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.) 1 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 2 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 &:’/// New York Live Arts 50 & Change Commission Sep 16 & 17 at 7:30pm, 19, 20, 26 at 8pm, 24 & 25 at 7:30pm 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.