Ruth Negga, Premiere From Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker & More Set for NYU Skirball 2024 Season

NYU Skirball’s Spring 2024 season will open on Friday, January 12 with the American premiere of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling by Cliff Cardinal from Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre, co- presented with the Under the Radar Festival. The season continues with world premieres from choreographers Doug Varone and Raja Feather Kelly; North American premieres from Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Mette Ingvartsen, Catapult Opera, the Queer New York International Festival, and Chile’s Teatro La Re-Sentida; a NYC premiere from New York-based choreographer Beth Gill; and two artist lectures by Suzanne Bocanegra, featuring actors Lili Taylor and Ruth Negga.

NYU Skirball, led by Director Jay Wegman, presents adventuresome, transdisciplinary work that inspires yet frustrates, confirms yet confounds, entertains yet upends. NYU Skirball proudly embraces renegade artists who surprise, productions that blur aesthetic boundaries, and thought leaders who are courageous, outrageous, and mind-blowing.

William Shakespeare’S AS YOU LIKE IT, A RADICAL RETELLING BY CLIFF CARDINAL 

U.S. Premiere Friday, January 12 & Saturday, January 13 Canada • Theatre

NYU Skirball and the 2024 Under the Radar Festival present the U.S. premiere of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling By Cliff Cardinal. Shakespeare's beloved comedy As You Like It seems like a bizarre choice for inclusion in an experimental theatre festival. That's only the first of many surprises to be found in this U.S. premiere, a fresh interpolation of the Bard's classic story. This timeless tale of mistaken identities, gentle ruses, banishment and forgiveness takes on an entirely new meaning in playwright Cliff Cardinal's radical retelling that the Toronto Star calls "sly, funny and charming." Born on a South Dakota American Indian reservation, Cardinal's Cree and Lakota heritage deeply informs his take on the play, which centers on the relationships between Indigenous communities and colonial settlers, where both sides continue to struggle to be clearly heard. When the curtains rise, you can be certain that it's Shakespeare like you've never seen before and almost certainly never will again.

Cliff Cardinal is a polarizing writer and performer known for his black humor and compassionate poeticism. Cardinal’s multi-award-winning one-man play Huff is a harrowing yet hilarious show about youth who abuse solvents to the risk of suicide. Huff won numerous awards, including The Edinburgh Fringe Festival Lustrum Award (which recognizes the greatest moments at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) and was shortlisted for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. Born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Cliff studied playwriting at The National Theatre School of Canada and is an associate artist at VideoCabaret, where he develops his new work.

Crow’s Theatre, located in Toronto, Canada, ignites passionate and enduring engagement between audiences and artists by creating, producing, and promoting unforgettable theatre that examines and illuminates the pivotal narratives of our times. Founded in 1983, Crow’s Theatre has premiered over 50 new, daring, Canadian works, including the multiple-award-winning production of Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, John Mighton’s A Short History of Night, James O’Reilly’s Time After Time: The Chet Baker Project, and many more. www.crowstheatre.com

*****

BODYCAST, AN ARTIST LECTURE BY SUZANNE BOCANEGRA STARRING Ruth Negga

USA Monday, January 29 Artist Lecture/Theatre

Suzanne Bocanegra is a visual artist who uses theater and theater craft to interrogate the history and practice of visual art. Part performance, part memoir, and part essay, her Artist Lectures are both intensely personal and exhaustively researched, exploring not only how and why she became an artist, but also

Bodycast, starring Ruth Negga and directed by Paul Lazar calls upon memories of Bocanegra’s Texas childhood. Through text, video, music, and costume, the stories examine her upbringing and life as an artist, in stories of her teenage years spent in a plaster body cast and growing up on a farm in Texas.

Ruth Negga was nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for her starring role in the film Loving and starred in the film Passing. Her television credits include AMC’s Preacher. Her upcoming projects include David E. Kelley’s Apple TV+ limited series, Presumed Innocent, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal, and Dan Levy’s film Good Grief. In 2022, Ruth made her Broadway debut in Macbeth as Lady Macbeth, earning a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. Ruth was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and was raised between there, Limerick, Ireland, and London, England.  

“Suzanne Bocanegra’s art is an antidote to the history-free, prepackaged world that threatens every day to

QUEER NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL

North American Premieres Monday, February 7 - Saturday, February 17 International • Transdisciplinary

After a six-year hiatus, the Queer New York International Arts Festival returns and features works from a diverse group of International Artists. The festival questions traditional definitions and the understanding of queerness in artistic practice in concept and/or form. The 2024 festival features artists from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Germany, and the U.S. whose works explore a range of contemporary issues related to queer identity and marginalization, opening up topics such as sex work, migration, Indigenous rights, political prosecution, and the new conservatism. QNYIAF, curated and produced by Zvonimir Dobrović (founder and artistic director of Queer Zagreb and Perforations festivals in Croatia), will include performances, a video installation/exhibition, and a series of public talks with artists and curators.

The festival opens on February 7 with Arijana Lekić Fridrih’s From 5 to 95, a video installation and art web project documenting intergenerational stories and experiences of girls and women living in Croatia and continues with performances by Croatian artists Bruno Isaković, Nataša Rajković and Mia Zalukar; Toronto-based artist Clayton Lee; Tiziano Cruz from Argentina, Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz and more. The works presented question social and artistic norms, politics of patriarchy, notions of ‘others’ and dynamics of power between the center and the margin. The full lineup will be announced in December.

*****

Anne Teresa de KEERSMAEKER: THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, BWV 988 Belgium

N.A. Premiere Thursday, February 22 - Saturday, February 24 Dance

In this dance solo, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker continues her journey with Bach, this time together with pianist Pavel Kolesnikov. She stays true to her main principle of using the musical score as the blueprint for choreography.

The Goldberg Variations belong to Bach’s late period, in which the composer pushes the boundaries of musical themes in a play of variations, canons, and fugues. Spanning one aria and thirty variations, the music challenges the choreography to find a form of dance capable of adaptation and flexibility while retaining an immutable core. To De Keersmaeker, it is above all an invitation to consolidate the road traveled as an artist, posing today’s questions in her ongoing search for a personal choreographic idiom. rosas.be/en/

In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (b. 1960) created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Her choreography is grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. With Rosas, she has created a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body’s articulation in space and time.

INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE: Anthony Davis AND LEILA ADU-GILMORE

U.S. Saturday, March 2 Music

The International Contemporary Ensemble returns to NYU Skirball with a program of works by composer/pianist Anthony Davis and composer/vocalist Leila Adu-Gilmore. The evening will feature Adu-Gilmore’s Mahakala Oratorio (2020-23, world premiere of the live version) and Alyssum (2014); and Davis’s Wayang No. II Shadowdance (1982), and Undine (1986).

Anthony Davis is an internationally recognized composer of operatic, symphonic, choral, and chamber works, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his opera The Central Park Five. He is also known for his virtuoso performances both as a solo pianist and as the leader of the ensemble Episteme. As a composer, Davis is best known for his pioneering work in opera. The now-classic X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X played to sold-out houses at its 1986 premiere, and the premiere recording of X received a 1993 Grammy Nomination.

Leila Adu-Gilmore is a composer-performer who has released five solo albums. She composes and produces for dance, theatre and short film and has performed her compositions internationally. Of New Zealand Pākehā and Ghanaian descent and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, Dr. Adu-Gilmore is passionate about the role of music in social change, mental well-being, and human connection.

The International Contemporary Ensemble is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments, inspiring audiences to reimagine how contemporary music and sound can be experienced. Acclaimed as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and is the recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAPAwardforAdventurousProgramming,aswellasMusicalAmerica’sEnsembleoftheYearAward. By honoring the polyaspora of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists, the International Contemporary Ensemble has had a major impact on contemporary performance around the world. www.iceorg.org

*****

• N.A. Premiere

Oasis of Impunity

Oasis of Impunity is a choreographic reflection on the nature of the State’s violence that has linked police force with citizens in a permanent dialectic throughout history. It examines the systemic and personal motivations of those performing such violence, and raises issues related not only to Chilean society but to all democracies now questioning their history. Performed in Spanish with supertitles.

Teatro La Re-sentida (The Resentful) is a collective of young Chilean artists who regard theater as a critical instrument with major political responsibility. Their work embodies the pulses, visions and ideas of their generation and assumes as duty the desecration of taboos, and reflection generated from provocation. Their works give theatrical creation great political responsibility, understanding it as an instrument of critique, reflection and construction, and have been performed in more than 17 Countries.

TEATRO LA RE-SENTIDA: OASIS DE LA IMPUNIDAD 

Chile

Thursday, March 7- Saturday, March 9 Theatre 

Chile’s Teatro La Re-sentida returns to NYU Skirball with cited by The New York Times as one of the top European productions of 2022 when it was performed at Berlin’s Schaubühne. Hailed as “brilliant and harrowing,” Oasis is one of those extreme works of art that is all the more disturbing for the delicate artistry of its execution.

METTE INGVARTSEN: MOVING IN CONCERT

Denmark/Belgium• N.A. Premiere Saturday, March 16 & Sunday, March 17 Dance

Moving in Concert, featuring nine dancers, Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. Questions of kinesthesia, perception, affect and sensation have been crucial to most of her work, which includes several site-specific projects that have been seen around the world.Herworksinclude21pornographies,tocome(extended), 69positions,TheArtificialNatureProject,TheExtra Sensorial Garden, and many more. Skatepark, a large-scale performance for skaters, dancers and local skatepark communities, premiered in 2023. Mette is currently preparing Rush, a solo performance for Manon Santkin that draws on 20 years of collaboration. Ingvartsen established her company in 2003 and her work has since been shown throughout Europe, as well as in the U.S, Canada, Australia and Asia. She has been artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels (2012-2016), Volksbühne in Berlin, and associated to the APAP network. metteingvartsen.net

imagines a universe where humans, technologies and natural materials coexist to create an abstract set of movement. Inspired by how bodies are sensorially affected by living in a digitalized world, the performance explores a poetics of plasticity, abstraction and imagination.

Doug Varone: TO MY ARMS/RESTORE 

Friday, March 22 & Saturday, March 23

USA• World Premiere Dance

*****

To My Arms/Restore is a two-part work between the deeply emotional and the immensely physical. Set to a suite of arias by G. F. Handel, To My Arms builds a landscape of love and loss, evoking a strange otherworld of intimacy. In stark contrast, Restore’s visceral, unsparing movement explodes across the stage, revealing a new, wide-open terrain of physicality. Driven by the 21st-century sound of Nico Bentley’s HandelRemixed, the score fuses Handel’s 18th-century choral score Dixit Dominus with beats more commonly heard in clubs around the globe. Accompanied by live music by the 100-member MasterVoices and the New York Baroque Incorporated (NYBI), the entire evening will be conducted by orchestrator and Tony Award- winner Ted Sperling.

Doug Varone is the Artistic Director of Doug Varone and Dancers. Since 1986, the company has toured major venues across the U.S. Europe, Asia, and South America. Stages include The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Joyce Theater, London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, Moscow's Stanislavsky Theater, Buenos Aires’ Teatro San Martin, the Venice Biennale, among others. In opera, he is in demand as both director and choreographer and his numerous theater credits include Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional theaters across the country. www.dovadance.org

This season celebrates Artistic Director Ted Sperling’s 10th anniversary with MasterVoices, continuing and building the group’s mission to spark greater human connections through musical storytelling and unforgettable performances. With a chorus of 100+ members from all walks of life and a diverse roster of world-class soloists and directors/designers, MasterVoices performs masterpieces in concert, opera, and musical theater, as well as rarely heard gems deserving a fresh look and listen.www.mastervoices.org

New York Baroque Incorporated (NYBI) is a conductorless orchestra of period instruments based in New York City. With a passion for breathing life into 17th-and 18th-century repertoires, the orchestra delivers vibrant and informed performances while nurturing dynamic collaborations between historical performance and contemporary composers. NYBI has shared the stage with renowned soloists and has graced prestigious venues across the United States.

embodying Doug

Varone’s

decades-long

choreographic fascination

Raja Feather Kelly/THE FEATH3R THEORY: THE ABSOLUTE FUTURE USA

World Premiere Friday, April 5 & Saturday, April 6 Dance/Theater

A NYU Skirball commission, the feath3r theory (TF3T)’s The Absolute Future (or Death, Loneliness, and The Absolute Future of the Multiverse, or How to Cover the Sun with Mud), is a devised danced-theatre performance conceived, written, and directed by Raja Feather Kelly about a group of friends who attempt to watch The Great American Eclipse (April 8, 2024) and miss it. A constellation of shadows come together in a daring mix of fiction, reality, fantasy, and surrealism.

the feath3r theory ( Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T). Kelly has created 18 evening-length premieres with the feath3r theory. He has choreographed many off-Broadway productions, most recently Michael R. Jackson’s White Girl in Danger. Kelly choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop. He has received numerous accolades, including three Princess Grace Awards, an Obie Award and an Outer Critics Circle honor, among many others. www.thefeath3rtheory.com

*****

HONOR, AN ARTIST LECTURE BY SUZANNE BOCANEGRA STARRING Lili Taylor

USA Monday, April 8 Artist Lecture/Theatre

Honor, starring Lili Taylor and directed by Geoff Sobelle, is based on a 16th century tapestry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled Honor, which depicts 69 historical and allegorical figures who offer personal stories as moral lessons in honor and in dishonor. Bocanegra’s very close reading of the tapestry leads her to such diverse topics as Carole King’s Tapestry album, tableau vivant, the founding of the Girl Scouts of America, Anni Albers, and the history of theater.

Lili Taylor has been working on stage and screen for thirty years. She has appeared in dozens of films including Mystic Pizza, Say Anything..., Dogfight, Short Cuts, Household Saints, Factotum, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page, Ransom, and The Haunting. In television she has starred in Six Feet Under, Almost Human, Outer Range and American Crime, for which she earned an Emmy nomination. Taylor has appeared on stage in Broadway and Off- Broadway productions including Three Sisters (Roundabout), Mourning Becomes Electra (Acorn Theater), and The Library (Public Theater).

Suzanne Bocanegra is a visual artist who uses theater and theater craft to interrogate the history and practice of visual art. Part performance, part memoir, and part essay, her Artist Lectures are both intensely personal and exhaustively researched, exploring not only how and why she became an artist, but also

TF3T) was founded in 2009; the number 3 in TF3T speaks to the equal importance of dance- theatre-media in the work. Influenced by his research into the life and ideas of Andy Warhol, Kelly expanded his company of dancers and designers to self-produce TF3T’s first evening-length production Andy Warhol’s DRELLA (I love you Faye Driscoll) in 2013. The ensemble’s many awards include a HERE Arts Fellowship, the Solange MacArthur

Award for New Choreography (2016), and a Princess Grace Award for Choreography (2017). 

Beth Gill: NAIL BITER

Friday, April 12 & Saturday, April 13

USA• NYC Premiere Dance

*****

more general meditations on art-making, on history, our various cultural moments and our shifting ideals of human beauty.

“Gill brings to her craft a sense of control that doesn’t stifle but rather beckons our curiosity. With her eye- catching formalism, Gill has been gently teasing the viewer’s perception since 2003.” - Siobhan Burke, Dance Magazine

From acclaimed contemporary choreographer Beth Gill, Nail Biter moves the viewer through portals of myth, memoir, psychodrama, and horror. Characters emerge as a collection of representations of our collective unconscious as the work pierces through the existential weight of our time and channels our contemporary angst and anxiety.

Beth Gill is an award-winning choreographer, based in New York City since 2005. Her multidisciplinary works are captivating, cinematic timescapes, the product of long-term collaborations with celebrated artists. Gill is the proud recipient of the Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art and two “Bessie” awards. She has produced eight commissioned evening-length works that were met with critical acclaim. She has toured nationally and internationally and been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence. www.bethgill.com

*****

CATAPULT OPERA: LA VILLE MORTE 

USA/Greece • North American Premiere Thursday, April 18 - Sunday, April 21 Opera

Nadia Boulanger is widely considered one of the most important women in the history of music, having taught iconic 20th-century composers including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass, and Quincy Jones. Her only opera, La ville morte, with a libretto by Gabriele D’Annunzio, is a twisted love story that explores the destructive power of obsession and desire within a quartet of characters. The work was scheduled to premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1914, but with the outbreak of World War I, it never did, and the music was lost. Nearly a century later, vital New York-based chamber company Catapult Opera has commissioned David Conte, one of Boulanger’s last protégés, to compose a full score based on Boulanger’s recently discovered piano reduction of the orchestra, for a new production helmed by acclaimed opera and film director Robin Guarino, conducted by Catapult founder and artistic director Neal Goren, and featuring the Talea Ensemble. A co-production of Catapult and the Greek National Opera, La ville morte comes to NYU Skirball for its American premiere, after opening in Athens in January 2024.

Catapult Opera projects a more dynamic future for opera; the company seeks to broaden the art form and its audience, launching innovative productions that celebrate the classically trained voice. Catapult was founded in 2019 by Neal Goren, whose previous venture, Gotham Chamber Opera, popularized and legitimized the formerly ignored genre of chamber opera, which has now attained respect equal to the pillars of the operatic repertoire.www.catapultopera.org

The mission of the Greek National Opera is to offer audiences – at home and abroad – high-caliber productions, by presenting operas, ballets, operettas, operas for children, and music recitals, among others. Performances are held at Greek National Opera's two stages at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, as well as at the open-air Odeon of Herodes Atticus. The repertory of Greece’s only opera house covers four centuries of lyrical theatre, from the works of Claudio Monteverdi to those of contemporary composers.

For complete scheduling, dates and times, visit www.nyuskirball.org. Tickets go on sale to NYU Skirball members on November 9; tickets go on sale to the general public on November 17 at noon.Tickets can be purchased online, by visiting the box office in person, Tuesday - Saturday from 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm, or by calling 212.998.4941. NYU Skirball is located at 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square, New York, New York 10012.

Photo credit: Marc Domage

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