11-20 Ades.qxp_GP 11/12/15 4:17 PM Page 1 Friday and Saturday Evenings, November 20–21, 2015, at 7:30 Sunday Afternoon, November 22, 2015, at 3:00 Post-performance discussion with Thomas Adès and John Schaefer on Saturday, November 21 A Sadler’s Wells London Production Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths— Movements in Music (U.S. premiere) This performance is approximately two hours long, including two intermissions. (Program continued) Presented in association with New York City Center These presentations of Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths—Movements in Music are made possible in part by endowment support from the American Express Cultural Preservation Fund. These performances are made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. New York City Center Please make certain all your electronic devices are switched off. WhiteLightFestival.org 11-20 Ades.qxp_GP 11/12/15 4:17 PM Page 2 MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center. Join the conversation: #LCWhiteLight Used by arrangement with European American Music Distributors Company, U.S. and Canadian agent for Faber Music Ltd., London, publisher and copyright owner. Outlier was remounted by Sadler’s Wells in collaboration with Studio Wayne McGregor. It was originally commissioned by New York City Ballet and had its premiere at Lincoln Center on May 14, 2010. The Grit in the Oyster is a Sadler’s Wells production and commission. It was co-commissioned by DanceEast, with additional support from Arts Council England, The Point, Aldeburgh Music, ResCen Middlesex University, and the kind support of Charles Glanville. Polaris is a Sadler’s Wells production and commis - sion, in collaboration with Kidd Pivot. Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths—Movements in Musi c was partly rehearsed at New 42nd Street Studios. For Outlier Studio Wayne McGregor Odette Hughes , Associate Director and Rehearsal Director Antoine Vereecken , Restaging Marc Happel , Costume Maker For Life Story Adam Carrée, Re-lighting For The Grit in the Oyster Mark Bowden, Consulting Composer Chris Fogg, Dramaturgy Elisabetta d’Aloia, Assistant to the Choreographer Dom Martin, Technical Director Jamie Platt, Re-lighter Donna Meierdiercks, Producer Nouska Hanly PR, Publicist For Polaris Eric Beauchesne, Rehearsal Director Shay Kuebler, Cindy Salgado, Staging Ana Maria Lucaciu, Rehearsal Assistant We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. 11-20 Ades.qxp_GP 11/12/15 4:17 PM Page 3 A Sadler’s Wells London Production Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths— Movements in Music (U.S. premiere) Outlier (2010) Wayne McGregor , Choreographer Thomas Adès , Conductor Orchestra of St. Luke’s Thomas Gould , Violin Wayne McGregor and Lucy Carter , Set Design Moritz Junge , Costume Design Lucy Carter , Lighting Design Dancers: Catarina Carvalho, Travis Clausen-Knight, Alvaro Dule, Louis McMiller, Mbulelo Ndabeni, Daniela Neugebauer, Anna Nowak, James Pett, Jessica Wright THOMAS ADÈS Violin Concerto (“Concentric Paths”) (2005) Rings Paths Rounds Intermission Life Story (1999) Karole Armitage , Choreographer Thomas Adès , Piano Anna Dennis , Soprano David Salle , Costume Design Dancers: Ruka Hatua-Saar and Emily Wagner THOMAS ADÈS Life Story (1994) Pause WhiteLightFestival.org 11-20 Ades.qxp_GP 11/12/15 4:17 PM Page 4 The Grit in the Oyster (2014) Alexander Whitley , Choreographer Thomas Adès , Piano Calder Quartet Benjamin Jacobson, Violin Andrew Bulbrook, Violin Jonathan Moerschel, Viola Eric Byers, Cello Lee Curran , Lighting Design Jean-Marc Puissant , Costume Design Dancers: Natalie Allen, Antonette Dayrit, Wayne Parsons THOMAS ADÈS Piano Quintet (2000) Intermission Polaris (2014) Crystal Pite , Choreographer Thomas Adès , Conductor Orchestra of St. Luke’s Jay Gower Taylor , Set Design Linda Chow , Costume Design Tom Visser , Lighting Design Dancers: Shay Kuebler, David Raymond, Cindy Salgado, Jermaine Spivey, Spenser Theberge, Tiffany Tregarthen With students from New York University Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dance, Seán Curran, Chair THOMAS ADÈS Polaris (2010) 11-20 Ades.qxp_GP 11/12/15 4:17 PM Page 5 A Note on Outlier By Wayne McGregor In 2010 I was asked to create a new work for the New York City Ballet in their architec - ture and dance series. The Philip Johnson building that houses the David H. Koch Theater and is home to the New York City Ballet felt like a natural place to look for inspiration. Johnson was not only a great friend of George Balanchine and an influential architect, he championed the architects of the Bauhaus, like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, in the U.S. I am fascinated by that Bauhaus art period and by abstract minimalist painters like Josef Albers and Barnett Newman. The visual context for the piece has been greatly informed by the minimalists’ notion of simplicity and color theory. When I think of minimalism in choreography, I often think of Balanchine: his pared-down, reductive, and essential overall aesthetic. It’s very communicative, with the bodies doing all of the talking without an explicitly “narrative” context. Meaning emerges rather than being dictated, and the audiences have to discover the work’s secrets. It is in this sense of minimalism, where the body is the prime communicator, that I am particularly inter - ested. In terms of physical action, though, I don’t have a pared-down formal language. Instead, I have looked to push the technology of the body between fast angularity, sharp - ness, and abstraction, with fluid, circular, and sensual movement—often encouraging the body to “misbehave.” These anomalies act as physical outliers. I am a big fan of Thomas Adès, a composer who for me is a 21st-century Stravinsky. His Violin Concerto, fiendishly difficult to play, has this implicit sense of strangeness in the score. It is full of irregularities and unexpected events, structures that don’t quite obey the rules, musical events slightly out of sequence, circular patterns that collide and divert your attention—in other words, the score is full of outliers. —Copyright © 2014 by Wayne McGregor A Note on Life Story By Karole Armitage Life Story is a hilarious and heart-wrenching portrait of two people who spend the night together, sharing only their complete absence of intimacy. I was invited to create the work by producer Antonia Franceschi in 1999 for New York City Ballet principal dancers Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans. It premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in London on the New York Ballet Stars season with soprano Mary Carewe. The costumes by painter David Salle capture the situation perfectly. The couple are half-dressed in clothes thrown on quickly. The vividness of the soprano’s words leaves no doubt as to what is going on in her mind. The text by Tennessee Williams clings to the piano, flies away from it, and builds toward a dark, comical thunderbolt at the end. Thomas Adès creates an atmosphere of foreboding and delicacy in just a few chords as the score moves toward its startling conclusion. The choreography rides the musical roller coaster: off-balance, precarious jolts of flying movement alternate with weird positions, expressing the couple’s increasing apathy, hesitation, slim hope, and anger. The dance embodies the score physically, making the vitality of the notes visible to the naked eye. Intricate partnering morphs into contrapuntal phrases in a technically challenging dance that unfolds around a casual core. Adès’s musical jewel packs a lifetime of experience into a miniature masterpiece as the characters reckon with the dysfunctional night. —Copyright © 2014 by Karole Armitage WhiteLightFestival.org 11-20 Ades.qxp_GP 11/12/15 4:17 PM Page 6 Life Story with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one Text: Tennessee Williams of you rises to pee and gaze at himself with the mild aston - After you’ve been to bed together for the ishment in the bathroom mirror. first time, And then, the first thing you know, before without the advantage or disadvantage of you’ve had time any prior acquaintance, to pick up where you left off with your the other party very often says to you, enthralling life story, Tell me about yourself, I want to know all they’re telling you their life story, exactly about you, as they’d intended to all along, what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do and you’re saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, the vowel sincerely want to know your life story, at last becoming and so you light up no more than an audible sigh, a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the as the elevator, halfway down the corridor two of you and a turn to the left, lying together in completely relaxed draws one last, long, deep breath of positions exhaustion like a pair of rag dolls a bored child and stops breathing forever. Then? dropped on a bed. Well, one of you falls asleep You tell them your story, or as much of and the other one does likewise with a your story lighted cigarette in his mouth, as time or a fair degree of prudence and that’s how people burn to death in allows, and they say, hotel rooms. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, until the oh —By Tennessee Williams, from The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams , copyright is just an audible breath, and then of course © 1956 by The University of the South. there’s some interruption. Slow room Reprinted by permission of New Directions service comes up Publishing Corp.