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2022-2023 Season Brochure
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
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Amaryllis & Belladonna
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
Amaryllis & Belladonna are two new, modular, and interlocking projects by Brooklyn-based guitarist, composer, and MacArthur fellow Mary Halvorson. Amaryllis is a sextet that filters Halvorson’s compositional explorations of melody, harmony, and counterpoint through the lens of six master improvisers, arranged in a way that allows the music to unfold differently every time. Belladonna is a set of compositions written specifically for Halvorson on guitar plus The Mivos Quartet. Highlighting Halvorson’s compositional voice in a fresh context, the music is augmented by Halvorson’s guitar throughout, adding elements of chance and improvisation. Halvorson says, “Amaryllis features some of my favorite musicians on the planet. I started writing the music in 2020, when the world slowed and most activities came to a halt, and all I had was my guitar, a pencil, some staff paper, and a computer. The pleasure of imagining what the music might sound like kept me sane during that time and gave me a reason to push forward.
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In the Fire
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
Through the creation of set pieces, aerial dance, inventive apparatuses, a choir (Opus 8 from Toronto), and projection, In the Fire captures, re-interprets and shares important stories from Treddenick’s father, who is also the last living founder of the Winnipeg Firefighter Museum. During the performance, all are invited into a reflective space to witness the evolution of a father/daughter relationship, to stir a sense of hopefulness in their own lives, and “light the fire.”
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Fúria
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
Why are we speaking? To whom are we speaking? About whom are we speaking? How are we speaking? From what place are we speaking? A visceral work from a revolutionary company, assembling nine dancers in a frenzied, morphing mass. A constant flow of overflowing imagination that visualizes. Nine young dancers develop a series of images inspired by the daily lives of Black people in Brazil, creating poetry from these broken abandoned nothings.
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Prince Hamlet
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
Ravi Jain’s remixed, reimagined, and bilingual Prince Hamlet features a cross-cultural, gender-bent cast – challenging traditional ideas of who can tell this story. Interweaving Shakespeare’s spoken text with heightened and poetic American Sign Language, this groundbreaking production creates a visually stunning retelling for both hearing and Deaf audiences. You’ve never experienced Hamlet like this before.
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NEHANDA
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
1890, Cecil John Rhodes, then Prime Minister of Cape Colonies, advanced the Union Jack past the Limpopo River, making way for further industrial development and encouraging colonialism and immigration. Three years later, these encounters resulted in conflicts with the Ndebele people residing in modern-day Zimbabwe. Again in 1896, led by the Shona, Africans took up arms against these European invaders. It took 94 years to finally overthrow the British; however, the work that began in 1896 continues today.
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ANΩNYMO
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
Greek choreographer Tzeni Argyriou’s ANΩNYMO draws from traditional folk dances from all over the world to articulate the social disconnect that has become all too familiar in recent times. The result is a celebration of human connection and shared joy. A journey back to a time when art was not something created by particular, named individuals but a practice that brought people – and kept communities – together. ANΩNYMO observes our lives through collective body memory, the experience of passing traditional dances on, and their complete transformation into a contemporary movement idiom.
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OMBRES PORTÉES
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
A visually cinematic take on the ghosts hiding in the shadows of our families and selves, Raphaëlle Boitel’s latest choreographic and acrobatic work plunges us into the heart of the unsaid. At the crossroads of circus, dance, and theatre, Ombre Portées surrounds K, an energetic but wounded young woman looking for answers, and on a Kafkian quest for identity among numerous members of her family. A vivid physical exploration of trauma, courage, and the volatility of our senses of balance and self, Ombre Portées takes inspiration from film endings including those of Requiem for a Dream, Brazil, Festen, and Parasite, and the bodies of work of Fritz Lang, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
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The Night Falls
Office of Arts + Cultural Programming and PEAK Performances at Montclair State University
All across America, people on the brink of despair begin to have the same nightmare. A song will not leave their heads. This dangerously beautiful music lures lost souls to a kitschy Floridian roadside attraction built around a sublime grotto, “home of the world’s eeriest echoes” and the concert hall of The Sirenettes. With choreography that dramatizes the leap of empathy between bodies and music that channels the polarities of surrender and resistance, The Night Falls shows the visceral power of art to brace us against the abyss.
PEAK Performances at Montclair State University today announces its 2022-2023 season, a series of works confronting a world of chaotic imbalance, acknowledging that only by facing the past and present can we move into the future. With community as a bedrock theme of their works and a fundamental element of many of their practices, featured artists often call on the collective to unveil unseen truths and transformative possibilities—with vivid and radical vocabularies of movement, language, and artistic expression. The season speaks to the organization’s consistent introduction of audiences into the imaginations of some of the world’s boldest international and American artists. The insight, provocation, curiosity, and beauty they find within these visions can expand their understanding of their world.
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