The Obie Award-winning Target Margin Theater’s world premiere production of Show/Boat: A River, a daring reconsideration of the seminal musical Show Boat, reframes the original 1927 book and score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II for today’s audience.
Artist Florentina Holzinger returns to NYU Skirball with the North American premiere of TANZ (2019), completing her trilogy that began with Recovery and Apollon. With an all-female cast of twenty to over eighty-years-old performers who represent different dance backgrounds, TANZ is a quest for perfection in an ephemeral world, during which the gross is transformed into the sublime.
Award-winning French actress Isabelle Huppert gives a tour de force performance in this remarkable production, directed and designed by the American theatre visionary Robert Wilson. Mary Said What She Said charts the life and torments of Mary Stuart, the sovereign whose passions cost her a crown.
The International Contemporary Ensemble performs work by and with four composer-performers from the renowned experimental music collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Composer-performers from both collectives will work together to create exciting, all-new hybrid compositional-improvisative works.
Blending together the savagely comic discourse of Adrienne Truscott (Wild Bore, Asking For It) with the slick dramaturgy of the internationally renowned theatre company Brokentalkers (The Examination, Have I No Mouth, The Blue Boy), MASTERCLASS is a parody like no other – uncovering truths about privilege, power and the hold they have over our so-called great artists and the positions and opportunities they are granted.
In this new work, choreographer Reggie Wilson is boldly reclaiming foundational ideas from some of his early, more gestural works. Investigation of his early movements have opened new perspectives on and provoked questions, responses and surprises that are timely. Wilson’s inclination to reclaim seems to be pointing a way, offering a choice of how to get through these frenetic times more (w)holistically, especially after the impacts and containment that the recent pandemic has had on our minds, bodies and spirits.
Four bodies, given over to the dance, reveal what has taken refuge behind the strangely opaque skin: muscle, water, breath, energy, an outlook on life, so alive and aware of the other, in spite of or maybe because of a need to not be entirely alone. This remounting of Amour, acide et noix speaks of solitude but also and, most specifically, of the infinite tenderness of touch, the harshness of life, and the desire for avoidance or escape from these bodies, often so heavy.
Seán Curran Company makes its NYU Skirball debut with two works: the world premiere of PATH, a 30-minute work reflecting on the phenomenon of the Camino de Santiago — the ancient Catholic pilgrimage route across northern Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia – and Curran’s own spiritual wayfaring; and Everywhere All the Time (2018), which explores the relationship of humans with the natural environment.
The story of The Employees unfolds in an undetermined near future, on a spaceship carrying people and humanoid robots. All crew members are subject to cold, bureaucratic discipline that is seemingly pointless. Under these extreme conditions, a closed community is forced to confront questions about the differences between the human and the non-human, and about the essence of consciousness.
Russian anarchist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 critique of capitalism, The Conquest of Bread, is the inspiration for this special May Day choral performance by Ethan Philbrick, featuring an eclectic assortment of singers—grassroots organizers, professional vocalists, wayward performance artists—to vocalize excerpts of Kropotkin’s 19th century work and intone his often repeated call: “Well-Being for All!”