navaratri Festival, Lucier Celebration

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Center for the Arts Fall 2011At a time when so many of us are turning to YouTube to see performances by our favorite artists, we can lose sight of what it’s like to experience live performance. This fall, the Center for the Arts offers you a wide range of performances and exhibitions that will connect you with some of the brightest minds in contemporary art-making, transport you to foreign lands, and inspire you to think about the world in new ways—and the performers will never be more than 69 feet away!

We recognize that it has become increasingly difficult to classify a work as strictly music, dance, theater, visual art, or film as more artists are blurring the boundaries among disciplines. So we have merged our visiting artist performances into a single Performing Arts Series. We hope this will lead you to cross the boundaries of your own comfort zone and discover new artists and art forms.

Highlights of the fall season include the American premiere of the ground-breaking Italian movement theater collective Dewey Dell and the return of Philadelphia’s Rennie Harris Puremovement, that has been a trailblazer in taking hip hop forms from the street to the concert stage for nearly twenty years. We’ll also host two New England premieres: the astoundingly brilliant throat-singers and musicians from Inner Mongolia, AnDa Union and, continuing our collaboration with the College of the Environment, we’ll welcome Water is Rising, a breathtaking performance by a group of 35 dancers and musicians from the Pacific Island atolls, the first islands predicted to be submerged due to climate change. In November, the Music Department and CFA join forces to celebrate Alvin Lucier, internationally renowned composer who has just retired after serving on our faculty for four decades. Alvin Lucier: A Celebration features a major symposium, concert series, film screenings and an exhibition curated by Andrea Miller-Keller.

With performances and exhibitions by visiting artists, students and faculty, there is an extraordinary amount of good work to see at Wesleyan this fall, with 60% offered free to the public or at ticket prices that make us one of the most affordable venues in the state. Tickets are on sale now online. Starting at 10am on Tuesday, August 16, you can call or visit the Wesleyan University Box Office at 860-685-3355 to receive a 10% discount on your purchase of four or more Performing Arts Series events (and if you buy six or more “Performing Arts Series” events, you’ll save 15%!) Starting August 16, you will also be able to buy subscription packages for both the 35th annual Navaratri Festival (a 15% savings) as well as the Alvin Lucier Celebration (a 25% savings!)

Please join us. We appreciate that you believe, as we do, in the power of the arts to add meaning to our lives and to remind us of the capacity of the human spirit. Thanks for making Wesleyan’s CFA your center for the arts.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Ballet from Boise, July 21 & 22

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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”

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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

Summer at the CFA

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Tickets for Kenny Barron Trio, Marc Bamuthi Joseph / The Living Word Project, and Trey McIntyre Project are now on sale! Click here to buy your tickets online.

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Thesis Theater This Week: Spotlight on Samantha Joy Pearlman ’11

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An interview with Samantha Joy Pearlman ’11 by Sarah Wolfe ‘12.

Devotedly Sincerely Yours
Devotedly Sincerely Yours

This Thursday, April 7 and Friday, April 8, the Center for the Arts will travel back to World War II to experience the life of an American woman who participated in the USO Camp Shows. The solo performance, titled Devotedly, Sincerely Yours: The Story of the USO, counts as the creative component for Samantha Pearlman’s senior thesis in the Theater Department. Sitting down with Pearlman last week, we discussed how she came to this topic, the history of the United Service Organizations (USO) Camp Shows, Inc., and the process involved in putting on a show at Wesleyan.

The story follows the style of the USO’s radio broadcasts, which featured Hollywood stars like Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Lena Horne and Bob Hope singing to American soldiers all over the world, as well as telling jokes and humorous anecdotes. Pearlman’s character and the host for Devotedly, Sincerely Yours is based on the career of Louise Buckley as a USO entertainer.   Pearlman came across the character through a letter Buckley wrote describing her experience as an entertainer.  Pearlman describes the find as, “an 8 page, single spaced letter, one of the most beautiful letters I’ve ever read, and she just poured her heart out about her experience overseas and what it was like living there. A lot of the text of my show is taken from the letter.”

Pearlman also draws on a variety of sources for the text of the performance, inspired by the work of playwright Charles Mee, who wrote Big Love, which Pearlman acted in her freshman year.  She comments that, “he works in collage and assemblage… I always kind of wanted to do something like that, and so this project for me was my chance to get my feet wet in creating some kind of piece of musical theater, and then also taking all the tools I’ve learned as an actress here.” Pearlman took Professor Ron Jenkin’s “Solo Performance” theater class which granted her the skills to create and star in this one-woman theatrical event.

Due to Pearlman’s strong musical background, she was able to challenge herself through this performance by utilizing her voice and musical theater abilities to express the broad range of emotions needed for a powerful show. The songs chosen come from wartime periods between 1915 and 1945.  She found these after long searches through the Music Division of the New York Public Library, Olin Library, and eBay purchases from “people who are auctioning off what’s in grandma’s attic, and have no idea what they have.”  Sorting through approximately 300 songs, she managed to narrow the numbers down to eight that will be performed as a part of Louise’s story.

It was easy to see Pearlman’s enthusiasm and love for the project while she spoke about the process. She spoke with exceptional ardor about the music, stating that it was the part of the performance she most looks forward to. She’s been working with senior Ian Coss, a banjo player, who Pearlman describes as an “amazingly talented, unbelievably dedicated music student”, and they have met together since last semester to compile and arrange the music for the performance. The show includes an eight piece, all-male band.  Each of the men in the ensemble play a soldier who might be watching and experiencing the performance. “I remember, the first band rehearsal [when] they played the opening fanfare of the show . . . I literally was just beaming, I couldn’t believe that this was happening.”

Pearlman, eager to share her work states, “I’m excited to have the opportunity to present my work and have a lot of fun with it, and hopefully make people think about American identity, American wars, and especially about being an American woman.” The show presents American culture and history through an artistic form that will present enthusiastic Wesleyan students.  Not to be missed, Devotedly, Sincerely Yours represents the end of Pearlman’s career at Wesleyan, but a stunning ode to what the time at Wesleyan can allow a student to create.

“Devotedly, Sincerely Yours” plays April 7 and 8 in the CFA Theater at 8pm. Admission is free, but tickets are required. There is a two ticket limit per person. Tickets are available on the day of each performance at the box office, located in the Usdan University Center, 45 Wyllys Avenue, or by calling (860) 685-3355.

The other ensemble members include Ian Coss ’11, Jack Gallagher ’12, William Frakner ‘14, Jacob Hiss ‘13, Myles Potters ‘12, Owen Callahan ‘12, Issac Silk ‘14, Daniel Moakley ‘13, and Zachary Rosen ‘11. “Devotedly, Sincerely Yours” is also inspired by, or takes texts from, Louise Buckley, Grace Drysdale, Maxine Andrews, Ann Miller, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Arch Oboler, Robert B. Westbrook, Tampax Incorporated, Woman Power Campaigns, the National Center for PTSD, Four Jills and a Jeep, the USO Camp Show Inc. “Guide to the Foxhole Circuit,” Command Performance, Mail Call, BBC Radio Broadcasts, and the USO Camp Show Inc. Publicity Records (1941-1945), among others.

News about Eiko & Koma, Brian Stewart and KaWa Hula

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First, I want to thank everyone for enlivening this blog with your opinions about the work that you’ve seen at the Center for the Arts over the past month.  All of us at the CFA appreciate your comments…keep it up!  There’s nothing better than an engaged audience!

I had a wonderful trip to New York on Saturday to see the latest iteration of the Eiko & Koma Retrospective Project at New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center.  Sam Miller ’75, the producer of the project, and Program Director of Wesleyan’s new Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, introduced the work and two members of ICPP’s faculty (Judy Hussie-Taylor, Danspace Project and Doryun Chung, MOMA) gave an introductory talk and then we were ushered into an adjacent studio to view the installation.  If you saw Raven at Zilkha in November of 2009 or at the CFA Theater last summer, you would see how Naked has grown out of that work.  The scorched canvas pressed with rice and salt now surrounds the work and the audience.  Eiko and Koma lie together on another canvas laden with earth and raven feathers.  To me, the work is about life and death, aging bodies, memory, dreams, proximity and distance.  It is visually stunning and completely captivating.  The New York Times thought so too.

I saw Evelyn Israel ’10 and Julia Cheng ’08 in the audience and chatted with them after we saw the piece.  They, too, were moved and excited to see the long line of people waiting to get in.

Those of you who attended the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s Time Has Set the Table for Tea in February will remember Brian Stewart, Professor and Chair of Wesleyan’s Physics Department, who hosted of the tea alongside the character of Edith Warner.  You’ll be interested to know that after his highly acclaimed performance, Brian went on tour with the Dance Exchange!  The company performed The Matter of Origins (which includes the stage work as Act I and the tea as Act II) at Montclair State University in New Jersey last week, and Brian reprised his role as host of the tea for three sold-out houses.

KaWa Hula: Hula Through Time
KaWa Hula: Hula Through Time

Finally, please don’t miss KaWa Hula: Hula Through Time on Friday night.  This is the first time we have featured traditional Hawaiian music and dance in Crowell Concert Hall.  The group of glorious dancers and their jovial master Kawika Alfiche are from San Francisco and received a wonderful write up in the Times for their performance at Symphony Space last week.

Our own Kehaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, gives the pre-show talk at 7:15pm.

Click here for more information or to purchase tickets online.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Viver Brasil performances to feature sacred and secular Brazilian dance, capoeira, and percussion

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An interview with Eric Galm (Ph.D.’04)  by Center for the Arts Intern and Music Major Lucia Strother ’11

In anticipation of this weekend’s upcoming performances by Viver Brasil, I spoke with Eric Galm, Wesleyan graduate and professor of music and ethnomusicology at Trinity College. Galm is an expert in Brazilian music, and provided some valuable background information for Friday and Saturday’s performances.

Viver Brasil
Photo by Jorge Vismara

A large portion of Brazilian music and dance has emerged from the music and dance of the African diaspora, and in Brazil, music and dance are virtually inseparable. Eric highlighted two categories of Brazilian tradition that illustrate this connection and will be represented in this weekend’s performances. Sacred music and dancing, known as candomblé, expresses African-derived religion that is still found in Brazil. There is also a lot of African-derived social dancing, generally known as batuque (the generic label applied by the Portuguese during early years in Brazil).

Later, the samba emerged through a mix of European dance styles and variants of these African dances, and is now the most popular form of music and dance in Brazil. Samba and its accompanying music was popularized in the 1930s, when dictator Getúlio Vargas made it the “official dance” of Brazil in an attempt to unify the regionally segmented nation.

Viver Brasil’s performance this weekend will extract motifs, phrases and elements from these traditional forms, and transpose them to the stage using the choreography and storytelling of modern dance. Eric previewed the program of Viver Brasil’s performance and identified that the first half will be based on sacred dance forms, while the second half will feature several types of secular dance.

In the first half, dances will invoke specific deities from Afro-Brazilian religious tradition. Eric elaborated on the way the religious storytelling is incorporated in Brazilian music and dance:

“Each of the spirits have their own set of songs and musical rhythms. For example, Xango is the god of thunder and guardian of the drums. He’s represented by the colors red and white, and dances with a double-headed hatchet or axe. There are a certain set of markers that identify him, and a strict set of songs and rhythms that make up his music.”

Therefore, anyone steeped in these religious expressions would be able to identify a particular deity and follow the storyline.

Each of the secular traditions that will be featured in the performance’s second half has its own extensive body of work with songs to choose from and adapt to the stage. One piece, In Motion, will feature capoeira, an “Afro-Brazilian martial arts dance game.” Eric mentioned that he has seen other modern dance representations of capoeira and been disappointed by the decision of those companies to eliminate the one-on-one, combat element that is so central to the art.

Audiences should expect a lot of percussion, much of it improvised. Sometimes, as in the case of the berimbau, a one-stringed percussion instrument, the percussion will actually inform the dancers’ movement. The music will also feature female vocalists and melodic instruments like flute or saxophone. I’m excited to see the variety these performances will offer, and happy to have the opportunity to experience a category of world music that is under-represented at Wesleyan.

Friday, March 25 & Saturday, March 26, 8pm
Pre-performance talk by Debra Cash in the CFA Hall at 7:15pm before the Friday performance
CFA Theater
$23 general public, $19 seniors, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students, $8 Wesleyan students

Three in One: A Celebration of Dance at Wesleyan

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Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, A Dance Company
Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, A Dance Company

This Saturday, we welcome three exceptional dance companies to the Center for the Arts Theater. For those who have been coming to the Breaking Ground Dance Series, you’ll remember that in 2004, we commissioned Ronald K. Brown/Evidence’s Come Ye, set to and inspired by the music of Nina Simone. In 2007, we presented the world premiere of One Shot, an evening-length work inspired by photographs of Pittsburgh native Charles “Teenie” Harris.  He was known as “One Shot” because whenever he was given a photo assignment, it only took him one shot to get “the” picture. This Saturday, Brown returns to teach a master class in the afternoon and that evening, his company will perform excerpts of One Shot, as well as Ife/My Heart.  Ife/My Heart was created in 2005 for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and draws on themes of faith and inspiration.

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet
The Suzanne Farrell Ballet

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet will follow, presenting a program of duets choreographed by George Balanchine. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet has been the Kennedy Center‘s own ballet company, housed in Washington, D.C. since 2001. The company exists to realize the vision of Artistic Director Suzanne Farrell, with over 30 ballets by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Maurice Béjart in its repertoire.

Gallim Dance
Gallim Dance

Finally, the Center for the Arts is delighted to be awarding the Mariam McGlone Emerging Choreographer Award to Andrea Miller, artistic director of Gallim Dance. Wesleyan has a long history with Miller: when Andrea was a student at Juilliard (and home for the weekend in Branford where her mother lives), she took classes at DanceMasters. Little did we know then that she would grow up to be an acclaimed choreographer!  After Andrea graduated from Juilliard, she went to Israel to dance with Ohad Naharin’s Ensemble Batsheva, and a few years later returned to New York to develop her choreographic work and to found Gallim. In just four years, the company has distinguished itself for its innovation and virtuosity. On Saturday, the company will present excerpts from I Can See Myself In Your Pupil, the work they presented to rave reviews this past June at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.

Please join us to celebrate the breadth and wonder of dance at the twelfth annual DanceMasters Weekend!

DanceMasters Showcase Performance
Saturday, March 5, 8pm
CFA Theater
Tickets: $25 general public; $19 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students

Click here for more information about the DanceMasters master classes

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Paris-based Compagnie Vincent Mantsoe to Celebrate Story of Khoi-San People at Dance Performances This Weekend

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This Saturday and Sunday, legendary choreographer Vincent Mantsoe will bring his Paris-based company to the CFA Theater to present two performances of his newest work, SAN. Known for its fusion of traditional South African movement and street dance forms, the company has been praised by the New York Times for a “…sophistication and beauty in the way traditional African dance motifs…are woven together with more sinuous abstract movements.”

SAN celebrates and tells the story of the Khoi-San people, hunter-gatherers and aboriginal inhabitants of the Southern African plains, commonly referred to as Bushmen. Mantsoe writes:

“Restricted from the open land, which has slowly but consistently been converted to farmland or taken into possession for mining, the San have been silenced, fenced out, subjected to hangings intended to break their spirit, and endured the terrors of genocide… SAN asks how, in the face of change, which spreads like wild roots, we can sustain the freedom to express our sense of beauty, emotions and attitudes without shame or guilt of who we are.”

Interestingly, this past Thursday marked a major victory in the Khoi-San’s defense of their rights, when Botswana’s Court of Appeal revoked a 2010 ruling that had denied the Kalahari Bushmen access to water on their own lands. (More information on this legislation is available online here). 

The themes of SAN take on new meaning with this hopeful news, and this weekend’s performances by Compagnie Vincent Mantsoe should be especially moving in light of this important milestone.

Saturday, February 5, 8pm & Sunday, February 6, 3pm
Pre-performance talk by Debra Cash in the CFA Hall at 7:15pm before the Saturday performance
CFA Theater
$21, $18 seniors, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students, $8 Wesleyan students

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts