For Immediate Release

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS 2015-2016 SEASON AND PROGRAMS

2015

Louise Lecavalier So Blue New York City Premiere Sep 9–12 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Star dancer of Édouard Lock’s La La La Human Steps from 1981 to 1999, 56 year old Louise Lecavalier is a force of nature known worldwide for her artistic stamina, power and grace, birthing a movement style unlike any other. The first Canadian to win a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award in 1985 for Businessman in the Process of Becoming an Angel, presented by Dance Theater Workshop, Lecavalier returns to present the New York City premiere of her first extended piece of choreography, So Blue. Conceived and choreographed by Lecavalier with assistance from collaborator France Bruyère, the work’s intensely rhythmic soundtrack features Montreal composer and atypical world-music artist Mercan Dede. Performed by Lecavalier and Frédéric Tavernini, the movement is inspired by simple, everyday gestures infused with speed, repetition, abstraction and theatricality. With stark, cool lighting by collaborator Alain Lortie, the “powerfully zen and poignantly human” So Blue is rife with “the still-riveting power of Lecavalier's dancing” (The Guardian). yMusic Come Around World Premiere Season Featuring Six Music Commissions & Two Dance Commissions Tickets start at $15

Sep 11 at 8pm Part I: Mark Dancigers & Paul Corley World Premiere Commissions + Repertory

Oct 30 at 8pm Part II: Qasim Naqvi World Premiere Commission + Repertory

Nov 20 at 8pm Part III: Missy Mazzoli & Robert Sirota World Premiere Commissions + Repertory

Dec 9-12 at 7:30pm Part IV: Marcos Balter World Premiere Commission featuring Solo Works Choreographed by Bill T. Jones and Dianne McIntyre + Repertory (Please see page 9 for further details.)

New York Live Arts’ debut music series features yMusic, a genre defying, indie-classical ensemble comprised of six New York City instrumentalists flourishing in the overlap between the pop and classical worlds. Their virtuosic execution and unique configuration (string trio, flute, clarinet and trumpet) has attracted the attention of high profile collaborators—from Dirty Projectors to Ben Folds, Bon Iver and Beck—and evolved to become one of the great forces shaping contemporary music today.

For this debut season, they will perform commissioned works by contemporary composers Marcos Balter, an artist “making big waves lately for his adventurous, unpredictable work” (The New York Times); Paul Corley, “a masterful sculptor of sound” (Textura); the “fresh and vibrant” (The Classical Review) Mark Dancigers; Missy Mazzoli, hailed as “Brooklyn’s post-millennial mozart” (Time Out New York); Qasim Naqvi; and Robert Sirota, known by The New York Times as “One to reckon with.”

The series culminates in December with a special one-week run featuring a world premiere composition by Marcos Balter, created in collaboration with and for legendary choreographers Bill T. Jones and Dianne McIntyre.

Miguel Gutierrez The Age & Beauty Series New York City Premiere Co-Presented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)'s Crossing the Line Festival 2015 New York Live Arts 50 & Change Commission (Age & Beauty Part 3) Sep 16–20, 22-26, various times (please see listings below) Tickets start at $15

Miguel Gutierrez, “one of our most provocative and necessary artistic voices” (Dance Magazine), culminates his extraordinary Age & Beauty series with the New York City premiere of Part 3 and the presentation of the full series in one theater over two weeks. Gutierrez’s highly anticipated project consists of a three-part suite of queer performance works addressing the representation of the dancer, the physical and emotional labor of performance, tropes about the aging gay choreographer, the interaction of art making with administration, “queer time,” futurity and mid-life anxieties about relevance, sustainability and artistic burnout. The Age & Beauty Series is the first of three co-presentations in the fall of 2015 between Live Arts and the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival.

Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ Sep 19, 20, 26 at 3pm, 22 & 23 at 7:30pm

Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ is a duet for 43-year-old Gutierrez and 24-year- old performer/dancer Mickey Mahar. Moving from precise unison dances to an irreverent and celebratory corruption of orderliness, the work suggests modes of communication where hyper-emotional affect is not only the conceptual and choreographic core of the performance, but also the sole hope for continuing in this messed up world.

Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@& Sep 18 at 7:30pm, 19, 20, 26 at 6pm, 24 & 25 at 10pm

Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@& deals with Gutierrez’s long-term creative/work relationships and features performer/choreographer Michelle Boulé, arts manager Ben Pryor and lighting designer Lenore Doxsee. The piece harnesses retrospection and

Gutierrez’s archives of his past work to demonstrate how relationships, money and flights of fancy are at the center of all art making.

Age & Beauty Part 3: DANCER or You can make whatever the fuck you want but you’ll only tour solos or The Powerful People or We are strong/We are powerful/We are beautiful/We are divine or &:’/// is the third and culminating chapter of the series. Performed by Gutierrez along with an intergenerational cast, whose immediate physical representation is not as a “dancer,” the piece envisions a future dripping with lamentation, aspiration, melancholy, fantasy and doubt: a choreography for the end of the world.

Ali Moini Lives US Premiere Co-Presented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)'s Crossing the Line Festival 2015 and the Hermès Foundation’s (Fondation d’enterprise Hermès) New Settings Program Sep 29–30 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Lives is an observance of oneself from three different points of view. It is a revisitation, unraveling and reworking of Moini’s 2008 work My Paradoxical Life, presenting a single blueprint from a multifaceted self. Trained as a musician and singer in his native Iran, Moini is known for works that tackle themes like the fragmentation of identity, the mutability of existence and the search for selfhood, many of which are present in Lives. Featuring video, design and props, the work uses meticulous amplification to multiply Moini’s voice, words and narratives, encouraging an exploration of the myriad possibilities for self-dialogue. Lives is the second of three co-presentations in the fall of 2015 between Live Arts and the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival.

Alessandro Sciarroni Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow? US Premiere Co-Presented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)'s Crossing the Line Festival 2015 Oct 1–3 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

A rising star quickly becoming one of Europe’s most celebrated dance artists, Italian performer, choreographer and director Alessandro Sciarroni makes his New York Live Arts debut with Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow?. A performative and choreographic practice focusing on time, Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow? springs from the idea of ancient folk dances as popular phenomena that have survived contemporaneity. Dancers perform the Schuhplattler, a typical Bavarian and Tyrolean dance that means “shoe batter” and literally consists of hitting one’s shoes and legs with one’s hands. The result is a deeply rhythmic and auditory work that presents dance as a rule, a dictatorship and a flux of images that follow the form, not the content. Called "...a meticulous work, capable of exciting progressively through a reiteration of actions that becomes dramaturgy" (La Repubblica), the folk material finds its clearest revelation in a loop of percussive repetition, geographically and culturally decontextualized. Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow?

3 is the final of three co-presentations in the fall of 2015 between Live Arts and the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival.

Rude Mechs + Deborah Hay Match-Play New York City Premiere Oct 7–10 at 7:30pm; Oct 10 at 2pm Tickets start at $15

Two pillars of Austin's exploding performing arts scene—Rude Mechs, known for their eclectic and "remarkable" (New York Magazine) performance experiments spanning nearly 20 years, and Deborah Hay, the acclaimed choreographer with a “mischievous sense of play” (The New York Times)—are at the heart of Match-Play, a big-stakes play created by Rude Mechs and adapted from Hay’s New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award winning dance, The Match (2004). A haunting, sometimes hysterical yet sincere meditation on consciousness, Match-Play collages liminal texts from the notebooks of preeminent theater artist Richard Foreman with Ms. Hay’s written score and original text by Kirk Lynn. With Rude Mechs’ trademark penchant for slapstick and innovative staging, Match-Play hovers between hallucination and insight, tackling the overarching frame for Ms. Hay’s “handsome” (The New York Times) work: “What if every cell in the body has the potential to perceive all time and space as unique and original. And it’s no big deal.” The result is a tragicomic coaster ride exploring our cultural need for spectacle, our preoccupation with novelty and our ability (or inability) to connect the ordinary moments of life with the extraordinariness of living. Featuring SITI Company’s Barney O’Hanlon, don't miss Rude Mechs’ quirky and meditative exploration of the depths (and shallows) of the human mind.

Okwui Okpokwasili Bronx Gothic Oct 21–24 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

A solo creation at the intersection of theater, dance and visual art installation, Bronx Gothic gives palpable force to the charged relationship between two girls on the verge of adolescence in 1980s outer-borough New York City—where Newports are bought in singles at the corner deli, sex saturated notes are passed in class, and Orchard Beach erupts in flame.

Returning for a command run, Okwui Okpokwasili’s acclaimed, New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning piece has been hailed as a breakthrough work, and is envisioned for Live Arts’ stage as part of a multi-year collaboration with the artist. Hers is a performance of psychic and physical collisions that threaten to break the body—an unflinching look into the exquisite turbulence of one woman’s memory. Created in collaboration with Peter Born, Bronx Gothic draws inspiration from Victorian-era novels and West African griot storytelling to reveal a dark and powerful tale of sexual awakening, the body in transformation and the humor, love, strangeness and even terror that accompany it. “In language that is by turns blunt and poetic, crudely funny and incantatory, Ms. Okpokwasili conjures and probes this adolescent friendship, a jumble of insults, anger and love…A magnetic performer” (The New York Times).

Wunderbaum Looking For Paul New York City Premiere Nov 11–14 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Rotterdam based performance gang Wunderbaum is pulling no punches in their highly anticipated New York premiere. It’s Inez van Dam vs. Kabouter Buttplug, the notorious sculpture by infamous artist Paul McCarthy. Inez lived a simple, serene life in Rotterdam until the installation of the so-called “Buttplug Gnome.” Inez thinks this work of public art is ruining her street, her very life, and she’s heading to Los Angeles to track down McCarthy and take revenge. But can this defiant citizen defeat the indelible force of contemporary art? Who funded this so-called art anyway? Could her hard-earned taxes have contributed to this? Wunderbaum has graciously invited Inez, en route to LA, to make her case in New York City. Designer Maarten van Otterdijk, along with actors and creators Walter Bart, Inez van Dam, Matijs Jansen, Maartje Remmers, Marleen Scholten and guest Daniel Frankl, bring her story to life. Join Live Arts for the New York City premiere of Looking for Paul, a genre-colliding work that questions art’s purpose, how it gets made and the international funding systems that support its existence, all through the lens of McCarthy’s controversial work.

Pavel Zu⌃tiak and Palissimo Company Custodians of Beauty New York Premiere New York Live Arts 50 & Change Commission Dec 2–5 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Can anything still strike today’s spectator facing modern disenchantment as beautiful? Choreographer/director Pavel Zuštiak—“a striking performer” (The New York Times) with a knack for creating work that shines with a “vivid, often anguished imagination” (The New Yorker)—asks this and other questions in Custodians of Beauty. A 50 & Change Commission for Live Arts’ 2015-16 season, Zuštiak’s new work merges dance, live music and visual arts.

Custodians of Beauty promises to build on Zuštiak’s continued theatrical and movement investigation while examining the multiplicity of concepts of beauty and its permanence within art. From Plato, via Pope Benedict XVI to Susan Sontag, the work draws from a fascinating range of contextual sources while invoking beauty that can shock and transform us. The work continues Zuštiak’s acclaimed working relationship with composer/musician Christian Frederickson and lighting designer Joe Levasseur.

Ellen Robbins Dances by Very Young Choreographers Dec 5 at 2pm, Dec 6 at 1pm & 4pm Tickets: Adults $15, Youth $1

For over 20 years, Ellen Robbins has worked with young dancers from ages 5 to 18, helping them to stretch their technical modern dance skills and their imaginations in a warm and supportive atmosphere where improvisation reigns. The works in Dances by Very Young Choreographers can be humorous, dramatic, lyrical, or abstract, but always entertaining. This showcase of young talent has become one of New York Live Arts’ most beloved community programs, and is a not to be missed opportunity to inspire children by exposing them to live performances created and performed by their peers. yMusic: Come Around Part IV: Marcos Balter World Premiere Commission featuring Two World Premiere Solo Dance Commissions by Bill T. Jones and Dianne McIntyre + Repertory World Premiere Dec 9-12 at 7:30pm 5

Dec 9 & 11 featuring Bill T. Jones Dec 10 & 12 featuring Dianne McIntyre Tickets start at $15

The closing program for yMusic’s Live Arts debut features world premiere solos by two of the foremost dance legends of our time, Bill T. Jones (Dec 9 & 11) and Dianne McIntyre (Dec 10 & 12). Choreographed for Marcos Balter’s commissioned composition, the program will also include stunning works from yMusic’s growing repertory.

Urban Word NYC Journal to Journey Dec 16 & 17 at 7:30pm Tickets: Adults $7, Youth $5

Continuing its proud partnership with Urban Word, now in its 13th year, New York Live Arts presents the latest edition of Journal to Journey, a pre-professional youth development theater program linking youth poets with professional theater artists to increase opportunities for achieving life goals, learning new skills, and collaborating creatively with other artists. Led by a director and writing mentor, youth participate in a six-month process to write, stage, perform and present their one-person show at New York Live Arts. Journal to Journey is presented via a partnership between Urban Word, Hi-ARTS, New York Live Arts and Creative Legacy Projects.

2016

Live Artery Jan 14–19 Program and Schedule TBA

Live Artery is New York Live Arts’ annual showcase of commissioned works featuring commanding performances of the season’s most acclaimed works and works-in-progress, by the season’s 50 & Change Commissions and New Work Residency artists. Connecting Live Arts’ commissioned and resident artists with curators, presenters and the public alongside the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP)’ global performing arts conference and marketplace, and adding its unique voice to the vibrant array of January festivals and showcases, Live Artery fuels a vibrant, nationwide network in support of New York Live Arts’ artists and ideas.

Ann Liv Young Elektra US Premiere New York Live Arts 50 & Change Commission Jan 20–23, Jan 26–30 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Ann Liv Young brings her uncompromising vision of Sophocles’ Elektra to the stage in her first American commission since 2008. Known for creating work that’s “brilliant at one moment, perverse the next” (The New York Times), Young re-mixes Greek ritual in her incomparable style by combining passages from three distinct translations. Surrounded by a family steeped in murder, revenge and deception, Ann Liv Young’s Elektra is crazed, authentic, honest, compassionate, steadfast and tragic—a young woman struggling for footing in a shifting, murky world, which she navigates with imperfect tools. Exploring the tipping point

6 between following the social flow and being an engaged, responsible and decisive agent, Elektra wants everyone to question, to pay attention, let go of the yoke of social norms and act as an engaged individual.

Fresh Tracks Feb 5-6 at 7:30pm Tickets: $10

New York Live Arts’ signature Fresh Tracks Program is New York City’s leading, season-long residency and performance opportunity for artists exploring hybrid and movement-based work at the early stages of their careers. Created in 1965 by Dance Theater Workshop, Fresh Tracks continues as a signature program in New York Live Arts’ newly minted “New Work Development Program.” Designed as a springboard for intensive choreographic, administrative and creative development, Fresh Tracks is a pioneer opportunity in the field, positioning early career artists at a unique vantage point within Live Arts' annual programming.

Unfolding over the course of Live Arts’ regular presenting season, the Fresh Tracks Program provides five artists with a 50-hour studio residency, a professionally-produced shared evening bill in the New York Live Arts theater, an artistic fee, one-on-one dialogue sessions with the program’s Artistic Adviser, professional development workshops led by renowned professionals from the field and exclusive access to Live Arts’ Marketing, Production and Programming staff support.

Valda Setterfield & John Scott Lear US Premiere Feb 17-20 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Downtown dance legend Valda Setterfield adds to a multi-year, citywide examination of the Shakespearean tragedy with a deeply personal and riveting Lear of her own. Created in collaboration with John Scott, Artistic Director of Dublin-based John Scott Dance (formerly Irish Modern Dance Theatre) whose choreography falls “somewhere between Beckett, Chaplin and Monty Python” (Tanz Magazine), Scott and Setterfield deliver a work that is both deeply personal and playful. The inimitable Setterfield, noted for her work with David Gordon Pick Up Company and as a soloist for Merce Cunningham, plays King Lear, giving a profoundly moving performance that explores the unraveling of a universe, parental love, fear of death, personal transformation and enlightenment. Toppling the hierarchy with Goneral, Regan and Cordelia portrayed by three men, including Irish dancer Ryan O’Neill and young French dancer Kevin Coquelard, Lear is a “timely and tender exploration of aging, loss and regret that gets to the very heart of who we are” (Irish Daily Mail).

Champagne Jerry (feat. Neal Medlyn) Champagne Jerry in the Champagne Room World Premiere New York Live Arts 50 & Change Commission Mar 2–5 at 7:30pm, Mar 5 at 10pm Tickets start at $15

Welcome to the Champagne Room: a magical hideaway open to the public for an exclusive, limited engagement by hip-hop sensation Champagne Jerry (CJ). Joining him are his onstage entourage of miscreants known as the Champagne Club, a rotating cast of others including Neal Medlyn, Adam Horovitz, Kathleen Hanna, Bridget Everett, the House of Larreon, Carmine Covelli and a series of real and invented bands. Revel in a world of cheap gold, dance, effervescence and memories to last a lifetime through this one- 7 time-only epic performance event celebrating the release of CJ’s new album; an acclaimed, sold-out tour of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club parking lots across the Southeastern seaboard from the back of a van; and a suite of videos directed by Jason Cacioppo. “Simultaneously catchy, affecting, creepy, endearing, funny, puzzling, and profoundly strange” (Blouin ARTINFO), this is Champagne Jerry in the Champagne Room featuring Neal Medlyn.

Rebecca Lazier with Dan Trueman + Mobius Percussion There Might Be Others World Premiere Mar 16–19 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Rebecca Lazier makes her New York Live Arts debut with her movement-based realization of Terry Riley’s seminal masterpiece IN C, performed with a live score by Dan Trueman in collaboration with members of two of today’s most vital ensembles, SŌ Percussion and Mobius Percussion. Created along with a diverse group of artists, designers and scientists, and featuring an international cadre of performers, the work questions the role of presence, performer agency and collective decision-making to create emergent forms. Known for her “intelligent, fine control of complex material” (The Village Voice) showcasing an “exciting immediacy” (The New York Times), this extraordinary collaboration features dramaturgy and design by Naomi Leonard, Davison Scandrett and Mary Jo Mecca, as well as acclaimed dancers Asli Bulbul, Simon Courchel, Natalie Green, Cori Kresge, Christopher Ralph and Saúl Ulerio.

Jen Rosenblit Clap Hands World Premiere New York Live Arts 50 & Change Commission Off-site at the Invisible Dog Art Center Apr 20–24, 26–28 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Jen Rosenblit—a choreographer lauded for her “Sly, tender and spatially sophisticated” (The New York Times) performance pieces—builds upon a relationship with Live Arts that began with a Fresh Tracks residency (2009) and a split-bill commission (2012). Her new work, Clap Hands, is a mating call, a solo for the body that needs bodies. While conceptually a solo, the work will navigate its form through multiple bodies and objects. Each element constantly emerges from itself through a process of self-fertilization without resorting to pattern, ritual or husbandry. Fuchsia felted set pieces install the space, enacting a sort of still life and hailing the functional while demanding flamboyance. Clap Hands asks: Does the establishment of this new “thingness" shift the solo figure out of demand? Is intimacy still located within non-human forms?

Half Straddle Ghost Rings World Premiere New York Live Arts 50 & Change Commission Apr 22–24, 26–30 at 7:30pm Apr 23 & 30 at 2pm Tickets start at $15

The critically acclaimed, Obie award-winning theater ensemble Half Straddle will make their Live Arts debut with the world premiere of Ghost Rings. Driven by an original song cycle, the work is inspired by elements of

8 live band dynamics, graphic novels and music videos, and tells the story of two friends taking the ultimate leap into adulthood. With text and lyrics by Tina Satter, the “genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist” (The New York Times), and music by Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey, the show unfurls a narrative of contemporary friendship and family-making told through virtuosic performances and evocative design. Mixing deadpan magical realism with the considerations of feminist thinkers like Maggie Nelson and Michelle Tea, the resulting piece is a tender, harrowingly funny, unexpected musical experience.

Open Spectrum - Critical Community Dialogues Sep 28, Nov 9, Mar 21, May 16 at 7:30pm, Feb 13 at 5pm Produced in Association with MAPP International Productions and Critical Partner, Culturebot Tickets: $5

An intimate conversational platform founded on the belief that cultural institutions can and should be a catalyst for societal transformation by participating in a world of ideas, Open Spectrum provides a space for community dialogue on the most vital issues facing our community today, engaging participants in active listening, constructive discourse and action planning. Topics will be announced in the fall to allow the conversations to respond to current moments in social, economic and political discourse.

LIVE IDEAS 2016: Mapping the Future – Cultural Transformation in the MENA (Middle East North African) Region Feb 9-Apr 8, 2016 Humanities week: April 4-8, 2016

Live Arts’ 2016 Live Ideas festival, Mapping the Future – Cultural Transformation in the MENA (Middle East North African) Region, devotes itself to the ongoing transformation of the MENA region as seen through the lens of contemporary performing artists. Multiple performances, presented in the winter and spring, will ask and respond to the immediate questions defining the region’s cultural and political future and also its position on the world stage. (Please refer to the individual listings below for details surrounding some of the specific artists and works to be presented.)

The final week of the Live Ideas festival, Mapping the Future – Cultural Transformation in the MENA (Middle East North African) Region will feature a series of panel discussions, films and live performance events in response to the performances and topics considered throughout the festival.

Further Live Ideas details will be announced in the fall.

Live Ideas: Arkadi Zaides Archive New York City premiere Feb 9-10 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Arkadi Zaides, an Israeli artist born in Byelorussia (former USSR), is known for creating works that exude a “soft, silken power” (The New York Times). He returns to New York Live Arts in 2016 with Archive, an artistic exploration of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forming part of a larger series of works on the 2015-16 season that use an artistic lens to explore political issues in the Middle Eastern region, Archive features footage filmed by volunteers of B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)’s Camera Project. Initiated in 2007, the project distributes video cameras to Palestinians living in 9 high-conflict areas in an effort to expose the reality of life under occupation and provide an ongoing documentation of human rights violations to the Israeli and international public. Zaides brings the viewers’ attention to the Israeli body, bringing life to the visceral physical reactions resorted to in various confrontational situations. Through Archive, Zaides asks: What is the potential for violence embedded in each individual body? Archive is presented in conjunction with Live Ideas: Mapping the Future – Cultural Transformation in the MENA Region.

Live Ideas: KVS, les ballets C de la B & A.M. Qattan Foundation Badke US Premiere Feb 11-13 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

Called “One of the most influential dance theatre companies in the world” (The Guardian), the critically acclaimed Belgian contemporary ensemble les ballets C de la B makes its New York Live Arts debut with the unprecedented international dance experiment Badke, a display of passion for life and dance as a form of resistance. Created by Koen Augustijnen, Rosalba Torres Guerrero (les ballets C de la B) and Hildegard De Vuyst (KVS) in residence with 10 young Palestinian dancers in Ramallah, the work unites a diverse number of dance forms ranging from the traditional dabke to modern dance, hip-hop, capoeira and circus. Badke is presented in conjunction with Live Ideas: Mapping the Future – Cultural Transformation in the MENA Region.

Live Ideas: Winter Family JERUSALEM CAST LEAD hallucinatory trip in an emotional dictatorship US Premiere Mar 25-26 at 7:30pm Tickets start at $15

A documentary theater performance by the experimental music duo Winter Family, Jerusalem cast lead takes audience members on a hallucinatory trip through an emotional dictatorship. Guided on a journey of sound, visuals and text by a young woman from Jerusalem, we palpably experience Israeli society, where memory and courage are celebrated everywhere and codes and symbols are stretched to exhaustion. The songs, speeches, dances and sirens are omnipresent as individuals become actors in a dazzling and macabre collective experience. Repeating and translating the specific procedures that the Israeli regime uses on its own population, Jerusalem cast lead questions the manipulation of individuals. This work is presented in conjunction with Live Ideas: Mapping the Future – Cultural Transformation in the MENA Region.

Live Ideas: Adham Hafez Company / HaRaKa ARAB WORKS US Premieres Mar 29–Apr 2, times TBA A coproduction of New York Live Arts, Adham Hafez Company, HaRaKa Platform and ARC.HIVE

Deepening Live Ideas' exploration of one of the most vilified, challenging and future-defining regions of the world through the artist’s lens, Arab Works features a collection of projects curated by Adham Hafez in collaboration with HaRaKa, a cross disciplinary network of artists representing the Arab and Muslim worlds within the MENA (Middle Eastern North African) region. The network seeks a new platform for understanding the current terms, definitions, conflicting aesthetics and histories that underlie radically diverse geopolitics and personal narratives. These works challenge notions of representation; reminisce on landscapes re- shaping themselves in reflection of the US’ civil rights movement of the past and present; transforming culture worldwide; revisiting the frames with which we view work; the future vision of the region from the 10 artist’s perspective and their role in it; and diaspora artists’ relationships to their origins. These works are presented in conjunction with Live Ideas: Mapping the Future – Cultural Transformation in the MENA Region.

Funding Support

The creation of new work by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company is made possible by the Company's Partners in Creation: Ellen Poss, Jane Bovingdon Semel & Terry Semel; Anne Delaney; Stephen & Ruth Hendel; Eleanor Friedman; Sandra Eskin; Joseph Azrack & Abigail Congdon; and Richard H. Levy & Lorraine Gallard.

Major support for New York Live Arts is provided by: Con Edison; The Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; The Ford Foundation; French American Cultural Exchange (FACE); The Howard Gilman Foundation; The Florence Gould Foundation; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; The Jerome Foundation; MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The Mertz Gilmore Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation for the Arts; National Performance Network; New England Foundation for the Arts; The O'Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; and The Shubert Foundation. New York Live Arts is supported by public funds administered by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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