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  2018-2019 Season Brochure

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

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  Democracy in America

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

  Romeo Castellucci is one of Europe’s best-known directors, a firebrand known for productions that are as thought-provoking as they are visually stunning. He returns to Peak Performances with the American premiere of “Democracy in America,” freely inspired by the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Castellucci conjures majorettes who stir the crowd’s enthusiasm for democracy in America, colonial settlers who confound the native Americans, and a puritan couple who struggle to farm a barren land. He asks us to consider the empty promises of a political system steeped in Biblical egalitarianism rather than the concept of tragedy so essential to ancient Greek democracy, the dangers of majority rule, and the inherent violence that springs from religious puritanism and territorial conquests. His challenging, soul-stirring brand of theatrical magic transposes these painful, profound ideas into an enticing, vibrant, celebratory work of art.

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  Thank You For Coming : Space

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

  The final work in Faye Driscoll’s three-part Thank You For Coming series, Space is an intimate shared performance, and a liberatory ritual that confronts life’s most notable transition. Alone with the audience, Driscoll constructs a temporary world upheld by pulleys, ropes and the weightiness of others, to invoke the sensations of absence. At the center of the work is the human body—built for action, self contained, and driven by its longing for the felt world. Space calls forth new presences and offers an enlivened contemplation of our shared conclusion. Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming series, extends the sphere of influence of performance, creating a communal space where everything is questioned, heightened, and palpable.

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  Shanghai Quartet with Haochen Zhang

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

  Since his gold medal win at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2009, 27-year-old Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang has captivated audiences with his deep musical sensitivity, fearless imagination, and spectacular virtuosity. In 2017, he received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 2018, he made his Carnegie Hall solo recital debut. Zhang joins the Shanghai Quartet for Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Bright Sheng’s Dance Capriccio and the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34. Don’t miss this “fiery piano virtuoso” (San Francisco Chronicle) recognized as “a star in the making.” (Seattle Times)

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  Elizabeth, The Dance

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

  Imagine a world in which classical ballet, modern dance icon Martha Graham, and questions of cultural appropriation collide with clowns, basketball players, and hula dance, and you may begin to grasp the creative force, intelligence, and wit of choreographer Ann Carlson. In “Elizabeth, the dance,” she pays homage to “the visionaries and teachers” of modern dance history. With movement both formal and physically awkward, deliciously surprising and joyfully restrained, Carlson has created an astonishing tribute to modern dance and to the joy of being human.

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  When Angels Fall

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

  Raphaëlle Boitel began her career as a young girl when she and her family ran away to join the circus. A mesmerizing contortionist and aerialist, Ben Brantley of The New York Times called her “truly ravishing.” Peak Performances introduced American audiences to Boitel’s boundless talents in 2016 with her luminous directorial debut “The Forgotten.” In her new work, “When Angels Fall,” her agile, athletic performers create a rugged, ethereal dreamscape at the crossroads of circus, dance, theater, and cinema. Everything once organic has been replaced by machines, and humans’ very existence depends on making themselves passive, conformist cogs in a massive engine controlled by the manipulators who watch from above. A heroic figure rises to resist the manipulators and bring fresh hope to the survivors. In Boitel’s world, aerial feats and theatrical invention are the building blocks for a work of fantasy, poetry, and hope.

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  Smashed

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

  What do you get when you toss together nine jugglers, 80 apples, and four crockery sets? “Smashed,” a tea party you’ll never forget, created by Gandini Juggling, the thinking person’s jugglers. Nine well-dressed, perfectly respectable young people take the stage and, under the guise of a quaint afternoon tea, engage in the dark art of juggling. Inspired by the work of Pina Bausch, the Gandinis display a virtuosic blend of skills, precision, and theatricality that leaves the audience breathless, while the performers remain as cool as cucumber sandwiches. Created in 1992 by renowned juggler Sean Gandini and champion gymnast Kati Ylä-Hokkala, Gandini Juggling is at the vanguard of the explosive contemporary circus scene. According to The Guardian, [“Smashed”] is as terrifyingly vicious as it is funny.”

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  Cut the Sky

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

  Is it a rock concert? Modern dance? A plea for environmental action and the rights of Indigenous peoples? Cut the Sky by Marrugeku, Australia’s preeminent dance theater ensemble of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, is all three. As soul singer Ngaire belts out tunes ranging from Nick Cave to Buffalo Springfield Australian “post-soul” music, Marrugeku’s “incredibly expressive and visceral” dancers (The Guardian) form a band of climate change refugees struggling to survive another extreme weather event. Moving backward and forward in time, Cut the Sky meditates on humanity’s frailty in the face of its own actions.

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  Field

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

  Alastair Macaulay of The New York Times calls choreographer Liz Gerring’s mind, “warmly modernist: scientific but also passionately and infectiously in love with movement.” Gerring returns to the Kasser with “field,” the third in a trilogy of works created in collaboration with composer Michael J. Schumacher and designer Robert Wierzel, all commissioned and produced by Peak Performances. In Field, Gerring and her team conceive a place in which the elements — movement, sound, and light — combine to envelope and engage the audience, and where her magnificent dancers test their the physical limits.

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  Thank You For Coming : Attendance and Play

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

  Faye Driscoll is an award-winning choreographer and director whose work has been described as “creative, awkward, hilarious, goofy, surprising, rowdy, randy, chaotic, and sweet.” (Berkshire Eagle) Thank You for Coming is her playful, moving, mind-boggling trilogy about “how we are all wrapped up in each other, whether we like it or not.” In October, see the first two parts of the trilogy; then come back in April for the world premiere of the trilogy’s final installation.

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  All Beethoven : Celebrating the Shanghai Quartet’s 35th Anniversary

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

  Renowned for its passionate musicality, impressive technique, and distinctive blend of styles, the Shanghai Quartet has become one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles. The “utterly sublime” (The New York Times) ensemble returns for two enchanting engagements. The Shanghai Quartet is the quartet-in-residence at Montclair State University’s Cali School of Music.

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  The National Anthems : Music of Lang, Shaw and Hearne

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

  Where does patriotism end and nationalism begin? Are there universal values that transcend national borders? The Crossing, hailed as an “ardently angelic” chamber choir by The Los Angeles Times, considers these difficult questions with works by three powerhouse composers: Pulitzer Prize winners David Lang and Caroline Shaw and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ted Hearne. The strings players of ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) magnify the impact of this stirring and timely concert.

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  Hatuey : Memory of Fire

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

  HATUEY: Memory of Fire is a soaring Cuban-Yiddish opera, a love story set in a Havana nightclub in 1931. Oscar, a young Jewish writer who escaped the pogroms in the Ukraine to make a new home in Cuba, falls in love with Tinima, a beautiful singer and passionate revolutionary of Taino descent. As Oscar pens an epic poem about Cuba’s legendary 16th century freedom fighter, Hatuey, Tinima draws him into her fight against the corrupt Machado regime. This vibrant fusion of Afro-Cuban and Yiddish music and culture is also a powerful celebration of freedom performed in English, Yiddish, and Spanish with English supertitles.