The Center For The Arts Reveals 2023/2024 Season

The Center for the Arts at George Mason University announced its 2023/2024 season of mainstage performances, featuring a diverse lineup of artists and ensembles across many genres, as part of Great Performances at Mason and the Family Series. Season subscriptions are currently on sale to Friends of the Center for the Arts at cfa.gmu.edu/subscriptions or by phone at 703-993-2787. For the general public, subscriptions go on sale Wednesday, May 17 and tickets for individual events go on sale Tuesday, August 1. More details are available at the Center for the Arts' website.

"The 2023/2024 will bring some of the greatest artistic voices of our generation to the Center for the Arts," shared Director of Programming Adrienne Bryant Godwin, "from Tony Award-winning powerhouse Renée Elise Goldsberry, to one of the most famous sopranos of our time, Renée Fleming. MacArthur Genius Award winners Kyle Abraham and Rhiannon Giddens will also bring their ensembles to lead residencies in our community, and GRAMMY Award winner Christian McBride will take the stage with the beloved Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra. The Concert Hall will be filled with the joyful music of Mariachi Herencia de México, audience favorites Natalie Macmaster and Donnell Leahy, and Austrian treasure Mnozil Brass. Shadow puppets will bring Persian legends to life, and world-renowned dance companies will present classics alongside invigorating new works. We're excited for a season of memorable artistic encounters."

The Center for the Arts' 2023/2024 season launches with Tony-, GRAMMY-, and Emmy Award-winning performer Renée Elise Goldsberry in Concert, headlining ARTS by George!, an annual fundraiser supporting Mason Arts. Goldsberry is best known for her Tony Award-winning portrayal of Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton, for which she also received a GRAMMY Award for Best Musical Theater Album in 2016 as a member of the original cast.

Virginia Opera returns to the Center for the Arts with a thrilling season of performances including Wagner's Siegfried, the most lighthearted of the four "Ring" cycle works; Gioachino Rossini's beloved The Barber of Seville; a moving contemporary work by composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell, Sanctuary Road; and Giacomo Puccini's heartbreaking Madama Butterfly, which will feature an all-female, Asian creative team, bringing a new lens to this tragic tale.

The Center's classical music offerings include a special co-presented performance with the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra featuring the internationally celebrated singer Renée Fleming, "possibly the most beautiful soprano voice in the world" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will be joined by pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, ECHO Rising Star and 2021 recipient of the coveted Leonard Bernstein Award and an Opus Klassik award for Best Young Artist. Pianist Hélène Grimaud, praised by The Washington Post for the "rapturous" and "astonishing show of her proficiency and poetic sensibilities," joins one of Germany's premier orchestras, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, for Schumann's dazzling piano concerto, in a program also including iconic works by Wagner and Brahms, titled "The World After Wagner." Internationally celebrated pianist and devoted champion of Frédéric Chopin Brian Ganz presents A Chopin Recital: Romantic Revolutionary, co-presented with George Mason University's Dewberry School of Music.

The Center welcomes three 2023/2024 Mason Artists-in-Residence: GRAMMY-winning, radical cultural collaborators Silkroad Ensemble joined by Artistic Director (and MacArthur Genius) Rhiannon Giddens, embrace a language of musical difference to create a more hopeful, inclusive world. MacArthur Genius Award-winning A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, brings a dance aesthetic that defies genre, mixing and morphing from social dance to classical dance styles and back again. Small Island Big Song provides a moving concert experience combining music, spoken word, and stunning projections to showcase unique oceanic grooves and soulful island ballads by featured artists from the islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, while shining a light on the devastating effects of global warming on these islands. Each residency will feature curated opportunities for Northern Virginia to get to know these artists with workshops, conversations, and events surrounding their performances.

Diverse dance performances in the Center's season performances by the "sparklingly present... and remarkably strong" (The New York Times) Cuban dance troupe Malpaso Dance Company as well as one of Canada's best contemporary ballet companies Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in their program Dancing Beethoven. The Center welcomes Trinity Irish Dance Company, hailed as "impossibly complex" (The New York Times) and "irresistible" (Dance Magazine), for joyous program of sheer percussive power and aerial grace. The revolutionary Martha Graham Dance Company returns to the Center with a special performance of one of Graham's earliest works, Steps in the Street-danced entirely by students of the Mason Dance Company-as well as Agnes De Mille's tour de force Rodeo, and Graham's last choreographic work, Maple Leaf Rag.

The season also features trail-blazing Latin GRAMMY-nominated group Mariachi Herencia de México, which makes its Center for the Arts debut with A Mariachi Christmas, bringing the Latin American tradition of Las Posadas to the Center with songs of the season such as "Feliz Navidad," "Los Peces en el Río," and "Ave Maria." Hamid Rahmanian's Song of the North uses more than 500 handmade puppets to bring the adapted magical and ancient landscape of Persia's Shahnameh (Book of Kings) to life. Slapstick comedy meets virtuosity with the seven players of Mnozil Brass in Jubilee, a cheeky tribute to the greatest hits of the "seriously funny, whimsically brazen" (San Antonio Reporter) brass ensemble. World-class gymnasts, jugglers, cyclists, and tumblers, The Peking Acrobats, provide a gravity-defying spectacle with amazing displays of contortion, flexibility, and control.

Returning favorites to the Center for the Arts include joyful holiday performances by the GRAMMY Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer in A Chanticleer Christmas; virtuoso fiddlers Natalie MacMaster & Donnell Leahy and their musical, step dancing children in A Celtic Family Christmas; and the American Festival Pops Orchestra, who will deck the halls with Holiday Pops: Songs of the Season under the baton of Artistic Director and Conductor Peter Wilson. Recently celebrating 30 years of performances at the Center for the Arts, Keyboard Conversations with Jeffrey Siegel returns with four programs of his trademark piano concerts with commentary. The Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra also comes back to the Concert Hall with bassist and composer Christian McBride, an eight-time GRAMMY Award winner and the velvety voice behind NPR's popular "Jazz Night in America" radio show.

The Center for the Arts continues its beloved Family Series with Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood LIVE: King for a Day!, based on the #1 PBS Kids TV series that has delighted audiences across the country. The special event also features a VIP experience and character meet and greet following the 5:30 p.m. performance. B - The Underwater Bubble Show invites its audience to embark on an underwater adventure and discover a realm inhabited by seahorses, dragonfish, starfish, mermaids, and other whimsical and watery creatures. Canines and comedy collide in Mutts Gone Nuts, a troupe of four-legged friends and comedian Jonathan Burns. GRAMMY Award-winning duo The Okee Dokee Brothers infuses bluegrass music and playful lyrics with childhood wonder for the great outdoors, hoping to spark a desire in children to explore their surroundings and imaginations.

A full listing of 2023/2024 Great Performances at Mason and Family Series performances follows. Unless otherwise noted, these performances take place at the Center for the Arts located at 4373 Mason Pond Dr, Fairfax, VA 22030.

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