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  2017-2018 Season Brochure

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

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  Spinning

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe (“Anthracite Fields,” 2015) and “cello goddess” (The New Yorker) Maya Beiser honor the essential labor of spinning thread. “Spinning” celebrates the work once performed by hand by women. Music has long been a vital part of the craft — both as a propelling force and as a distraction. To pay homage to the human dignity of this work, Wolfe and Beiser create a sonic universe for three cellos and voice performed by Beiser with Melody Giron and Lavena Johanson featuring multimedia projections imagined by the innovative artist Laurie Olinder. In Beiser’s words, “I found in Julia’s music a rare quality — combining folk, rock and classical elements in a distinct and relentless energy. This collaboration is one that has been in our minds for many years, and we are thrilled to now embark on this journey together.”

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  Esta Breve Tragedia de la Carne

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  With Esta Breve Tragedia de la Carne (This Brief Tragedy of the Flesh), Peak Performances introduces audiences to the singular work of the confrontational Spanish writer, director and performance artist Angélica Liddell. All the major European festivals – d’Avignon and d’Automne in France, Vie in Italy, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in Switzerland – embrace Liddell with the adoration usually reserved for Romeo Castellucci and Robert Wilson. Esta Breve Tragedia epitomizes her willingness to put herself and her performers through intense physical challenges to explore politics and the human condition. Here she immerses herself in Emily Dickinson, who spent much of her life secluded in a room in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Having studied psychology as well as theater, Liddell fearlessly addresses sensitive issues such as intimacy and pain. Don’t miss this extraordinary artist in a rare U.S. appearance.

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  M Stabat Mater

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  “M”is the most common sound in the word for “mother” in languages all over the world. In this stunning tribute to motherhood, contemporary dance, set to baroque music, probes its joys and sorrows. While pregnant with her third child, emerging Israeli choreographer Inbal Oshman found inspiration in Pergolesi’s version of Stabat Mater, the 13th-century hymn about Mary’s vigil at the foot of the cross. Oshman’s dance explores the vulnerability and tenderness required of mothers, and the strength and ferocity that come with the territory. She borrows from the mythological mothers of history, including the Mary of Christianity, the dark and violent Hindu goddess Kali and the Four Matriarchs of the Old Testament: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater will be performed live on period instruments by New York Baroque Incorporated, one of the ensembles responsible for “the fast-growing vitality of the early music scene in New York.”

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  Leonora and Alejandro : La Maga y el Maestro

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  In 2016, Stacy Klein and her Double Edge Theatre dazzled Peak audiences with their acclaimed, kaleidoscopic The Grand Parade (of the 20th Century). They return in 2018 with the world premiere of Leonora and Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, a fantasia on the relationship between two remarkable artists: the Mexican painter, writer and feminist Leonora Carrington and the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. Drawing on the music, dance and magic realism of Latin American culture, Double Edge’s new project promises to be challenging, provocative and beautiful.

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  ink

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  Award-winning choreographer and TED Fellow Camille A. Brown brings her company and its irresistible energy to Peak Performances. ink, the final installation of her dance trilogy about culture, race, and identity, celebrates the rituals, gestural vocabulary, and traditions of the African diaspora while examining the culture of Black life that is often appropriated, rewritten or silenced. Using the rhythms and sounds of traditional African music mixed with blues, hip-hop, jazz, and swing, ink travels through time from the abolitionist movement to the Civil Rights struggle, from the Black Power movement to the emergence of hip-hop. Through self-empowerment, Black love, brotherhood, exhaustion and resilience, and community and fellowship, ink depicts the pedestrian interactions of individuals and relationships as grounds for accessing one’s innate super powers and finding liberation. Brown’s choreographic gifts and her inherent theatricality and musicality are tools that shape our understanding of the African American experience.

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  Shanghai Quartet with Yiwen Lu

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  Known worldwide for its passionate musicality, impressive technique and expansive repertoire, the Shanghai Quartet melds traditional Chinese folk music, masterpieces of Western musical literature and cutting-edge contemporary works. This renowned quartet continues its tradition of expanding the musical palette of its audiences by introducing Yiwen Lu, acclaimed young master of the erhu, a two-stringed instrument whose versatile, expressive tone is an essential element of Chinese folk music and culture. Lu’s virtuosity allows her to blend techniques and styles – modern and traditional, Eastern and Western –defying expectations for this “simple” instrument.

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  Le Sorelle Macaluso (The Sisters Macaluso)

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  Once upon a time in Sicily, there were seven sisters who lived in Palermo. An untimely death plunges the sisters into their own divine tragedy, this one created by Emma Dante, a ferocious Sicilian theater artist and award-winning writer, actor, producer and director of plays, operas and films. In her raucous, poetic fable, these vibrant, funny sisters are as likely to throw shoes or crucifixes at one another as they are to share secrets. They command the stage, quarrelling and reminiscing, in this empathetic and uncompromising look at the chains of family and tradition.

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  New Work for Goldberg Variations

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  In 2007, pianist Simone Dinnerstein rocked the music world with her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. She raised the money for the project herself and rented the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall for a concert. Her gamble paid off, with glowing reviews of her “expressive force” and “timeless, meditative, utterly audacious solo debut.” Now ready for a new challenge, Dinnerstein wanted to match the music with movement, so it was time to roll the dice again. She proposed her project to acclaimed choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Both women were intimidated by the challenge of reinterpreting Bach’s towering, beloved classic, but they decided their hesitation was the exact reason to proceed. “Working together we’ll invent our own world,” Tanowitz decided, “and create something inherently dangerous for both of us as artists.” The result is New Work for Goldberg Variations, with Dinnerstein center stage at the piano in expressive dialogue with the dancers moving all around her to Bach’s glorious music.

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  The Force of Things : An Opera for Objects

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  “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.

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  The Merchant of Venice

  Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University

  Karin Coonrod “looks for the flash in the actors’ eyes and listens for the music of the audience.” Now this internationally acclaimed director brings her groundbreaking production of Shakespeare’s most controversial play, The Merchant of Venice, to the US. Coonrod first staged this thorny masterpiece in 2016 in its original setting, the Jewish ghetto of Venice, to mark the 500th anniversary of its creation. Five actors of different races, creeds, nationalities, and genders play Shylock, the iconic Jewish moneylender at the center of the play. According to Coonrod, “these five actors, all of them very different, open up the play in a way that is both Jewish and universal.”