Green Energy Arts at Solar One
Alice Farley Dance Theater, May 23 & 24 at 6pm
In The Air & Now…Dance Improv at Solar One, July 10 at 6pm, Rain Date July 11 at 6pm
Chinese Theatre Works: The Legend of Whitesnake, July 17 at 6pm, Rain Date July 18 at 6pm
In The Air & Now… Dance Improv @ Solar One
Thurs July 10 at 6pm, Rain Date July 11 at 6pm
For one evening only, Solar One has invited choreographers Patricia Hoffbauer, Dan Safer and Marlies Yearby to perform on our outdoor stage. These three well-known choreographers will ask dancers to join them in exploring three concepts: self-involvement, co-dependence and perfect balance. Each artist will design their own 15-minute section and reveal to their dancers and to the audience, in the minutes before the performance, the structure they have envisioned. In this way, the immediacy of improvisation is conveyed. The audience understands the challenge and witnesses the ingenuity of the performers in initiating solutions. The sound for In the Air and Now is solar-powered, using energy from the panels on the Solar 1 roof.
This performance is made possible in part by a grant from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.
PATRICIA HOFFBAUER
Patricia Hoffbauer with George Emilio Sanchez, photo: Seth Cohen
Patricia Hoffbauer is a Brazilian-born choreographer, director, performer, and educator. Besides creating her own work, she has developed a 10-year artistic collaboration with writer/performer George Emilio Sanchez with whom she has toured throughout the United States and Latin America. In 2002-03 Ms. Hoffbauer and Mr. Sanchez were the Viola Farber Artists-In-Residence at Sara Lawrence College. At the end of that residency they presented Hoc Est Corpus/This Is A Body at Symphony Space in April 2003. Her latest collaboration with Mr. Sanchez, Milagro, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in April 2004. They did a three-week run of their piece The Architecture of Seeing:REMIX at La MaMa for a 10-year anniversary. Their collaborations and her individual work have been supported by the NEA, NYFA, NYSCA, & The Rockefeller Foundation. Hoffbauer has taught at Wesleyan University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Miami Dade Community College, Sara Lawrence College, New York University’s Tish school of the Arts’ summer program, Pratt Institute, Marymount Manhattan College and most recently at Yale University. In 2008/09 she is a full time professor in the dance department at Hunter College and will also be teaching at Princeton University. In 2002 Ms. Hoffbauer was invited by Yvonne Rainer to perform her 1962 solo Three Seascapes at Jacob’s Pillow, Judson Church Monday Series, and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and at PS 1. She continues to work with Yvonne Rainer.
Patricia will perform with George Emilio Sanchez and Sally Silvers.
DAN SAFER
Dan Safer originally hails from the wild suburbs of New Jersey. He is the Artistic Director of Witness Relocation (www.witnessrelocation.org) and has directed / choreographed / adapted every one of their shows. His work has been presented all over, including Off-Broadway, The Ontological Theater, La MaMa, Dance Theater Workshop (four consecutive seasons), Patravadi Theatre (Bangkok), Theater Krudttonden (Denmark), the 2007 CUNY Prelude Festival, Dixon Place, Danspace Project; he has choreographed operas, rock videos and fashion shows, and wrote a seven episode serial play with Pulitzer winner David Lindsay-Abaire. Performer with Ridge Theater, Jane Comfort, John Moran, Mabou Mines, the Blacklips Performance Cult, Hong Kong choreographer Dick Wong, and others. He founded and directed the Bangkok Performance Boot Camp, is faculty at NYU, and teaches workshops across the US and Internationally. He is a 2007-9 recipient of the Six Points Fellowship (Performance) from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the winner of two NY Innovative Theater Awards. Artforum Magazine called him “pure expressionistic danger”. He used to be a go-go dancer, and once choreographed the Queen of Thailand’s Birthday Party.
The dancers performing with Dan are: Heather Christian, Sean Dovovan, Mike Mikos and Laura Berlin Stinger.
MARLIES YEARBY
Marlies Yearby is and internationally renowned choreographer/director with an approach to dance theater that is both organic and physically exuberant. She is the recipient of a 1996 Tony Award Nomination for her choreography of RENT and a 1997 Drama League Award for the Los Angeles production of RENT. Ms. Yearby was nominated for a 2002 Helen Hayes award for her choreography in Oedipus Plays at the Washington Shakespeare Theatre. Her signature work of choreographing musicians as a character in theater was acclaimed in poet laureate Rita Dove’s Darker Face of The Earth at the Guthrie Theater in MN and writer Sekou Sundiata’s Mystery of Love at the American Musical Theater Festival in PA. Ms Yearby founded her company, Movin’ Spirits Dance Theater in 1988 as a vehicle for the creation of new multi media works that examine the human experience. MASS MoCa, The Exit Festival France, PS 122,The American Dance Festival, Lincoln Center, Kansas Lied Center, and Jacob’s Pillow, among many others, have commissioned her work for the company. As an artist, her service for the community is recognized by a BaxTen Arts and Artists in Progress Award, which honors individuals in the arts who have revealed and transformed the creative world by enduring change, and a Mentor of the Year Award from Def Dance Jam a company of hearing and partially hearing performers. Ms. Yearby conceived and curated the first of a series of African American Choreographer’s Craft Workshops at 651 Arts in Brooklyn. She was awarded two National College Choreography Initiatives to create new interdisciplinary works. Ms Yearby has been awarded for creative excellence in choreography with the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Van Lier fellow, and 651 Arts Tradition and Transformation Award funded in part by the Doris Duke Foundation. She is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Her company’s critically acclaimed multimedia production, Brown Butterfly inspired by “the Greatest” Muhammad Ali is noted for its seamless integration of video, live music, and dance. (Woom’ən)n, her company’s newest multimedia production, has engaged women nationally in its development, discovery, and celebration of the authentic self. She is developing a new work on the impact of American media on identity entitled The Beautiful . She received a digital fellowship at Dance Theater Workshop with video artists Joe Douillette, librettists Carl Hancock Rux and Laurie Carlos, and with music by Cooper-Moore. Ms Yearby continues to seek creative partnerships globally building a diverse perspective on the human condition. Ms Yearby utilizes improvisation and the dialogues between live music, dance, and spoken word as the catalyst for creative inspiration in her work.
Performing with Marlies are: Karma Cloud, Yasmine Lee, Nioka Workman and a Very Special Surprise Guest!
Chinese Theatre Works: The Legend of Whitesnake
Thurs July 17 at 6pm, Rain Date July 18 at 6pm
CHINESE THEATRE WORKS returns to Solar One with a performance of the enduring Peking Opera classic The Legend of White Snake. In this magical tale of the powers of nature and of love, the heroine, part animal-spirit, part super-ninja and part herbalist-healer, overcomes tremendous obstacles as she fights for the chance to live a mortal, human life.
About Chinese Theatre Works
Chinese Theatre Works was formed in 2001 through the merger of two non-profit arts organizations dedicated to the Chinese performing arts: The Gold Mountain Institute for Traditional Shadow Puppetry (founded in 1975 by Jo Humphrey) and Chinese Theatre Workshop (founded in 1990 by Kuang-Yu Fong). For more about the company’s history, click here.
Chinese Theatre Works’ performing company is made up of classically trained Chinese opera artists and skilled puppeteers, reflecting our commitment to maintaining the highest artistic standards in all of our performances. Similarly, our Arts in Education program is staffed by teaching artists who together have nearly a century of classroom experience with students of all ages. For company biographies and more, click here.
Alice Farley Dance Theater
Solar One kicked off its 2008 Green Energy Arts season with a performance of HellGate Love Letter * What I Remember, an imaginary landscape in dance to be created at the edge of the East River. A project of visual art and performance designed by Bessie Award winning choreographer, Alice Farley, with music by Peter Garland.
This interactive performance will be a River Walk, a guided tour among the shadows and memories of the urban waterfront. A company of 20 combine dance, boats, puppetry, circus arts, and create characters transformed through illusion and sculptural costuming.
Performances will begin promptly at 6 PM at 20th Street and the East River, Friday May 23 and Saturday May 24. Rain Date is May 25.
The piece is a love letter to New Yorkers and the waterfront environment that has uniquely shaped our city. Inspired by the words of Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and dramatist who attended Columbia University during the Great Depression of 1929, and of Walt Whitman, the influential American poet who is widely considered the father of free verse, HellGate Love Letter * What I Remember weaves together poetry, waterfront history, dance spectacle and puppetry to create an intoxicating mixture of past and future memory. HellGate Love Letter takes its name from the old Dutch name for the East River Strait: “Hellegat”, meaning Bright Passage or, alternatively, Gate to Hell.
From Garcia Lorca’s Landscape of the Pissing Crowd (Nocturne of Battery Place)
and Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)
“They burn, these people who can piss around a moan…
Out in this World, no one sleeps. No one, no one. / No one Sleeps.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas come and bite the men who do not dream
Out in this World, no one sleeps. No one, no one. / No one Sleeps.”
From Whitman’s Manahatta and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry :
“City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city! “
“…myself disintegrated, everyone disintegrated, yet part of the scheme.”
The tour will be led by Gallus Mag, the legendary bouncer from the Hole in the Wall Bar on Water Street circa 1869, and the Hudson River pirate, Sadie the Goat, infamous leader of the Charlton Street Gang..
This production is being sponsored by Looking Glass Productions, Inc. and Solar One, with additional funds from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
This program is also made possible, in part, with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the New York City department of Cultural Affairs; and the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation.
“For me the province of dance is to speak that which cannot be spoken. Make the invisible, visible.” Alice Farley
Dance is our body’s shadow. It is inescapable, woven around the rhythm, the pattern, the gesture of every human social and sexual interchange. It is a language we can understand in our bones, at the base of our neck, in the small of our back. It is a tangible mystery, easily comprehensible yet not translatable.
Dance must be a surprise again. Out of the theater and extended into new forms, sculpture, costumes, puppets, illusion, we build an amplified body, a poetic body, but still it dances.
ALICE FARLEY DANCE THEATER is a New York based company. The group has created performances for the World Financial Center Winter Garden, the Whitney Museum, Smithsonian Museum, Cooper Hewitt Museum, Lincoln Center Plaza, Grand Central Terminal, La Mama Theater, The Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater at the Public Theater (in New York), at the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Bronx Zoo, Cleveland Science Center, the Singapore Arts Festival, Queen Sirikit Pavilion Bangkok, Aruba International Dance Festival, Toronto Harbourfront Festival, Quebec Festival D’Ete, Juste Pour Rire Montreal, Int. Contemporary Arts Festival Tokyo - among many others.
Collaborations with new music composers include Henry Threadgill, Dean Drummond (Harry Partch Ensemble), Mikel Rouse, and Peter Garland (Conquest of Mexico for New Music America).
