New York Live Arts to Present RE: AWAKENINGS Performances for Live Ideas Festival, 4/17-21

New York Live Arts is set to present several Re: Awakenings performances as part of the inaugural Live Ideas festival. New York Live Arts' newest program initiative, Live Ideas is an annual humanities festival that will explore a different theme each year over several days. The inaugural festival, The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, will take place from April 17 through 21, 2013 and is comprised of more than 20 events, including performances, films and discussions that showcase works of art and spark conversations that engage the prevalent themes in the acclaimed neurologist's works.

Featuring the critically acclaimed Orchestra of St. Luke's in an evening of music inspired by the writings of Oliver Sacks, Re: Awakenings (Music) includes the U.S. premiere of renowned composer Tobias Picker's Awakenings ballet suite accompanied by a solo dance performance by Daniel Hay-Gordon, choreographed by Aletta Collins. The orchestra will also perform in a concert version of selected passages from Michael Nyman's opera The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. The evening's music will be conducted by Samuel Bill and will feature three vocalists, Marnie Breckenridge (soprano), John Easterlin (tenor) and Mischa Bouvier (baritone). Performance will take place in the Theater at New York Live Arts on April 19^th at 8pm.

Picker, called "our finest composer for the Lyric Stage" (The Wall Street Journal), is an American composer who is the recipient of numerous awards and has created myriad works, including operas, symphonies, quartets and more. Nyman, known as one of Britain's most celebrated and innovative composers, has created works encompassing operas, string quartets, orchestral concertos and film soundtracks.

A Tourettic who was diagnosed in his 30s, Picker met Dr. Sacks in 1990 when introduced by a Parkinsonian artist friend in common. Over the years, they have formed a friendship founded partly on music and medicine; both artists mutually interested in the others realm of expertise.

Picker's Awakenings is an engrossing and lyrical score that had its premiere in 2010 in Salford, UK. In 1918 a mysterious sleeping-sickness epidemic swept across the world leaving hundreds of survivors in an unexplained paralysis. The powerful true stories of a group of very individual patients, catapulted temporarily but dramatically from their long slumber into their own emotionally-charged awakenings inspired Sacks' legendary work Awakenings, which became the fodder for Picker's score.

Nyman's The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat , dubbed a "neurology opera" by the Los Angeles Times, originated in 1986 and takes its impetus from Sacks' bestselling work of the same name, a poignant study of a singer suffering from visual agnosia, making him unable to interpret visual stimuli in the typical fashion. "My first reading of the title text of The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, soon after the book was published in Britain in November 1985, curiously mirrored the way its central character, Dr. P, viewed the world: I scanned it, skipped from page to page, incident to incident, fascinated by the details, but seeing the whole," explains Nyman. "These details, however, inescapably formed themselves into a new picture: an opera."

Re: Awakenings (Dance) will feature Donna Uchizono Company on April 18^th at 8pm and April 20^th at 4pm in one world premiere and one restaged work. A choreographer with a knack for "making something out of nothing" (Philadelphia City Paper),Uchizono's newest solo work, Out of Frame, was commissioned by Live Arts exclusively for Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks. A multi-media production, the work features music by Chopin and selected texts from Sacks' Awakenings. The evening will also include the restaging of State of Heads, which originally premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in 1999. Featuring performance by Rebecca Serrell Cyr, Levi Gonzalez and Hristoula Harakas, with original music by "Bessie" Award winner James Lo, State of Heads explores the concept of disjointedness and the passage of time.

The third of the Re: Awakenings programs, Re: Awakenings (Theater)is comprised of two versions of A Kind of Alaska, Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter's one-act play, presented on April 20^th at 8pm and April 21^st at 3:30pm. Written in 1982, the play was inspired by Sacks' Awakenings and tells the story of the quickening back to life of a bedbound older woman.The Re: Awakenings (Theater) production will commence with a spoken language version of the work, directed by Karen Kohlhaas and performed by Lisa Emery, Rebecca Henderson and Reed Birney, with two American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters. The second iteration of the work will be a version rendered entirely in ASL, in celebration of Sacks' special standing and work with the Deaf community in the U.K. and U.S., as represented in his book Seeing Voices. Directed by Kim Wield, the ASL version features performers Terrylene Sacchetti, Alexandria Wailes and Lewis Merkin.

All Re: Awakenings (Dance), (Theater) and (Music) performances will also feature Bill Morrison's Re: Awakenings short film commissioned by Live Arts with an original score by composer Philip Glass. (See the complete listing of related events below.)

Live Ideas is made possible by the Ford Foundation. Additional support is contributed by The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, The JJC Foundation, The Opaline Fund, Daniel and Joanna S. Rose, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation, Judith Zarin, Mortimer B. Zuckerman and the Theatre Development Fund. Our media partners are the New York Observer and WNYC.

For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Live Ideas microsite at www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas. Download a PDF of the complete Live Ideas schedule.

Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, Apr 17 - 21, 2013:

Highlighted Events:

Re: Awakenings (Music)

Featuring music composed by Tobias Picker and Michael Nyman, with the Orchestra of St. Luke's conducted by Samuel Bill and Daniel Hay-Gordon in a solo dance performance choreographed by Aletta Collins

Apr 19, 8:00pm

Tickets: $40, $15

Re: Awakenings (Dance)

Featuring Donna Uchizono Company's world premiere of Out of Frame and the restaging of State of Heads, with performance by Donna Uchizono, Levi Gonzalez, Rebecca Serrell Cyr and Hristoula Harakas

Apr 18, 8:00pm; Apr 20, 4:00pm*

Tickets: $40, $15

* This event will be streamed live at newyorklivearts.org/liveideas

Re: Awakenings (Theater)

Featuring two versions of A Kind of Alaska (both spoken language and ASL), directed by Kim Weild and Karen Kohlhaas

Apr 20, 8:00pm; Apr 21, 3:30pm

Tickets: $40, $15

Related Events:

Musicophilia & Music Therapy

With Connie Tomaino, Aniruddh D. Patel, Joseph LeDoux, Jeffrey Kittay

This event will be streamed live at newyorklivearts.org/liveideas

Apr 17, 5:30pm

Tickets: $15

Sacks on Film
Bill Morrison in conversation with Lawrence Weschler

Apr 19, 6:00pm

Tickets: $10

The Tourette's Community

With Tobias Picker, Lowell Handler, Jumaane Williams, Lawrence Weschler

Apr 21, 10:30am

Tickets: Free

Disembodiedness: Body Image & Propioception

Apr 17, 3:00pm

With Ian Waterman, Dr. Jonathan Cole, Marsha Ivins, Jennifer Hecht

Tickets: $10

Minding the Dancing Body

With Bill T. Jones, Alva Noë, Miguel Gutierrez, Colin McGinn, Gwen Welliver

Apr 14, 6:00pm

Tickets: $15

SOLD OUT. To be included on the wait list, click here.

The Deaf Community

With Kim Weild, Terrylene Sacchetti, Lewis Merkin, Aaron Kubey

Apr 21, 12:00pm

Tickets: Free

This event will be streamed live at newyorklivearts.org/liveideas

All events take place in the Theater and Studios at New York Live Arts

219 W 19^th Street, New York, NY 10011

T: 212-924-0077 | www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas

Box Office hours:

Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm

Now in its 38th season, Orchestra of St. Luke's (OSL) is one of America's foremost and most versatile ensembles. OSL was formed at the Caramoor International Music Festival in the summer of 1979, after evolving from St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, which was established at The Church of St. Luke in the Fields in New York's Greenwich Village in 1974. Dedicated to engaging audiences throughout New York City and beyond, OSL performs approximately 70 concerts each year-including an annual Chamber Music Series at The Morgan Library & Museum and Brooklyn Museum, an Orchestra Series at Carnegie Hall, and a summer residency at Caramoor International Music Festival. OSL's Principal Conductor is Pablo Heras-Casado.

Dubbed "our finest composer for the Lyric Stage" by The Wall Street Journal, Tobias Picker is a composer of numerous works in every genre drawing performances by the world's leading musicians, orchestras and opera houses. The Santa Fe Opera gave the world premiere of Picker's widely acclaimed first opera in 1996, Emmeline, which was subsequently broadcast nationally on public television's "Great Performances" series. His operatic adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Opera, established Picker as a composer whose appeal crosses all boundaries of age. Picker's third opera Thérèse Raquin was commissioned by a consortium of companies including The Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, and Opéra de Montréal. The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Picker's fourth opera An American Tragedy, based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser. Picker's next opera, Dolores Claiborne, based on the Stephen King novel and utilizing a libretto by J.D. McClatchy, will premiere at San Francisco Opera in September 18, 2013, directed by James Robinson and conducted by George Manahan. Picker completed his first ballet, Awakenings, inspired by the novel by Dr. Oliver Sacks and commissioned by the Rambert Dance Company, in 2010 which was then toured throughout the UK by Rambert with over 70 performances in the 2010/11 season. Picker was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and is Artistic Director of The Opera San Antonio.

Celebrated for his modular, repetitive style, minimalist British composer Michael Nyman is among experimental music's most high-profile proponents, best known in connection with his film scores for director Peter Greenaway. Also a music critic, Nyman has written for The Listener, New Statesman and The Spectator. In 1986, Nyman composed the acclaimed chamber opera The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, based on the Oliver Sacks' title. Other well-known works include his award-winning score for the film The Piano, as well as collaborations with Sir Harrison Birwistle and Damon Albarn. Nyman is also the subject of a documentary, Michael Nyman Composer in Progress, as well as the author of the 2008 book Sublime.

Samuel Bill studied conducting, piano and organ at the Bratislava State Conservatory in his native Slovakia. He was a co-founder and assistant conductor of the St. Martin's Cathedral Choir in Bratislava, which he conducted for several radio and television broadcasts. After one year at the Bratislava Academy of Music (where he specialized in orchestral conducting) he received an invitation and full scholarship to complete his Master's degree at Montclair State University, where he graduated with honors in 1997. While in New Jersey he served as rehearsal pianist and assistant to the conductor for TheatreFest, as well as other theaters in the Montclair area. Since 1997 he has been the associate conductor of the Montclair Chamber Ensemble, and in 2001 appeared with the Ensemble at Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall as a conductor and pianist. Bill completed his Doctoral studies in orchestral conducting at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he has been the conductor for countless productions. He has also conducted for New York's Dicapo Opera Theatre, and served as assistant conductor for Tobias Picker's chamber orchestra version of Therese Raquin, and has conducted many of Picker's works with Dicapo Orchestra. Bill resides in New York with his wife, soprano Yvonne Bill.

One of the UK's leading theatre, opera and dance choreographers, Aletta Collins has worked for companies including The National Theatre, Opera North and the Berlin Philharmonic. She also choreographed Awakenings for Rambert Dance Company which premiered in 2010.

Daniel Hay-Gordon is a choreographer, teacher and performer. He is interested in film, theater and music videos. He has performed in works by the Rambert Dance Company, the National Dance Company of Wales, Tanztheater Wuppertal, Welsh Independent Dance, The English National Opera, The Royal House Opera House, Scenes from Salzberg, Impermanance Dance Theatre, among others.

Hailed by Ms. Magazine's end of the century issue as "a choreographer making great leaps forward into the 21^st century", Donna Uchizono, Artistic Director of Donna Uchizono Company, is known for work spiced with wit, rich invention, and unexpected beauty. Donna Uchizono Company has been presented throughout the United States, Europe and South America. A Guggenheim Fellow, Uchizono's work has been recognized by many grants and awards including the Alpert Award in Dance, New York Dance and Performance Award ("Bessie"), Rockefeller MAP, the National Dance Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, Arts International, the National Performance Network, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Greenwall Foundation and Meet the Composer among others. Uchizono's work is characterized by its numerous collaborative projects including collaborations with Visual Artist David Hammons and Composers "Butch" Morris, James Lo, and Guy Yarden. Uchizono's interest in original and live music for performance is evidenced by her collaborations with composers and her former role as co-director and -curator of "Bread to the Bone", a live music/dance series at The Knitting Factory in New York. In 2004, Uchizono was the choreographer for The Long Christmas Ride Home, a play by the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Paula Vogel, for the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, CT and has created a work for Mikhail Baryshnikov, commissioned by Baryshnikov Dance Foundation. An active member of the dance community, Uchizono is a member of the Artist Advisory Board at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, where she was the founding member and served as the first Chair. As a certified Zero Balancing practitioner, Uchizono will be resuming her practice in May, 2013. Uchizono will be teaching Dance Making and the Dance Maker through Movement Research's MELT July 8-12, 2013.

Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. An influential modern British dramatist, his writing career spanned over 50 years, during which time he created some of his most well-known works, including The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), Betrayal(1978) all of which he adapted for the screen. In 1982, he wrote A Kind of Alaska, a one-act play inspired by Dr. Oliver Sacks' book Awakenings. Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes and other honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

Kim Weild is a theatre director based in New York who is also a choreographer, performer, writer and teacher. She specializes in new plays, re-imagined classics and devised work. Her work is ensemble based and deeply collaborative. It is thoroughly grounded in narrative, honoring text while weaving matrices of movement, sound and images. In 2010 she founded WeildWorks with the inaugural production Fêtes de la Nuit which went on to be nominated for a Drama Desk Award and seven New York Innovative Theatre Awards, including Outstanding Director. Kim is the recipient of a Kennedy Center Directing Fellowship (design program with Ming Cho Lee and Constance Hoffman), a Shubert Fellow, the 2006 Williamstown Theatre Festival Foeller Fellow, an SDC Guest Artist Initiative Award, a 2010 TCG National Conference Nominated Artist Attendee, a Women's Project alumna, New Georges Affiliated Artist and member of SDC. She received her BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA Columbia University in the City of New York.

Karen Kohlhaas recently directed the Off-Broadway world premiere of Annie Baker's play BODY AWARENESS for Atlantic, and also directed actress/comedienne Judy Gold in the Drama Desk Award nominated one woman show 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother by Kate Moira Ryan and Ms. Gold which played at the Montreal Comedy Festival, Ars Nova in NYC, ran 6 months Off-Broadway at the St. Luke's Theatre, and is now on a national tour. Other Off-Broadway and regional productions include Harold Pinter's The Hothouse (Atlantic), Keith Reddin's Synergy (Alley Theatre, world premiere) and FRAME 312 (Atlantic, NY premiere); David Mamet'sBoston Marriage (New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, NY premiere) and The Water Engine (Atlantic); three productions of An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein in New York and Sydney; and Kate Moira Ryan's OTMA (U.S. premiere). She has also directed at Naked Angels, New Dramatists, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and other New York theaters. The current Pinter Alaska production reprises her 2010 staging of the short play with the Atlantic Theater Company at the Classic Stage Company.

Located in the heart of Chelsea in New York City, New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer.

We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Our influence extends beyond NYC through our international cultural exchange program that currently places artists in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

To post a comment, you must register and login.