Tag Archives: Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA)

MAKI NAMEKAWA PERFORMS GLASS

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Phil has written sonatas for other instruments before, but this would be his first for the piano. I imagined how much he would pour into it given that the piano is the instrument he has spent a lifetime playing (at home and on countless tours). However, Phil is not an artist to let the potential of a “first” be tethered to what is known. His exuberance came from writing something that would far surpass what he could play, or be able to entirely hear on the instrument itself beyond imagining it as the composer. There would need to be someone who could bring the music to life and bridge the musical space between themselves, the audience and the composer.

Phil composed his Piano Sonota for Maki Namekawa and Maki collaborated on its shape and dimensionality by adding her tremendous capacity and insight as a pianist. — Kristy Edmunds

In spring of 2019, Philip Glass sent Namekawa the score for the sonata, and the following summer the two longtime collaborators premiered the work at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr. The piece made its American debut in November of that year at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

This weekend, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA)—in association with Ars Electronica in Linz—will stream a prerecorded performance by Namekawa of the piece. Also on the program: Mozart Camargo Guarnieri’s Sonatina No. 3 in G-clef (1937), Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907-1908), and György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata.

See link below for details.

PIANO SONATA BY PHILIP GLASS—PERFORMED BY MAKI NAMEKAWA

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance

Sunday, January 10.

3 pm on the West Coast; 6 pm East Coast.

From top: Philip Glass and Maki Namekawa at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, 2019; Namekawa, photograph by Tom Mesic; Namekawa, photograph by Verena Lafferentz; Namekawa and Glass, Klavier-Festival Ruhr, 2019. Images courtesy and © the photographers, the musicians, and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.

FOUR QUARTETS — TANOWITZ, MARDEN, SAARIAHO

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If I am right to think this is the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century, we’re fortunate that FOUR QUARTETS will travel to other stages. I long to become more deeply acquainted with the many layers of its stage poetry. — Alastair Macaulay

In great demand and at the height of her powers, Pam Tanowitz creates work that bridges contemporary dance and ballet. Her FOUR QUARTETS—the most acclaimed dance work of the past two decades—is a collaboration with Brice Marden, who created the set images, and composer Kaija Saariaho.

The title refers to T. S. Eliot’s poetry cycle, which provided the inspiration and text for the work, read in performance by Kathleen Chalfant.

This weekend, CAP UCLA presents two performances of FOUR QUARTETS at Royce Hall. Dancers include Kara Chan, Jason Collins, Dylan Crossman, Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood.

The scenic and lighting design is by Clifton Taylor, the costume design by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, and the sound design by Jean-Baptiste Barriére. Saariaho’s music will be performed by The Knights.

PAM TANOWITZ, BRICE MARDEN, and KAIJA SAARIAHO—FOUR QUARTETS

Saturday, February 15, at 8 pm.

Sunday, February 16, at 3 pm.

Royce Hall, UCLA

10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles.

Pam Tanowitz, Brice Marden, Kaija Saariaho, Four Quartets, in performance. Photographs by Maria Baranova. Images courtesy and © the artists, the dancers, the photographer, and CAP UCLA.

MICHAEL KEEGAN-DOLAN’S SWAN LAKE

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Matthew Bourne, with his aggressive male swans and nightclub scenes, took Swan Lake in one direction. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s short, Tchaikovsky-free take—LOCH NA HEALA (SWAN LAKE)—goes somewhere else altogether. Inspired by a number of folktales, including “The Children of Lir,” and updated to present-day Ireland, Keegan-Dolan gives us predatory priests, suicidal depressives, and Mikel Murfi as a goat, leading up to an exhilarating, shambolic climax.

This dance-theater-performance art hybrid—performed by Keegan-Dolan’s company, Teaċ Daṁsa, and co-presented by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and the Ford Theatres—will be at Royce Hall for one night only. The trio Slow Moving Clouds will perform their score onstage.

LOCH NA HEALA (SWAN LAKE)

Saturday, November 9, at 8 pm.

Royce Hall, UCLA

10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles.

Michael Keegan-Dolan / Teaċ Daṁsa, Loch na hEala (Swan Lake), November 9, 2019, Royce Hall, UCLA, from top: Rachel Poirier (left) and Alex Leonhartsberger (foreground); Michael Murfi, (left) Leonhartsberger (sitting), Erik Nevin, Zen Jefferson and Keir Patrick; Leonhartsberger (left), Patrick, Murfi, Nevin, Jefferson, and Dr. Elizabeth Cameron Dalman; Murfi, Nevin, Dalman, and Patrick; Poirier, Latisha Sparks, Carys Staton, and Anna Kaszuba. Photographs by Reed Hutchinson, images courtesy and © the photographer, the choreographer, the artists, and CAP UCLA.

THE DAY AT ROYCE HALL

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THE DAY—a performative investigation of the diurnal rhythms of life and what comes after—is a superlative collaboration between avant-garde cellist Maya Beiser (who conceived the work), dancer Wendy Whelan, composer David Lang, and legendary choreographer Lucinda Childs.

When [Childs started] choreographing dances, in 1968, it was with the predilection for keeping the movement vocabulary relatively simple, seeking complexity elsewhere—in the intricate design of spatial forms and in timing. But in the music-based works choreographed since 1979, which propose a much more complex movement vocabulary, Childs has broken radically with the anti-ballet aesthetic of the other ex- or neo-Duchampian choreographers with whom she has been grouped.

Of all the adepts of the rigorously modern among contemporary choreographers, she has the subtlest and most fastidious relation to classical dance… Childs does not feed balletic movements and positions into an eclectic mix but wholly transforms and reinterprets them. In this, as in other matters, she is adamantly anti-collage. — Susan Sontag*

THE DAY was commissioned by Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina, Jacob’s Pillow, the Joyce Theater, and CAP UCLA, and will be performed by Beiser and Whelan twice this weekend at Royce Hall.

THE DAY

Friday and Saturday, October 18 and 19, at 8 pm.

Royce Hall, UCLA

10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles.

*Susan Sontag, “A Lexicon for Available Light,” Art in America, December 1983. Collected in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). Reprinted in Susan Sontag: Later Essays (New York: Library of America, 2017), 364–379.

The Day, Maya Beiser, Wendy Whelan, David Lang, Lucinda Childs: Beiser and Whelan in performance, photographs by Nils Schlebusch. Images courtesy and © the artists, the photographer, and CAP UCLA.

217 BOXES OF DR. HENRY ANONYMOUS

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I am homosexual, I am a psychiatrist. I, like most of you in this room, am a member of the [American Psychiatric Association] and am proud of that membership. However, tonight, I am insofar as it is possible, a we.— Dr. John E. Fryer, aka Dr. Henry Anonymous

So began Dr. Fryer’s 1972 speech at the APA convention in Dallas. Wearing a rubber mask and speaking through a voice-altering device, Fryer anonymously addressed a panel titled Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to the Homosexual? A Dialogue.

(Since 1952, the APA had classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disorder”—a diagnosis, paradoxically, welcomed at the time by many in the gay community, who saw it as a step up from the then prevailing view of queerness as a criminal perversion.)

Dr. Fryer was convinced he needed his disguise to keep medical license, but his courageous speech struck the convention like a bolt of lightening, and the following year the APA removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Writer-director Ain Gordon went through Dr. Fryer’s personal papers to create 217 BOXES OF DR. HENRY ANONYMOUS, onstage this weekend at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. This conceptual theater piece focuses on three people in Dr. Fryer’s life: his secretary Katherine M. Luder (played by Laura Esterman), his father Ercel Fryer (Ken Marks), and one of his patients, Alfred A. Gross (Derek Lucci)—a fascinating character who, among other things, assisted doctors working with the Selective Service System to weed out potential gay troops leading up to World War II, during which time Gross was accused of “fraternization” with a number of his interlocutors.

217 BOXES OF DR. HENRY ANONYMOUS

Friday, October 11, at 8 pm.

Saturday, October 12, at 3 pm and 8 pm.

Freud Playhouse, UCLA

245 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles.

Ain Gordon, 217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous, from top: Derek Lucci; Dr. John E. Fryer (right) at the 1972 APA convention in Dallas; Lucci; Laura Esterman(2); Ken Marks, with rear projection of Dr. Fryer. Lucci (top) and Marks photographs by Paula Court. Images courtesy and © the performers, the photographers, and CAP UCLA.