For Immediate Release Contact: Danielle Bias Director of Marketing & P.R. [email protected] (212) 691-6500 x212
New York Live Arts launches Live Ideas, an annual festival of arts and ideas
Inaugural Live Ideas festival explores The Worlds of Oliver Sacks from April 17 – 21, 2013
Confirmed participants include Oliver Sacks, guest curator Lawrence Weschler, Bill Morrison, Alva Noë, V.S. Ramachandran, Tobias Picker with Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Donna Uchizono, Marsha Ivins, Wendy Lesser, Jumaane Williams, Robert Krulwich and many more
New York, NY, February 1, 2013 – New York Live Arts’ Executive Artistic Director, Bill T. Jones, today announced the creation of Live Ideas, the latest program initiative for the Chelsea-based organization that has become an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry and artists actively engaged with the political, intellectual and cultural currents of our times. Taking place each spring, Live Ideas will concentrate on a different theme, explored through conversation and artistic presentations over several days. The inaugural festival, taking place Wednesday, April 17th through Sunday, April 21st, 2013 at New York Live Arts is themed The Worlds of Oliver Sacks.
“Live Ideas, as an annual event at New York Live Arts, will be distinctive in its explorations of the interplay of creative expression and the world of ideas,” said Jones. “We are extremely pleased that the first edition of the festival also affords us a rare opportunity to collaborate with the inimitable Dr. Sacks. Perhaps more than anyone in recent history, Dr. Sacks has contributed to our growing understanding of the role of creative expression within the mind-body connection.”
The acclaimed neurologist, who celebrates his 80th year in 2013, is the author of such best-selling works as Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia and Hallucinations. Called “the poet laureate of medicine” by the New York Times, Sacks will help to kick off the first edition of Live Ideas on April 17th, joining Jones and celebrated non-fiction writer Lawrence Weschler on the opening night of the festival for a keynote conversation. Weschler, a long-time friend and associate of Sacks’, is the guest curator for the first edition of Live Ideas. Comprised of more than 20 events across five consecutive days, the series will include a wide array of performances, films, discussions and more.
“Live Ideas will combine dance and the performing arts with big ideas, and I am honored to be involved in this inaugural festival,” says Sacks. “Live Ideas brings together a number of my own passions—music, ferns, cephalopods among them—alongside many of the neurological conditions I have spent a lifetime studying: Parkinson’s disease, Tourette’s syndrome, stereo vision, etc. The connections of these conditions with the dramatic arts is a deep one, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of this first annual Live Ideas festival (and the many more to come).” As guest curator of Live Ideas, Weschler has brought together an impressive and eclectic list of participants, showcasing works of art and sparking conversations that engage the prevalent themes in Sacks’ works. "Bill T. Jones and I agreed early on that the first Live Ideas festival would focus on the intersection of ideas and the body: which is to say, the body-politic, mind-body, body-soul and so forth," explained Weschler. "For this first iteration, what better subject than the worlds of Oliver Sacks. Both a great neurologist and a profound humanist, he constantly evinces the embodiment, the incarnation and the triumph of the individual human spirit across a world of challenges—a subject we will be surveying across an array of lectures, panels, performances, films and more."
Participants include philosopher Alva Noë, directors Karen Kohlhass and Kim Weild, neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Aniruddh D. Patel and V.S. Ramachandran, Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffman, astronaut Marsha Ivins, marathon cold-water swimmer Lynne Cox, writer Wendy Lesser, Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich and many more. Featured works include a newly commissioned short film by award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison, created by repurposing original archival footage of Dr. Sacks working with patients; fully-staged productions of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s play, A Kind of Alaska, based on Sacks’ book Awakenings and performed both in American Sign Language and spoken word; a new dance-theater work by acclaimed choreographer Donna Uchizono that draws upon the themes of perception central to Sacks’ work; and a performance of a ballet score, also based on Awakenings, by renowned composer Tobias Picker with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
“With Live Ideas, we are creating multiple entry points for audiences to understand and explore some of the underlying ideas expressed through movement-based art,” said New York Live Arts CEO Jean Davidson. “Throughout his career, Dr. Sacks has articulated the complex relationships between mind and body, which makes his work a compelling focus for the inaugural season. We are grateful for his participation in this new program, which is underwritten by the Ford Foundation and other generous supporters.”
Live Ideas is made possible by the Ford Foundation. Additional support is contributed by The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, The JJC Foundation, The Opaline Fund, the The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation and the Theatre Development Fund. Promotional partners include the WNYC, New York Observer and Standard Hotels.
All events will take place at New York Live Arts’ theater and studios, located at 219 W 19th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues. The festival includes both free and ticketed events. Tickets go on sale for New York Live Arts Members and Associate Artists today, and general public may begin purchasing tickets on February 8, 2013. A flexible and inclusive festival pass is also available. Tickets may be purchased online at newyorklivearts.org/liveideas, by phone at 212-924-0077 and in person at the box office. Box office hours are Monday to Friday from 1 to 9pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 12 to 8pm.
For more information, please visit the Live Ideas microsite at www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas.
Download a PDF of the complete schedule and participant bios.
Listing info: Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks Apr 17 – 21, 2013 New York Live Arts T: 212-924-0077 | www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas 219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 Box Office hours: Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm
About Oliver Sacks: Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England, into a family of physicians and scientists (his mother was a surgeon and his father a general practitioner). He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen’s College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York. Dr. Sacks is currently a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine, where he practices at the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center.
In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter (A Kind of Alaska) and the Oscar-nominated feature film (Awakenings) with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation and Alzheimer’s disease.
He has investigated the world of Deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001 and his most recent books are Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), The Mind’s Eye (2010) and Hallucinations (2012).
Sacks’ work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, as well as various medical journals. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from many universities, including Oxford, the Karolinska Institute, Georgetown, Bard, Gallaudet, Tufts and the Catholic University of Peru. About Bill T. Jones: Bill T. Jones, a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer, has received major honors ranging from a 1994 MacArthur "Genius" Award to Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009 and named "An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure" by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. His ventures into Broadway theater resulted in a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography in the critically acclaimed FELA!, the new musical co-conceived, co-written, directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones. He also earned a 2007 Tony Award for Best Choreography in Spring Awakening as well as an Obie Award for the show's 2006 off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off- Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award.
Mr. Jones began his dance training at the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY), where he studied classical ballet and modern dance. After living in Amsterdam, Mr. Jones returned to SUNY, where he became co-founder of the American Dance Asylum in 1973. In 1982 he formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (then called Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company) with his late partner, Arnie Zane. In 2010, Mr. Jones was named Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, a new model of artist-led, producing/presenting/touring arts organization unique in the United States that was formed by a merger of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop.
In addition to creating more than 140 works for his own company, Mr. Jones has received many commissions to create dances for modern and ballet companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, and Berlin Opera Ballet, among others. In 1995, Mr. Jones directed and performed in a collaborative work with Toni Morrison and Max Roach, Degga, at Alice Tully Hall, commissioned by Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival. His collaboration with Jessye Norman, How! Do! We! Do!, premiered at New York's City Center in 1999.
His work in dance has been recognized with the 2010 Jacob's Pillow Dance Award; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and the 1993 Dance Magazine Award. His additional awards include the Harlem Renaissance Award in 2005; the Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award in 1991; multiple New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards for his works The Table Project (2001), The Breathing Show(2001), D- Man in the Waters (1989) and the Company's groundbreaking season at the Joyce Theater (1986). In 1980, 1981 and 1982, Mr. Jones was the recipient of Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1979 he was granted the Creative Artists Public Service Award in Choreography.
Mr. Jones was profiled on NBC Nightly News and The Today Show in 2010 and was a guest on the Colbert Report in 2009. Also in 2010, he was featured in HBO’s documentary series MASTERCLASS, which follows notable artists as they mentor aspiring young artists. In 2009, Mr. Jones appeared on one of the final episodes of Bill Moyers Journal, discussing his Lincoln suite of works. He was also one of 22 prominent black Americans featured in the HBO documentary The Black List in 2008. In 2004, ARTE France and Bel Air Media produced Bill T. Jones-Solos, highlighting three of his iconic solos from a cinematic point of view. The making of Still/Here was the subject of a documentary by Bill Moyers and David Grubin entitled Bill T. Jones: Still/Here with Bill Moyers in 1997. Additional television credits include telecasts of his works Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1992) and Fever Swamp (1985) on PBS’s "Great Performances" Series. In 2001, D-Man in the Waters was broadcast on the Emmy-winning documentary Free to Dance.
Bill T. Jones's interest in new media and digital technology has resulted in collaborations with the team of Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar and Marc Downie, now known as OpenEnded Group. The collaborations include After Ghostcatching - the 10th Anniversary re-imagining of Ghostcatching (2010, SITE Sante Fe Eighth International Biennial); 22 (2004, Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies In The Arts and Technology, Tempe, AZ); and Ghostcatching - A Virtual Dance Installation (1999, Cooper Union, New York, NY).
He has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, Art Institute of Chicago, Bard College, Columbia College, Skidmore College, the Juilliard School, Swarthmore College and the State University of New York at Binghamton Distinguished Alumni Award, where he began his dance training with studies in classical ballet and modern dance.
In addition to his Company and Broadway work, Mr. Jones also choreographed Sir Michael Tippet's New Year (1990) for Houston Grand Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. His Mother of Three Sons was performed at the Munich Biennale, New York City Opera and the Houston Grand Opera. Mr. Jones also directed Lost in the Stars for the Boston Lyric Opera. Additional theater projects include co-directing Perfect Courage with Rhodessa Jones for Festival 2000 in 1990. In 1994, he directed Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain for The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN.
About the Guest Curator:
Lawrence Weschler, Director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU since 2001, is a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz (1974), and was for over twenty years (1981- 2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies.
His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). His “Passions and Wonders” series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney’s Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998) Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Robert Irwin: Getty Garden (2002); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (February 2006). Mr. Wilson was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
He has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence and NYU (where he is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence with the graduate journalism program). Alongside his role as director of the Institute (from which base he has been trying to start a semiannual journal of writing and visual culture, Omnivore), he concurrently held the position of Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival from 2006 through 2011 (and is still actively engaged there on an emeritus basis). He is also a contributing editor to McSweeney’s and the Threepeeny Review, curator at large of the DVD quarterly Wholphin, and art wrangler for the Virginia Quarterly Review; (recently retired) chair of the Sundance (formerly Soros) Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar emigre composer.
ABOUT NEW YORK LIVE ARTS:
Located in the heart of Chelsea in New York City, New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, a world- renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer.
We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184- seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Our influence extends beyond NYC through our international cultural exchange program that currently places artists in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Funding Support for New York Live Arts
Major support for New York Live Arts is provided by: Bloomberg Philanthropies; The Brownstone Foundation; The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Con Edison; The Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; The Ford Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; Florence Gould Foundation; Japan Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Lambent Foundation; MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; MetLife Foundation; The New York Community Trust; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; The Shubert Foundation; and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. 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.
DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
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