PEAK Performances at Montclair State University Announces 2022-23 Season

PEAK Performances at Montclair State University today announces its 2022-2023 season, a series of works confronting a world of chaotic imbalance, acknowledging that only by facing the past and present can we move into the future. With community as a bedrock theme of their works and a fundamental element of many of their practices, featured artists often call on the collective to unveil unseen truths and transformative possibilities-with vivid and radical vocabularies of movement, language, and artistic expression. The season speaks to the organization's consistent introduction of audiences into the imaginations of some of the world's boldest international and American artists. The insight, provocation, curiosity, and beauty they find within these visions can expand their understanding of their world.

Work this season hails from around the globe, with focuses as far-reaching as a tourist-trap grotto in Florida, 19th century Zimbabwe, contemporary Brazil under Bolsonaro, and pre-technology Greece. A current of darkness and fevered mystery connects them as they forge new, unpredictable relationships between countless artistic forms. Bridging contemporaneity and tradition, they often consider the elements of our past that perpetuate society's ills, and those that can be summoned to understand and reimagine our society.

Jedediah Wheeler, PEAK Performances Artistic Director, says, "As this season has coalesced, a connective element of darkness, unknowns, and unresolved questions-and the potential light and fresh starts that can result from confronting them in community-has emerged. Across 2022-2023, we behold Hamlet's unresolved despair, given new life by Why Not Theater; the gruesome Nehanda myth explored by nora chipaumire in direct, collective engagement with the audience; Lia Rodrigues's and nine dancers' furied response to poverty, inequity, and discrimination; the dystopian undercurrents and vivid world-building of Karen Russell, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and Troy Schumacher's collaborative work; Mary Halvorson's eruptive musical collaborations with the Mivos Quartet and six spectacular improvisers; Holly Treddenick's dive into her father's fiery memory; Raphaëlle Boitel's acrobatic excavation of a family's unspoken truths; and Tzeni Argyriou's choreographic revival of lost community. That theme, community, is the key that unlocks these works' shared desire for something better for humankind, as they examine and transcend struggle and shadow. The season begins, incidentally, with a portrait of the destruction of a community-and ends with the blessing of a community reinvigorated."

The season kicks off with the "defiantly charismatic...rock star of dance" (The New Yorker) nora chipaumire, examining issues of political governance and resistance in Zimbabwe, and the legacies of the colonial project in the global South in her new, immersive and participatory opera Nehanda (September 15-18). It continues with Why Not Theater, a company that makes "diverse, inclusive theatre the norm" (CBC) and reframes Shakespearean text in their bilingual Prince Hamlet, coalescing ASL and spoken English and featuring Christine Horne in the title role (September 22-25); Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças' Furia, viscerally exploring collectivity and otherness against the fascist backdrop of contemporary Brazilian politics (November 3-6); Femmes Du Feu Creations artistic director Holly Treddenick's solo work, In the Fire, combining dance and aerial circus with a vocabulary of movement inspired by her firefighter father's stories (November 10-13); Amaryllis and Belladonna by Mary Halvorson, a jazz guitarist and composer whose combined influences result in music "like little else, in any genre" (Pitchfork) (December 17 & 18); acclaimed Swamplandia! Author Karen Russell, choreographer Troy Schumacher, and composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone's The Night Falls, a dance-driven blend of opera and music theater set within a kitschy Floridian roadside attraction (February 9-12); Cie L'Oublié(e)'s/Raphaëlle Boitel's acrobatic excavation of the unspoken within a family, Ombres Portées, marking the artist's return to PEAK following her "stark and stunning...exquisitely designed and surprisingly moving" (The New York Times) When Angels Fall (March 23-26); and Tzeni Argyriou's Anonymo, addressing our social media age with a return to collectivized art-making tradition (May 6-9).

In July, 2022, choreographer Susan Marshall and scenic designer Mimi Lien will workshop Rhythm Bath, a performance installation offering a communal, meditative space, created with access for neurodiversity in mind, and marking Marshall's return to PEAK following her earlier performance installation Frame Dances. May, 2023 will feature another workshop, of Sentinel, a chamber opera created by Danielle Birritella, composed by Viet Cuong, with libretto by Claressinka Anderson, tracing its heroine's journey through grief in a dystopian reality of mass shootings and environmental collapse.

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