Tag Archives: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

FRANCES STARK AND YUVAL SHARON IN CONVERSATION

Following a reprise screening at LACMA of her new film THE MAGIC FLUTE, join Frances Stark for a conversation with opera company director and L.A. Philharmonic artist-in-residence Yuval Sharon, and LACMA curator Stephanie Barron.

This event is in conjunction with the LACMA exhibition CHAGALL—FANTASIES FOR THE STAGE.

 

FRANCES STARK—THE MAGIC FLUTE, Tuesday, October 3, at 7 pm.

BING THEATER, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

CHAGALL—FANTASIES FOR THE STAGE , through January 7, 2018.

LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

lacma.org/event/magic-flute-screening-and-discussion

See: PARIS LA, “Frances Stark’s Magic Flute”:

FRANCES STARK’S MAGIC FLUTE

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FREDDY

“Freddy was addicted to that moment between the body’s rise and fall.” — FREDDY, by Deborah Lawlor

Freddy Herko was a beautiful, talented dancer, a co-founder (with Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, and choreographer James Waring) of the New York Poets Theatre, and—with Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer—a charter member of Judson Dance Theater.

At Warhol’s factory, he was introduced to the wonders of methamphetamine. A runaway addiction commenced, which ended in 1964 when Freddy—age 28, but aging fast—took a great, naked leap into the blue from a fifth-floor loft in Lower Manhattan, the highly amplified sounds of Mozart’s “Coronation Mass” following him out the window.

Herko’s ballet days and Factory nights are revisited in FREDDY, Deborah Lawlor’s 50-minute fantasia—part theater, part dance, part happening. Lawlor (a co-founder of the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles) was an intimate of Herko’s in the ’60s, and knew all of the characters who dance through her piece: Waring (Mel England), Billy Name (Connor Clark Pascale), Ondine (Justice Quinn), Rotten Rita (Jesse Trout), etc. In the title role, Marty Dew ably captures the energy and waste of Herko’s fast trip and long drop, but the piece is anchored by Lawlor’s alter ego—a narrator called “present-day Shelley”—played with grace by former dancer and veteran actor Susan Wilder.

FREDDY—a Fountain Theatre production, playing off-site at the Los Angeles City College’s Vermont Avenue campus—is directed by Frances Loy, with choreography and movement direction by Cate Caplin.

FREDDY, through October 14.

CAMINITO THEATRE, LACC, 855 North Vermont, Los Angeles.

See Tim Teeman, “The Life and Dramatic Death of an Avant-Garde Hero,” The Guardian, October 23, 2014:

theguardian.com/fred-herko-avant-garde-hero

From top:

Fred Herko dancing on rooftop in Manhattan in the early 1960s; Freddy, with Jesse Trout (kneeling left), Connor Clark Pascale (standing right), Justice Quinn (below Pascale); Marty Dew as Herko in Freddy; Herko.

All Freddy photographs by Ed Krieger.

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FAUSTIN LINYEKULA AT REDCAT

This week at REDCAT, Faustin Linyekula and Studios Kabako will perform SUR LES TRACES DE DINOZORD, a tale of Congolese history and childhood dreams told through movement, text, and the voice of opera singer Serge Kakudji.

Linyekula will be joined by dancers Vumi, Papy Ebotani, and Djodjo Kazadi, and actors Maurice Papy Mbwiti and Antoine Vumilia Muhindo.

“Faustin is one of the most powerful, death-defyingly deft, and determined artists on the planet.  He was born in eastern Congo near a city now called Kisangani, a quiet place straddling the Congo River, a city where thousands of people were massacred in the early years of the 21st century. Faustin and his group of young, artistic collaborators, who had set out to reimagine and remake art in Africa, became refugees in that conflict….

“I first met Faustin as an emerging artist fifteen years ago and I commissioned him to make a work to commemorate the 250th birthday of Mozart in the city of Vienna.  [He] responded with a clear-eyed, shattering, and ennobling work which repurposed and reimagined the Mozart Requiem to describe the killings in Kisangani and their aftermath, and to trace the fates of his dispersed colleagues.  The Viennese were stunned. This is the major work that [he] now brings to REDCAT….

“Faustin’s unmistakably wild and bold work—he has never had anything to lose—has commanded audiences in the major capitals of the world…. The struggle continues, and in Faustin’s fearless hands, also the transcendence.”  — Peter Sellars*

 

FAUSTIN LINYEKULA—SUR LES TRACES DE DINOZORD, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, September 28, 29, and 30. All performances at 8:30 pm.

REDCAT, WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, Music Center, downtown Los Angeles.

*  redcat.org/event/faustin-linyekulastudios-kabako

Top: Faustin Linyekula.

Bottom: Sur les traces de Dinozord. Image credit: Faustin Linyekula, Studios Kabako, Alkantara Festival, and KVS Theatre, Brussels.

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Faustin Linyekula

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