Peak Performances Presents The Premiere Of Gandini Juggling And Alexander Whitley's SPRING, December 12-15

Peak Performances presents the U.S. premiere of Gandini Juggling and choreographer Alexander Whitley's Spring, a mesmerizing collaboration setting the company's avant-garde approach to juggling in juxtaposition with contemporary dance. Following the success of last year's Smashed, Gandini Juggling joins forces with Whitley for a kaleidoscopic dreamscape of a performance. The production features six virtuosic jugglers: Kati Ylä-Hokkala, Tristan Curty, Dominik Harant, Kim Huynh, Liza van Brakel, and Wes Peden and four contemporary dancers: Sakeema Peng Crook, Tia Hockey, Erin O'Toole, and Yu-Hsien Wu, and an immersive score by London-based composer and producer Gabriel Prokofiev. The Guardian called Spring "joyfully hypnotic...filled with intricate skill." Visually arresting, colorful-with lighting design by Guy Hoare and costume design by Claire Ashley-and bursting with rhythm and pattern, Spring is a refreshing and entertaining production at the vanguard of contemporary circus. Performances take place December 12-15 at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University.

Spring comes to the Kasser just after final performances of the Phelim McDermott-directed production of Philip Glass's Akhnaten at The Metropolitan Opera, for which Sean Gandini and members of the company have infused Glass' work with their mesmeric movement, "toss[ing] their balls into the air like ancient etchings brought to life" as "Glass' pulsing arpeggios rise from the orchestra pit" (Los Angeles Times). On Tuesday, December 3, Sean Gandini will join Pulitzer Prize-winning composer/ singer Caroline Shaw and multi-instrumentalist/instrument inventor Mark Stewart at National Sawdust in a conversation moderated by NationalSawdust+ curator Elena Park. The evening will be punctuated by juggling excerpts performed by the company and a special appearance by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings the title role of the Egyptian sun god in the opera.

Spring builds on Gandini's time exploring various art forms-including opera (Akhnaten), the tanztheater of Pina Bausch (Smashed), bharatanatyam (Sigma), and ballet (4x4: Ephemeral Architectures, a collaboration with Royal Ballet dancer Ludovic Ondiviela). Gandini considers Spring as completing a trilogy with the latter two works. Spring embraces deconstructed rhythms and jubilant patterning, delving deeper into the company's obsession with juggling as a pure choreography. Gandini and Whitley share a passion for pure form-both similarly interested in the differences between what a word describes and the thing itself. For them, it is in these limits of language where dance and juggling unfold their revelatory powers. Of Spring, The Guardian wrote: "there is something so satisfying about watching the repetitions of the jugglers' hypnotic geometry, the balls caught to the coarse beat and glitchy melodies of Gabriel Prokofiev's live strings and electronics soundtrack."

Gandini says, "The production is inspired by the spring season, with echoes to Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' and all its joyeux implications; the nature blooming in the garden, the lightness and the brightness of little details. Spring is also a reflection on choreography. With our previous show 4x4, dance and juggling operated at the same time, while in Spring the notion of counterpoint is introduced. Another difference is the approach to gravity. While in classic dance, the weight is very high, aerial; in contemporary dance, the weight is attracted by the floor, to the earth."

Spring continues Peak Performances' 2019-2020 season, offering its state-of-the-art platform to artists who work with-and sometimes against-established vocabularies in the creation of exhilarating new performance works. This theme has lent itself to the presentation of momentous collaborations and the merging of groundbreaking artistic practices. These have already included Elizabeth Streb and Anne Bogart's collaborative adaptation of works by Charles Mee, FALLING & LOVING and Lena Herzog's Last Whispers, for which she worked with composers to create an immersive oratorio of endangered and extinct languages.

Spring will take place Thursday, December 12 and Friday, December 13 at 7:30pm; Saturday, December 14 at 8pm; and Sunday, December 15 at 3pm at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University (1 Normal Ave, Montclair, NJ). Performances run 60 minutes, with no intermission. Tickets are affordably priced at $30, and can be purchased at www.peakperfs.org or 973.655.5112. Tickets are always free for Montclair State students.

A First Impressions talk with Alexander Whitley, Sean Gandini, and Gandini Juggling co-founder, co-artistic director, and performer Kati Ylä-Hokkala, moderated by Ruth Wikler, Director of Circus Programming at TOHU, will take place December 14.