UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance Presents Pam Tanowitz/Brice Marden/Kaija Saariaho's FOUR QUARTETS

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) presents Pam Tanowitz/Brice Marden/Kaija Saariaho's Four Quartets on Saturday, February 15 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, February 16, at 3 p.m. at Royce Hall. Tickets starting at $28 are available now at cap.ucla.edu, 310-825-2101, and Royce Hall box office.

Based on T.S. Eliot's poems Four Quartets, the choreographer Pam Tanowitz along with painter Brice Marden and composer Kaija Saariaho have created a sublime new dance work.

The poems are read aloud by actress Kathleen Chalfant while the choreography builds the outer framework and the new score by Saariaho (performed by The Knights) accentuates the connotation of the words. Marden's work is in the form of four paintings that comprise the scenic design by Clifton Taylor. The 10 dancers perform together in solos and duets wearing billowing pale green and off-white costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung.

This is Tanowitz's second season in a row with CAP UCLA, but this time with a piece featuring her own choreography: last April she danced as part of the Merce Cunningham centennial event Night of 100 Solos.

Tanowitz has a reputation for fine footwork, but she has surpassed even herself with the choreography for Four Quartets. Unlike other choreographers, her exploration of dance-making is made with an unflinchingly post-modern treatment of the classical dance vocabulary. Tanowitz's credits and accolades are extensive, her latest came in May of 2019 when she received an Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

About Pam Tanowitz

A celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance-making with a consistent community of dancers. Tanowitz is currently the Fisher Center at Bard's Choreographer in Residence.

Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a "rare achievement" (The New York Times).

In 2016, Tanowitz was presented with the Juried Bessie Award for "using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus." Other honors include an Outstanding Production Bessie award in 2009 for her dance Be In the Gray With Me, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in 2010, Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University in 2013-14, a Fall 2016 fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and named a 2016-2017 City Center Choreography Fellow. Her work was selected by The New York Times Best of Dance series in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

She has been commissioned by New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Fisher Center at Bard, The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series, Danspace Project, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Duke Performances, Peak Performances, FSU's Opening Nights Series, and the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston.

About Brice Marden

A contemporary American painter known for his subtle explorations of color and gestural lines. Like Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, and Agnes Martin, Marden's canvases are the product of an ongoing investigation into the nature of abstraction and the medium of painting itself. "A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation," the artist mused. "Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light." Born on October 15, 1938 in Bronxville, NY, Marden received his BFA from Boston University in 1961 and his MFA from Yale University in 1963, where he was taught by both Alex Katz and Jon Schueler. Marden's early Minimalist works, such as The Dylan Painting (1966), gave way to the influence of Chinese calligraphy and the creation of his first gestural works-Cold Mountain paintings-during the late 1980s and 1990s. In 2006, The Museum of Modern Art mounted the large-scale exhibition "Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective," which traveled on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art. The artist currently lives and works between Hydra, Greece and New York, NY. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.

About Kaija Saariaho

A prominent Finnish composer and performer who is now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics. Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L'Amour de Loin and Adriana Mater and the oratorio La Passion de Simone. Saariaho has claimed the major composing awards in The Grawemeyer Award, The Wihuri Prize, The Nemmers Prize,The Sonning Prize, The Polar Music Prize. In 2018 she was recognized with the BBVA Foundation's Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In 2015 she was the judge of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Always keen on strong educational programmes, Kaija Saariaho was the music mentor of the 2014-15 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and was in residence at U.C. Berkeley Music Department in 2015. Saariaho continues to collaborate for the stage. Only The Sound Remains, her most recent opera collaboration with Peter Sellars, opened in Holland in 2016. In the same year her first opera L'Amour de Loin was presented in its New York premiere by the Metropolitan Opera in a new production by Robert Le Page. The Park Avenue Armory and New York Philharmonic presented a celebration of her orchestral music with visual accompaniment in October 2016. February 2017 saw Paris come alive with her work when she was featured composer for the Festival Presences. Her fifth opera, Innocence, will be premiered in the summer 2020.

This performance concludes CAP UCLA's 2019-20 Dance series. For more shows this season visit cap.ucla.edu/calendar/.

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