skybetter and associates & Ear Heart Music Ensemble present COLD HOUSE - 11/18

Brooklyn-based skybetter and associates performs an evening of contemporary dance repertory with live music by the Ear Heart Music Ensemble, making their debut in this concert. The program includes Temporary Matters set to selections from Jóhann Jóhannsson's Englabörn; Cold House You Kept set to String Quartet no. 2, Quasi una Fantasia by Henryk Górecki, and the New York premiere of Eveningland, Skybetter's recent commission by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, featuring selections from David Lang's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion. Flutist and Ear Heart Music director Amelia Lukas will lead the ensemble in Karen Tanaka's ethereal Frozen Horizen, setting an icy yet uplifting tone for the evening. The performance will take place in the round.

BACKGROUND ON EVENINGLAND FROM ARTISTIC DIRECTOR SYDNEY SKYBETTER:

"Eveningland was commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center in the summer of 2012. We had just moved to DC so my wife could complete a fellowship at the Smithsonian, and my then-one-year-old son wasn't sleeping well. He simply refused to learn how to fall asleep. Every night, my wife and I would rock, sing, cajole and beg him to go down, and ultimately, exhausted, he'd konk out, only to wake up two hours later. Over time, I found this lack of sleep warped my sense of self and the world.

"This, then, is the emotional terrain of Eveningland. Informed by David Lang's score, I created a danced, formal frame to mirror the odd violence and darkness of my somnambulance. A narcissistic intention, surely, but thankfully Eveningland is not just MY work. It is the result of three dance companies - skybetter and associates, Christopher K. Morgan and Artists, and Summation Dance - working in close collaboration with one another, sharing resources, funding, and dancers. It is an intensely collaborative work haunted by the bodies, stories, poetry and emotional states of dozens of dancers from around the country. I set out to make a mirror, and my dancers made a kaleidoscope.

"In this way, the creative process of Eveningland helped to refine an interstate creative practice that is now my standard. All new dances I create are collaboratively made and owned, by as many as four different dance companies at once, and performed exactly once in New York City."