2018-2019 Season
2018-19
NATIONAL SAWDUST – BROOKLYN, NY
Art of the In-Between: Dia de los Muertos and Donkey Jaw Bone
In ART OF THE IN-BETWEEN the body meets borders in two dance productions choreographed by Karole Armitage and performed by Armitage Gone! Dance in celebration of New York's Mexico Now Festival. Dancers move between divergent worlds, celebrating Mexico’s rich mixture of indigenous and European cultures, to explore the morphing self.
The evening opens with Dia de los Muertos – a joyful, subversive comedy of screwball surrealism for a gang of dancing skeletons.
Donkey Jaw Bone follows, inspired by Mexico’s theatrical wrestling form, Lucha Libre sitting at the border of sport, dance and ritual with live music performed on pre-Columbian instruments. Invoking connections between sometimes contradictory domains: rural and urban, tradition and modernity, ritual and parody, machismo and feminism, politics and spectacle. The pre-Columbian instruments include the teponaztli (a pitched slit-log drum) and the quijada (a donkey jawbone). The dance draws on Balanchine’s Agon, ancient and contemporary minimalism, drag queen style and re-enacts documentary Lucha wrestling matches.
Live music is performed by Juan Lucero and Peter Basil Bogdanos with Armitage Gone! Dancers Ahmaud Culver, Megumi Eda, Sierra French, Alonso Guzman, Yusaku Komori and Cristian Laverde-Koenig. Light design is by resident designer, Clifton Taylor.
October 20, 2018 - 7:30pm
October 20, 2018 - 10:00pm
PARAMOUNT THEATRE - BOSTON, MA
Schoenberg in Hollywood
Armitage directs and choreographs Schoenberg in Hollywood, a new Boston Lyric Opera commission with music by Tod Machover and a libretto by Simon Robson. Schoenberg in Hollywood is inspired by the life of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who spent his final decades in Los Angeles after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933.Upon settling in Los Angeles by way of Boston, Schoenberg found himself at a crossroads. He was introduced to Harpo Marx, looked for ways to make his work accessible to a wider public (he considered, then rejected, a commission to compose music for eventual blockbuster film The Good Earth), rediscovered his heritage, and stuck to his artistic guns even when the lure of greater fame called.
The production will be presented at the Paramount Center’s Robert J. Orchard Stage, featuring baritone Omar Ebrahim in the title role.
JAPAN SOCIETY – NY, NY
You Took a Part of Me
Japan Society April 12-13 7:30
333 E 47th St, New York, NY 10017
Tickets are selling fast! Tickets
You Took a Part of Me is inspired by the 15th Century Noh play, Nonomiya. It explores erotic entanglement, unresolved attachments and the search for harmony that are hallmarks of Ghost Noh Theater. It feature live, commissioned music by Reiko Yamada. The lead role, by Armitage’s longtime collaborator, Megumi Eda, highlights sinuous, erotic movement executed with ferocious intensity in a dream-like state.
Megumi Eda Photo Julieta Cervantes
Choreography: Karole Armitage
Advisor: Melissa McCormick (Harvard professor Japanese culture)
Composer: Reiko Yamada
Flute, alto flute, koto, shinobue, shamisen, nutshell perucssion, electronics: Yuki Isami
Costume Design: Peter Speliopoulos
Hair Design: Danilo
Lighting Design: Clifton Taylor
Sound Engineer: Seth Torres
Dancers: Megumi Eda, Sierra French, Alonso Guzman, Cristian Laverde-Koenig
Megumi Eda Photo Julieta Cervantes
MORE INFORMATION
Noh, the oldest continuingly performed theatrical form on the planet, is a rigorous, ritualistic form of dance theater. Like many American artists including Bob Wilson and Bill Viola, Noh’s dreamlike exploration of time, memory, and the gaps that give the audience room to invest their own imagination, has played an important role in Armitage’s practice.
You Took A Part of Me, is performed by three dancers, a transformer known as a koken and a musician. Using various dance vocabularies that adhere to the austerity and minimalism of Noh, the dancers conjure up the past using calligraphic, sinuous movement based on the curvilinear paths of classical Japanese calligraphy. The dance gradually becomes thorny, ugly, as limbs are locked into contorted entanglements; knots from which there is no escape and no definition of individuality, but which remain erotically charged. In a puppet-like sequence, every gesture is initiated and controlled without physical contact. Though it all feels like a dream, the rhythm accelerates and the haunting ceases. The journey concludes in harmony, true to Noh form.
The performance area consists of 3 locations - two of which are in the midst of the audience. The first is the “Mirror Room”, traditionally a room where the performers look into a mirror, put on their mask and, through intense concentration, transform. This room is never seen by Noh audiences, however in You Took A Part of Me, it will be used as a place of visible transformation. Connecting the Mirror Room to the stage is the Hanamachi or runway. Most of the action takes place on a wooden stage rising a few inches above the larger proscenium area. The musician performs at the side, on the lower level.
You Took a Part of Me is made in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and is supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Howard Gilman Foundation, Helen F. Whitaker Fund & Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and with funding from The Armitage Foundation New Works Fund.
This event is part of Carnegie Hall’s Migrations: The Making of America festival.
WOMEN / CREATE: A Festival of Dance: NY NY June 11-16
