PEAK Performances and WNET's ALL ARTS Launch PEAK HD With FALLING & LOVING

PEAK Performances and WNET's ALL ARTS today announce the initial lineup for PEAK HD, a partnership formed last year to broadcast performances produced at PEAK Performances' state-of-the-art home, The Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, to audiences across the country.

These monthly releases-beginning with works performed last season and soon featuring works programmed for Fall 2020 at PEAK-launch October 11, 2020 with Anne Bogart & Elizabeth Streb's FALLING & LOVING, based on the works of Charles Mee, and breathtakingly captured with 12 cameras of varying sizes and purposes.

The broadcasts, which will be available to stream on the same day on the ALL ARTS website and free streaming app, will continue with Martha Graham Dance Company and International Contemporary Ensemble, performing Appalachian Spring and PEAK Commission The Auditions; Richard Alston Dance Company in their final American engagement; Spring, by Gandini Juggling; and Grand Band in a concert that included Julius Eastman's Gay Guerrilla. See descriptions of these works below; broadcast dates will be announced soon.

PEAK Performances and ALL ARTS first conceived PEAK HD in 2019, when Montclair State University made the Alexander Kasser Theater a state-of-the-art live performance broadcast venue by installing multiple 4K robotic video cameras linked to control studios in MSU's School of Communication and Media. The potential for what PEAK HD could mean for the theater world has been elevated amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as the organization took hold of this moment of deep uncertainty and expanded their 15-year streak of breaking the rules of performance as we've known it.

PEAK HD reaches back to the golden age of television when broadcasts of live symphonies, operas, and plays were fundamental to the newly invented craft of TV. Leaning into the future, well beyond the end of social distancing, PEAK HD and PEAK STAGE will continue to be central partners, working in tandem to-at levels both local and global-widen and deepen tastes for highly inexplicable works in dance, music, theater, opera, and circus.

While it pre-dates the pandemic, PEAK HD exemplifies how performance institutions can and will begin to move forward amidst the obstacles of the current moment. Having transformed The Kasser into a hybrid live performance venue and TV studio, PEAK Performances can program works for the future for capture/broadcast, while phasing audiences back in and assiduously assessing the safety needs of the moment. The organization plans to record its future productions using cutting-edge technology and 9-12 camera shoots, giving experimental and iconoclastic artists vast cinematographic scope and flexibility to capture their work. Regardless of the size of their live audiences (whether they can be viewed by 8 or 80 or hundreds of people in person at a time), these performances will live forever, and be open to anyone who wishes to discover them as exhilarating filmed works.

PEAK Performances Executive Director Jedediah Wheeler, who has worked in performance through the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, economic crashes, and numerous other crises, says, "The obstacles we're facing today are catastrophic and coated in painful loss, but this is not new for the performing arts. The performing arts in America are filled with the most tough-minded, forward-thinking, get-it-done people I have ever experienced in the world. So PEAK HD comes as a celebration of the deep, purposeful, important creativity that exists not just in the U.S. but worldwide, and it's an intense creative process with multiple experienced minds focused on it. With The Kasser now equipped as a first-class broadcast venue for the performing arts, we're sending that message far and wide. The day we can open The Kasser's doors to 465 people (and simultaneously capture these performances for broadcast)-that will be another celebration. But the doors that are open are the doors of our ideas. Everybody is welcome. All seats are available. There is no social distancing to the imagination."

ALL ARTS Artistic Director Jörn Weisbrodt says, "I have always admired the bold programming of PEAK Performances and its Artistic Director, Jed Wheeler. They have brought some of the greatest International Artists to PEAK's home, the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University-often groundbreaking artists whose work has never been seen in the United States. PEAK Performances is also one of the very few arts presenters on the East Coast commissioning new productions. I am proud that in our first year of collaboration we can bring an entire season of programming to our audiences during times when the live experience is sadly not available to us."