Welcome to Lincoln Center Festival 2010. We Have Searched the World to Bring You Some of the Best the Performing Arts Have to Offer
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07-15 Disappearing:Gp 3.qxt 7/7/10 12:55 PM Page 1 Sponsor Welcome to Lincoln Center Festival 2010. We have searched the world to bring you some of the best the performing arts have to offer. Over the 18 days of this month’s Festival, we present 45 performances by artists and ensembles from 12 countries, and expand our venues to include a new site on Governors Island. Simon McBurney’s theater company, Complicite, It is always a pleasure to present innovative returns for its fourth Festival appearance. Known work from the world of dance, and wonderful to for pioneering works, their newest endeavor, welcome back the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane A Disappearing Number , embraces the universal Dance Company. Bill has never been one to shy relevance of math and the link between two away from difficult subjects, and his Fondly Do very different people—a Cambridge professor We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray is an inspiring and a young clerk from Madras who is either a and emotionally wrenching work. Dancer and genius or completely mad. choreographer Saburo Teshigawara, who made his Lincoln Center Festival debut in 2006, brought Two dynamic directors give new life to classics back his laser-like focus for the compelling one- from literature and film at our newest perfor - man tour-de-force Miroku , and Pichet Klunchun mance venue. An industrial warehouse on brings his brilliant company from Bangkok for Governors Island is the dramatic backdrop for Chui Chai . The title, meaning “transformation,” the North American premieres of Peter Stein’s is as much a metaphor for Pichet’s own mod - marathon adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel ernization of Thai classical dance as it is a The Demons and Toneelgroep Amster-dam’s description of the Ramayana, an Indian epic on Teorema , based on the film by Pier Paolo which it is based. Pasolini and directed by Ivo van Hove. Georgian writer, director, and master puppeteer If we had a musical survivors series, it would Rezo Gabriadze returns with an encore of his undoubtedly include three groups making elegant and elegiac The Battle of Stalingrad . Festival debuts this month: The Blind Boys of Puppet theater for adults, it mixes humor and Alabama, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, heartbreak to tell the story of one of the most and Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking devastating battles of World War II. Orchestra. The Blind Boys have inspired musi - cians and music lovers of all tastes for decades, We take an unprecedented look at the complete and over three nights we are celebrating their work of 20th-century musical maverick Edgard contribution to the American music scene. Varèse with a two-night retrospective. A true Benin’s Orchestre Poly-Rythmo and Sarajevo’s pioneer, Varèse longed to “liberate sound” to No Smoking Orchestra are hugely successful in reflect in music the immense technological their homelands but have only recently burst changes of the last century, and the forces of onto the international scene. Both made their the New York Philharmonic, International Con- U.S. debuts at the Festival. temporary Ensemble, S o¯ Percussion, Musica Sacra, and the Oratorio Society reveal his suc - cess . With the Festival debut of Germany’s Wuppertal Opera and the North American pre - miere of Salvatore Sciarrino’s La porta della legge , we continue to celebrate composers who break with convention. A master of harmonics and structure, Sciarrino challenges all pre-con - ceived notions of what opera can be. I am pleased that you are joining us and hope that you will visit often throughout the month. Nigel Redden A scene from A Disappearing Number Director Photographer credit: Robbie Jack Lincoln Center Festival 07-15 Disappearing:Gp 3.qxt 7/7/10 12:55 PM Page 2 Lincol n Cente r Festiva l 2010 Complicite A Disappearing Number Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney Devised by the Company NEW YORK PREMIERE Director Simon McBurney July 15 –18 Original Music Nitin Sawhney DAVID H. KOCH THEATER Design Michael Levine There will be no intermission Lighting Paul Anderson Sound Christopher Shutt Projection Sven Ortel Costumes Christina Cunningham Major support for the Lincoln Center Festival presentation of A Disappearing Number is provided by Jennie and Richard DeScherer. Support provided by Isilon Systems. Lincoln Center Festival 2010 is made possible in part with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. A Disappearing Number is a co-production of Complicite, barbicanbite07, Ruhrfestspiele, Wiener Festwochen, and Holland Festival, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth. Sponsor 07-15 Disappearing:Gp 3.qxt 7/7/10 12:55 PM Page 3 Lincol n Cente r Festiva l 2010 Cast G.H. Hardy David Annen Al Cooper Firdous Bamji Aninda Rao Paul Bhattacharjee Tabla player Hiren Chate Mother/University Cleaner/Dancer Divya Kasturi Surita Bhogaita/Barbara Jones Chetna Pandya Ruth Minnen Saskia Reeves Srinivasa Ramanujan/Dancer Shane Shambhu Other parts played by members of the company Associate Director Douglas Rintoul Production Manager Jamie Maisey Company Stage Manager Cath Binks Technical Stage Manager Rod Wilson Stage Managers Emma Cameron , Ian Andlaw Relights Matt Haskins Lighting Operator Richard Godin Sound Operator Helen Atkinson Projection Operator Martin Dewar Rigging and Automation Nick Campbell for Principal Projects Automation Technician Nigel Shilton Wardrobe Mistress Donna Richards Production Photography Joris-Jan Bos , Robbie Jack Producer Judith Dimant Literary Associate Ben Power Artistic Collaborator Victoria Gould Associate Director, Original Production Catherine Alexander Associate Sound Kay Basson Associate Projection Finn Ross Math Consultant Marcus du Sautoy A Disappearing Number is in part inspired by G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology with forward by C.P. Snow. Complicite would like to thank Cambridge University Press for granting permission to use material from these texts in the production. A Disappearing Number received its world premiere at the Theatre Royal Plymouth in March 2007 and toured to Warwick Arts Centre, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen in Germany, Wiener Festwochen, Amsterdam’s Holland Festival, and to the Barbican, London. In 2008 it was revived and toured to Barcelona, Ann Arbor, Paris, Milan, Sydney, and again to London. It was awarded the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play (2007), The Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play (2007) and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play (2008). Following its New York performances, A Disappearing Number will tour to the NCPA, Mumbai, the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, and Zagreb International Theatre Festival. 07-15 Disappearing:Gp 3.qxt 7/7/10 12:55 PM Page 4 Lincol n Cente r Festiva l 2010 A Most Romantic the concept of infinity? What does it mean to say there are many different types of infinity? Collaboration Why are the primes fundamental, yet so In January 1913, the Cambridge mathe - deeply mysterious to mathematicians? What matician Godfrey Harold Hardy received a constitutes a mathematical pattern against strange letter in the morning post. It con - the chaos that pervades so much of the tained wild, fantastic theorems about prime physical world? What is mathematical proof? numbers, one of the great mysteries of mathematics. Hardy nearly threw the letter This last concept of proof is especially in the trash —math attracts its fair share of relevant to the relationship between the cranks —but by the evening, the theorems two mathematicians. Hardy persuaded were beginning to work their magic. Hardy Ramanujan to break with his Brahmin could see that the letter was the work of a beliefs, which forbade travel across the genius. What was even more intriguing seas, and to join him in Cambridge. Together was that it had come from the other side of they journeyed like Edmund Hilary and Tenzing the world. The author was a 26-year-old Norgay across the mathematical wilds. It was clerk earning 20 rupees a month in the not an easy collaboration, however. While Madras Port Authority, India. His name was Hardy insisted on the rigors of western Srinivasa Ramanujan. ideas of proof, Ramanujan’s theorems were spilling from his mind thanks, he claimed, to There was one formula in particular that the inspiration of his goddess Namagiri. struck a chord with Hardy. To the uninitiated it seemed to make no sense at all: Ramanujan relied on an extraordinary math - ematical intuition to make connections 1 1+2+3+4+5+... = - /12 between seemingly unrelated ideas. Hardy noted, “It seemed ridiculous to worry him Indeed, Ramanujan had already sent his letter about how he had found this or that known to a number of mathematicians, who had theorem, when he was showing me half a rejected the Indian’s ideas as the work of a dozen new ones almost every day.” It was madman. But it was this very formula that often up to Hardy to supply the rigorous provided Hardy with his first inkling that proofs that would be expected by the west - Ramanujan was far from a crank. Hardy knew ern journals to which they submitted their that there were sophisticated mathematical papers. It was a real culture clash, like trying techniques developed in Germany that had to marry the traditions of western classical once made sense of these infinite sums, but music with the ragas and talas of India. they were not ideas that had spread widely. Hardy realized that Ramanujan must have This tension between east and west is one single-handedly reconstructed them. that runs throughout much of mathematical history. For many like Hardy, mathematics It is this same formula that has provided a was regarded as a European endeavor dating catalyst for Complicite’s investigation of back to the traditions of Ancient Greece.