Irish Arts Center Announces Spring 2020 Programming

Irish Arts Center (IAC), a multidisciplinary arts center dedicated to bringing people of all backgrounds together through the excellence and dynamism of Irish culture, announces programming for the Spring 2020 season. The organization enters the new decade with a robust and multiform season, the last (for now) in its 51st Street home, prior to the highly anticipated opening of the New Irish Arts Center, fittingly showcasing the organization's enduring interest in bridging tradition and innovation. (The Center's 51st Street venue will be renovated following the opening of the new, adjacent 11th Avenue building, which it will ultimately adjoin.) As IAC prepares its momentous transformation, they continue to focus a long-held core vision for inclusively pairing and coalescing boundary-pushing contemporary work from Ireland, America, and around the world, with an appreciation of Irish artistic history and tradition. Whether in music, theater, dance, literature, or any collision of forms, IAC's seasons carry with them Ireland and Irish America's cultural legacies; panoramic visions of current artistic movements; and maps to the vast potentials of their futures.

The upcoming Ragas to Reels, April 17-18, speaks directly to IAC's consideration of histories as templates for new creation: something bold and unexpected is formed here in the reevaluation and cohesion of two classic forms. For this unique musical event, Irish Arts Center welcomes back prodigious raga and jazz pianist Utsav Lal-who over the course of a week-long residency in 2019 forged a dynamic new sound with violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire and Afro-soul star Loah-in another sonically groundbreaking collaboration. Lal, improviser and composer Sam Comerford (flute), and acclaimed tabla player Nitin Mitta join forces for this ever-evolving performance (which began in 2009 at Ireland's National Concert Hall and adds new compositions in its first U.S. performances) that brings together Indian classical and Irish traditional music. Understanding the event's multidimensional potential for educating and community-building, IAC will also present Ragas to Reels for Kids: Breaking Boundaries (April 18), the musicians' adaptation of the concert for younger audiences, offering an exhilarating example to cross-cultural collaboration.

The Center turns to more recent history in their presentation of Marie Jones' celebrated play A Night in November, "a very funny, poignant, dark, passionate play about a man's desire
to reconcile his internal divisions...mix[ing] polemic and observation in a rich, rewarding and provocative piece of theatre" (Sunday Tribune). First performed in Belfast in 1994, A Night in November has toured internationally, bringing its triumphal story to London, Dublin, Los Angeles, and New York. IAC now brings it back to U.S. audiences with the 25th Anniversary production from Soda Bread Theatre Company directed by Matthew McElhinney (Jones' son, who was a young child when Jones wrote the script, and grew up intimately understanding its context) and starring Matthew Forsythe, presented in association with Georganne Aldrich Heller and Anita Waxman (April 29-May 17). Like many of IAC's theatrical performances, this solo, 1990s Belfast-set play brings complex questions-about sectarianism and cultural identity-down to an intimate, human scale, as it follows a Northern Irish Protestant's awakening to a sense of personal liberation. Twenty-five years after its debut, the questions embedded in Jones' script feel pressingly contemporary-profoundly resonant universally amidst global instability, and specifically with deep uncertainty surrounding Northern Ireland amidst Brexit.

IAC showcases the vitality of multidisciplinary programming in This Ain't No Disco, an event featuring two evenings of screenings of the live music showcase web series of the same name, as well as conversation and live performance. The documentary web series This Ain't No Disco is a collaboration between Irish radio presenter Donal Dineen-the first host of the beloved music television program No Disco, to which his new online project nods-and filmmaker Myles O'Reilly. TheJournal.ie writes of the original No Disco (1993-2003), "In a pre-internet era, before streaming, Spotify and 24-7 music access, in a time of tapes and music magazines, No Disco was essential," while the Irish Independent recalls, "The show welcomed you in, while bringing you to musical places you'd never been before, and sometimes hadn't even known existed." Now in the documentary series This Ain't No Disco, Dineen once again introduces viewers to bold musical acts, following them through their creative processes and in breathtaking performances. IAC will screen the two premiere episodes of the second series of This Ain't No Disco (Episode 1 on April 24 and Episode 2 on April 25), hosted by Dineen and O'Reilly, and performances from Junior Brother, a 2019 RTE Radio 1 Folk Award double-nominee. The breakthrough musician's singular take on alternative Irish folk has been praised as "full of wide-eyed wonders and keen observations" (Irish Times) and "untamed" and "unapologetically raw...a shining example of how long-standing genres like trad and folk can be given new life" (The Last Mixed Tape).

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