American Modern Opera Company Returns To A.R.T. For Second Annual RUN AMOC! FESTIVAL

American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at Harvard University, under the leadership of Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus and Executive Producer Diane Borger, announces the return of American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) for its second annual Run AMOC! Festival December 14-16, 2018. The "hot-bed of boundary-pushing, inventive, chance-taking artists" (ZEALnyc) will present four pieces featuring company members at venues around Harvard Square in Cambridge.

AMOC is a new kind of opera company-comprised of a diverse collective of singers, dancers, instrumentalists, a director, and a composer-that aims to expand the definition and reach of opera in our world through collaborative, interdisciplinary work. 2018 MacArthur Fellow composer/conductor/
pianist/poet Matthew Aucoin (Crossing at the A.R.T., Harvard '12) and director/choreographer/dancer Zack Winokur (The Black Clown at the A.R.T.) serve as Artistic Directors.

Tickets to Run AMOC! Festival performances will go on sale on Wednesday, November 21.

The festival line-up includes (details below):

WITH CARE

An exploration of care and caregiving

Created by Bobbi Jene Smith (A Study on Effort) in collaboration with Keir GoGwilt (A Study on Effort)

Original music by Matthew Aucoin (Crossing)

Featuring Or Schraiber, Bobbi Jene Smith, Miranda Cuckson (Cage Match), and Keir GoGwilt

Friday, December 14 at 7:30PM & Saturday, December 15 at 8:30PM | Loeb Drama Center Ex

BACH FLUTE SONATAS AND PRELUDES

The debut performance of the new recording collaboration

Featuring Emi Ferguson and RUCKUS

Saturday, December 15 & Sunday, December 16 at 2:30PM | Horner Room at the Agassiz Theater

CAGE

The performer called "brilliant...effortlessly elegant," by The New Yorker

Featuring Conor Hanick

Saturday December 15 & Sunday December 16 at 4PM | Loeb Drama Center Ex

AMOC IN CONCERT

A sampling of the Company's latest collaborations

Featuring Jonny Allen, Paul Appleby (December 16 only), Matthew Aucoin, Doug Balliett, Jay Campbell, Julia Eichten (December 15 only), Keir GoGwilt, Conor Hanick, and Coleman Itzkoff

Saturday, December 15 & and Sunday, December 16 at 5:30PM | Horner Room at the Agassiz Theater

**A limited number of press tickets are available for each performance-contact Rebecca Curtiss (rebecca_curtiss@harvard.edu) to reserve.

Aucoin and Winokur will host a special preview of the Run AMOC! Festival at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts on Thursday, December 13 at 8PM. More information at pem.org/events/running-amoc-with-matthew-aucoin.

PRODUCTION DETAILS

WITH CARE

Created by Bobbi Jene Smith in collaboration with Keir GoGwilt

Original music by Matthew Aucoin

Friday, December 14 at 7:30PM & Saturday, December 15 at 8:30PM

Loeb Drama Center Ex (64 Brattle Street, Cambridge)

Featuring:

Or Schraiber and Bobbi Jene Smith, dancers

Miranda Cuckson and Keir GoGwilt, violinists

Building on the cross-disciplinary work performed in A Study on Effort ("chilling, thrilling rawness," The New York Times), which was featured as part of the inaugural Run AMOC! Festival at the A.R.T., Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt's newest project explores ideas of care and caregiving through music, dance, and spoken word. Conceived as a drama between twinned characters, a caregiver and a wounded spirit, With Care is a physical investigation of vacancy, loss, and passion. With Care is a co-commissioned production by ODC Theater, San Francisco, and AMOC.

BACH FLUTE SONATAS AND PRELUDES

Saturday, December 15 & Sunday, December 16 at 2:30PM

Horner Room at the Agassiz Theater (5 St. James Street, Cambridge)

Featuring:

Emi Ferguson, flute

RUCKUS

Doug Balliett, double bass, viola da gamba, and mandolin

Elliot Figg, keyboards

Shirley Hunt, viola da gamba and cello

Paul Holmes Morton, theorbo, guitar, and banjo

Clayton Zeller-Townson, bassoon

with special guest Stephen Stubbs, guitar

Fresh off of their first recording collaboration, widely acclaimed flutist Emi Ferguson ("dazzling...irresistibly vital," Portland Press Herald; "wonderful," New York Times) is joined by the continuo band RUCKUS ("superb," Opera News; "rough-edged intensity," The New Yorker) with special guest and Stephen Stubbs, Artistic Co-Director of the Boston Early Music Festival, in a wild technicolor romp through one of Bach's most playful and transcendent sets of work. Don't miss your chance to experience this special preview of never-before-heard arrangements to be released in Spring 2019.

CAGE

Featuring Conor Hanick

Saturday December 15 & Sunday December 16 at 4PM

Loeb Drama Center Ex (64 Brattle Street, Cambridge)

AMOC pianist Conor Hanick ("defies human description," Concerto Net; "brilliant... effortlessly elegant," The New Yorker) plays the entirety of John Cage's epochal Sonatas and Interludes, a hugely influential set of pieces inspired by Indian philosophy and written for prepared piano, in the Loeb Ex.

AMOC IN CONCERT

Saturday, December 15 & and Sunday, December 16 at 5:30PM

Horner Room at the Agassiz Theater (5 St. James Street, Cambridge)

Featuring:

Jonny Allen, percussionist

Paul Appleby, tenor (December 16 only)

Matthew Aucoin, pianist

Doug Balliett, bassist

Jay Campbell, cellist

Julia Eichten, dancer-choreographer (December 15 only)

Keir GoGowilt, violinist

Conor Hanick, pianist

Coleman Itzkoff, cellist

AMOC artists perform two programs featuring their newest collaborations, as well as music composed by AMOC Co-Artistic Director and 2018 MacArthur Fellow Matthew Aucoin.

TICKETING INFORMATION

Tickets start at $25 and go on sale Wednesday, November 20 online at americanrepertorytheater.org, by phone at 617.547.8300, and in person at the Loeb Drama Center Ticket Services Offices (64 Brattle Street, Cambridge). Discounts are available to Subscribers, Members, groups, students, seniors, Blue Star families, EBT card holders, and others.

ABOUT AMOC

AMOC is an opera company on a new model. Led by Artistic Directors Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur, the company serves as the artistic home for seventeen of the most exciting singers, dancers, and instrumentalists of the rising generation. AMOC's artists are committed to reimagining what it means to make opera in the twenty-first century: unlike a typical opera company, which features a constantly-changing roster of artists in one particular theater, AMOC focuses on deep, long-term artistic relationships among its core members. The company's goal is to create a body of new, discipline-colliding music-theater works, conceived, developed, and performed by our artists.

AMOC's second season includes the premiere of With Care, a new work co-commissioned by ODC Theater in San Francisco and AMOC, created by dancer Bobbi Jene Smith in collaboration with Keir GoGwilt; a second, expanded Run AMOC! Festival at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA; performances of John Adams's El Niño, arranged specially for AMOC, at the Cloisters; and its first fully-staged chamber opera production, Hans Werner Henze's El Cimarrón, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In AMOC's first season, the company launched its inaugural Run AMOC! Festival at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA in December; held its first major teaching and performance residency at Harvard University in February; performed at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN, in March; and was Artist-in-Residence at Park Avenue Armory in April. Other recent engagements include appearances at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival and The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA.

ABOUT AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER

American Repertory Theater at Harvard University (A.R.T.) is a leading force in the American theater, producing groundbreaking work in Cambridge and beyond. A.R.T. was founded in 1980 by Robert Brustein, who served as Artistic Director until 2002, when he was succeeded by Robert Woodruff. Diane Paulus began her tenure as Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director in 2008. Under the leadership of Paulus and Executive Producer Diane Borger, A.R.T. seeks to expand the boundaries of theater by producing transformative theatrical experiences, always including the audience as a central partner.

Throughout its history, A.R.T. has been honored with many distinguished awards including the Tony Award for Best New Play for All the Way (2014); consecutive Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Musical for Pippin (2013) and The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess (2012), both of which Paulus directed, and sixteen other Tony Awards since 2012; a Pulitzer Prize; a Jujamcyn Prize for outstanding contribution to the development of creative talent; the Regional Theater Tony Award; and more than 100 Elliot Norton and IRNE Awards.

A.R.T. collaborates with artists around the world to develop and create work in new ways. It is currently engaged in a number of multi-year projects, including a collaboration with Harvard's Center for the Environment that will result in the development of new work over several years. Under Paulus' leadership, the A.R.T.'s club theater, OBERON, has been an incubator for local and emerging artists and has attracted national attention for its innovative programming and business models.

As the professional theater on the campus of Harvard University, the A.R.T. catalyzes discourse, interdisciplinary collaboration, and creative exchange among a wide range of academic departments, institutions, students, and faculty members, acting as a conduit between its community of artists and the university. The A.R.T. has trained generations of theater artists through its Institute for Advanced Theater Training, and also plays a central role in Harvard's undergraduate concentration in Theater, Dance & Media.

Dedicated to making great theater accessible, A.R.T. actively engages more than 5,000 community members and local students annually in project-based partnerships, workshops, conversations with
artists, and other enrichment activities both at the theater and across the Greater Boston area.

Through all of these initiatives, A.R.T. is dedicated to producing world-class performances in which the audience is central to the theatrical experience.

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