REDCAT Set To Present The World Premiere Of AH! 9/16-18

This September, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) transforms its flexible performance space into an immersive visual and sonic environment for the world premiere of AH!, a co-production of The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts and the CalArts Center for New Performance. AH! opens Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at REDCAT and runs for a limited engagement through Friday, September 18, 2009.

Standard theatrical seating is absent as audience members are invited into an intimate arena of sound, experiencing what the creators describe as an "opera no-opera." Composed and performed live by creators from across the Americas, Europe and East Asia, this pioneering collaboration emerged from A Counterpoint of Tolerance, a special project of the Transatlantic Arts Consortium (TAC) led by composer-performer David Rosenboom and award-winning poet Martine Bellen.

Drawing inspiration from the classic Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, AH! is a celebratory passage across musical cultures and times: a polyglot clarion call for understanding and unity in today's globalized, increasingly interconnected world. Rosenboom and Bellen describe AH! as "Interwebbing variations, narrative actions, story woven into story form, one song, one story, one song-story story-song, one opera no-opera. Is it Electronic? Static Buzz? Rock? Jazz? Eastern? Western? Northern? Southern? Post-Modern? Pre-Modern? Experimental Funk? Zen Hip Hop? Genre-blind? Yes! Yes! Yes!"

Performing in more than 13 different languages and on a variety of Latin American, East Asian and Western instruments, including an eleven piece lap-top orchestra, the collaborating composer-performers who comprise A Counterpoint of Tolerance are Iván Caramés Bohigas (Spain), Michael Foumai (US-Hawaii), Alex Kotch (US-North Carolina), Claudio Maldonado (Argentina-Patagonia), Vedran Mehinovic (Bosnia), Natalie Oram (UK), Doo Jin Park (Korea), Jerónimo Rachenberg (Mexico), Diana Syrse Valdés Rosado (Mexico), and Xiaolang Zhou (China). Joining them at REDCAT, along with David Rosenboom and Martine Bellen, is an exceptional cast of musicians, theatermakers and interactive artists under the direction of Travis Preston, who stages this exceptional music event with production designer Christopher Barreca, choreographer Mira Kingsley, lighting designer Laura Mrczkowski, and video designer Jeremiah Thies.

Spinning off a mandala of 13 extraordinary and ordinary modern-life stories, this spellbinding opera brings together ingenious stagecraft, flights of phenomenal musicianship, and an array of robotic and interactive musical technologies, Musical robots, 3-D sound-speaker pods, a piano outfitted with Multi-Laser Gestural Controllers, and a Laser Tetrahedron Music Controller suspended in the theater have been imagined, developed, and utilized for this immersive visual and aural experience. More information about these technologies is described at www.ah-opera.org, where the audience is invited to engage with and contribute to AH! before, during and after the performances at REDCAT. Via the website, mobile media, and an interactive, multi-touch BriK table in REDCAT's lobby, the audience can take part in the creation of this interactive opera no-opera, contributing sounds and words which are being collected with the intention of making them visible and audible during the performances.

A Counterpoint of Tolerance is a project commissioned by the Transatlantic Arts Consortium (TAC). This production of AH! is made possible with generous support from TAC, The Evelyn Sharp Foundation, Judith O. and Robert E. Rubin, and Abby Sher.

AH! runs September 16-18, 2009 at REDCAT.  Performances take place Wednesday-Friday at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $25, with student discounts available. Seating is general admission. Tickets and information at the REDCAT box office, 213-237-2800 or www.redcat.org.

REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, is located at the corner of W. 2nd and Hope Streets, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex (631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

Explore and interact with AH!'s website

Listen to sound excerpts

View a promotional video by collaborator Claudio Maldonado

A Counterpoint of Tolerance is a special project of the Transatlantic Arts Consortium (TAC) to bring together a group of young composer-performers from around the world to work with David Rosenboom in creating a new, concert-length work exploring the potential of creative music-making to enhance how we understand human conditions in the new era of globalization. Over the course of two summer residencies in Southern California, at Idyllwild Arts in 2008 and The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts in 2009, and a year of working collaboratively via the Internet, the group will realize a design for a new kind of collective opera created by writer-poet Martine Bellen and composer-performer David Rosenboom, called AH!

The Center For New Performance at CalArts was established in 1999 as a forum for the creation of work that expands the language, discourse, and boundaries of contemporary theater.  The Center supports a producing model that is artist and project specific, giving priority to performance that cannot be easily produced in other circumstances. For more information, please visit www.calarts.edu/theater/centernewperformance.

The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts offers rigorous training in an unrivaled variety of musical styles and cultures, helping each student to acquire the musical fluency to work across conventional boundaries, expand his or her artistic and cultural horizons, and develop a global creative vision. Programs are offered leading to the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Master of Fine Arts (MFA), or Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degrees, as well as the Certificate or Advanced Certificate of Fine Arts. For more information, please visit www.music.calarts.edu

David Rosenboom (born 1947) is a composer-performer, interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator. Since the 1960s he has explored ideas about spontaneously emerging musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and multi-media, the interactive music of the infosphere, an approach to compositional modeling termed "propositional music", and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely published, recorded, distributed and presented around the world, and he is known as a pioneer in American experimental music. Since 1990 he has been dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts where he now holds the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music and is a conductor for the New Century Players and board member for the Center for New Performance. His most recent recordings can be found  on New World Records, Lovely Music Ltd., EM Records, Mutable Music, Pogus Productions, Nine Winds Records, Centaur Records, and other labels.

Martine Bellen is the author of six collections of poetry including the Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press); Further Adventures of the Monkey God (Spuyten Duyvil); Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Award; and Places People Dare Not Enter (Potes & Poets Press) and a forthcoming novella 2X2 (BlazeVOX [books]). A bilingual collection of her poetry has been published in Germany by Verlag im Waldgut (translator, Hans Jürgen Balmes) and she has co-translated from Chinese into English work by the poets Ma Lan and Zhang Er. Ms. Bellen's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Lyric Postmodernisms: an Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (Counterpoint Press) Saints of Hysteria: a half century of collaborative poetry (Soft Skull Press), and The Convergence of Birds: Writing Inspired by Joseph Cornell (DAP). She has been a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy; the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; the Fund for Poetry Award; and the American Academy of Poets Award. Bellen is a contributing editor of the literary journal Conjunctions.

Bios for the entire AH! creation team are available at www.ah-opera.org/creators.

The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, opened by CalArts in 2003, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in this region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT is the newest partner in an international network of adventurous art and performance centers, which together are playing a vital role in the evolution of contemporary culture. REDCAT is a center for experimentation, discovery, and lively civic discourse.

REDCAT sponsors include The Standard, Yamaha, Ovation TV, Los Angeles magazine and KCRW.

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