2016-2017 Season Brochure

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2016-2017/1000/thumbnail.jp

2015-2016 Season Brochure

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2015-2016/1000/thumbnail.jp

Aubade

For his entire career, Douglas Dunn has done it his way – all the way. Now, witness his next surprising pivot forward. Aubade, his new dance/theater piece, is all about apprehending mortality and the unstoppable progress of time. All the senses engage with scenic and video design, music, and lyrics by noted artists Charles Atlas, Steven Taylor, and Anne Waldman, respectively. As if that wasn’t enough, Douglas Dunn’s amazing company expands to even greater numbers by casting six Montclair State College of the Arts dance students. The title refers to the classic “aubade”, the opposite of a serenade. At its heart, the aubade is a morning song of love won and lost, and of endless possibilities both bitter and sweet.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2013-2014/1008/thumbnail.jp

The Force of Things : An Opera for Objects

“Tones made tactile, objects made audible, noise made beautiful.” That’s how The New York Times describes Ashley Fure’s work. In her world, all materials are potent and active with lives of their own. We often take things for granted, but Fure does not. She has given them their own voice and consciousness in The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects. This wordless drama, created with her architect brother Adam Fure and International Contemporary Ensemble, “probes the animate vitality of matter.” The audience sits beneath a canopy of familiar and exotic objects, while performers spur them into action and singers, like the sirens of mythology, shout and whisper warnings, luring the audience into an entirely new way of listening.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2017-2018/1002/thumbnail.jp

Look Who\u27s Coming to Dinner

Stefanie Batten Bland creates performance at the intersection of dance-theater and installation, questioning contemporary and historical cultural symbolism and the complexities of human relationships. Inspired by the 1967 Stanley Kramer film starring Sydney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy, Look Who’s Coming to Dinner pays tribute to those who paved the way toward acceptance in love and life. Set around a transformative dinner setting, seven dance-theatre artists excavate interlaced universal traumas through imagery and ritual as they seek a seat at the table.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2021-2022/1002/thumbnail.jp

2012-2013 Season Brochure

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2012-2013/1000/thumbnail.jp

La Madonna

A Baroque celebration of Mother’s Day and motherhood! Repast Baroque Ensemble, a group of “practiced period perfectionists” whose articulate, spirited playing has won rave reviews, has created a program of works in praise of motherhood. From Biber’s Annunciation sonata to Purcell’s Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation, all the works on this program, played by some of the finest instrumentalists on period instruments, will honor the mothers among us.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2014-2015/1013/thumbnail.jp

doug elkins choreography, etc

doug elkins choreography, etc. was established in summer 2009 as a way to brand independent dance, theater, and teaching projects for Doug Elkins. The umbrella has allowed for the creation of three award-winning works: Fräulein Maria, a loving deconstruction of The Sound of Music that began at DANCE NOW Joe’s Pub in 2006 and, with the addition of theater directors Barbara Karger and Michael Preston, toured throughout North America from 2009 to 2012; Mo(or)town/Redux, a movement conversation with Shakespeare’s Othello and José Limón’s seminal The Moor’s Pavane set to a Motown-inspired score (named by Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times as one of the Top Ten Dance Performances of the year); and Hapless Bizarre, a 2013 National Dance Project selection. The original Doug Elkins Dance Company was founded in 1988 with Ben Munisteri, David Neumann, Lisa Nicks, and Jane Weiner and debuted at Dance Theater Workshop (DTW)’s 11 O’Clock News series. The company disbanded following 15 years of national and international touring and multiple New York seasons at The Joyce Theater, The New Victory, 92nd Street Y Harkness Center for Dance, and Dance Theater Workshop.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2016-2017/1007/thumbnail.jp

The Matter of Origins

Did you believe the world would implode on the day CERN’s Large Hadron Collider revved up? Liz Lerman’s new work explores the physics of beginnings and why afternoon tea and chocolate cake may be the reason we live in dread of the apocalypse. When J. Robert Oppenheimer (the American Prometheus) took a break from harnessing energy for mass destruction, he had tea and cake with Edith Warner, who lived near Los Alamos. Liz Lerman has made a distinguished career of bringing scientific elements together with the poetry of the mind (Ferocious Beauty: Genome). Act I travels from Marie Curie’s lab to CERN and then through the Hubble telescope. Act II is a 360-degree experience of dance, media, cake, and tea shared in real time with each member of the audience, as Lerman unpacks the origin of matter one bite of cake at a timehttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2010-2011/1014/thumbnail.jp

Wayfaring Stranger

Lionheart expertly joins classics from the Medieval and Renaissance vocal repertoire with new work by the most innovative composers of contemporary vocal music. In Wayfaring Stranger, the group joins forces with four members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) for the East Coast premiere of composer Ingram Marshall’s Psalmbook. Accompanying Marshall’s meditation on early American psalmody is an eclectic mix of music spanning more than 800 years ranging from sacred chant to Appalachian folk melodies. Works by Phil Kline and Laura Nyro are also highlighted in this ode to restless wanderlust.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-performances-2012-2013/1007/thumbnail.jp