NYU Skirball Brochure — FALL 2017 by NYU Campus Services

7 1 N N O O S S EA 7 S 1 S 1 0 7 L 2 20 L L N A AL O S F A E N S O 7 AS SE E 7 S 01 N 2 O #MOVES #SOUNDS L 0 S #MATTERS L #SURPRISES 2 A #QUESTIONS #DELIGHTS E L L S

GET EXCITED. GET THINKING. 2

#PLAYS #ACTS #TALKS #LIVES #EXPERIENCES #CHALLENGES #EXPERIMENTS #ENCOUNTERS #PLEASURES

Welcome to NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. This is the season of our dis/contents. No matter who you are, there’s probably something here that’s right up your alley — and there’s also probably something here that’s not quite for you. We’re eager to see what happens when you show up either way. Think of Skirball as NYU’s largest classroom. Whether you’re a student or not, experiment with the 2017-18 season. There are numerous possibilities for you to encounter something you might not otherwise encounter: whether it’s a language you don’t speak, an art form you don’t know, or an experience you think you won’t relate to. See something that sounds intriguing and then hang around after the show to talk about it. What can performance(s) tell you about the world and your place in it? What kinds of unexpected surprises/pleasures/discomforts

might you find along the way? On the next page is a diagram of thematic suggestions to get you rolling. Throughout the following pages you’ll find Indefinite Articles by NYU faculty to help contextualize the Fall 2017 events. And we offer reading lists here too. On nyuskirball.org there are video clips, interviews, a calendar of pre- and post-show talks, discussions, seminars, downloads for reading, advance production programs, and discussion boards to share your insights, your concerns, your discomforts — and hopefully also your surprises and delights. If you don’t think you’ll be inspired or challenged by anything here, come visit our offices. We want to talk to you.

Readings J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge:

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive

Harvard University Press, 1975).

Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre:

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (New York: Touchstone, 1995).

(London: Routledge, 1993).

Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dance (Berkeley: University

John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde

of California Press, 1986).

(London: Verso, 2015).

RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction

Present (Third Edition) (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011).

(London: Routledge, 2013).

André Lepecki, ed., Dance (Whitechapel: Documents of

Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham: Duke University

Contemporary Art) (Boston: MIT Press, 2012).

Press Books, 2016).

3 GRRRLS TO THE FRONT #grrrls AUNTS Mette Ingvartsen: 7 Pleasures Adrienne Truscott: Asking For It Mx Justin Vivian Bond THISISPOPBABY: RIOT Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop

CULTURE AS RESISTANCE #cultureasresistance Faustin Linyekula: In Search of Dinozord The Freedom Theatre: The Siege DJ Spooky: Rebirth of a Nation Adrienne Truscott: Asking For It Mx Justin Vivian Bond THISISPOPBABY: RIOT Teatro la Re-Sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness Lil Buck and Jon Boogz: Love Heals All Wounds

SERIOUS FUN #familyfun The Hypocrites: Pirates of Penzance Jerome Bel: Gala Lil Buck and Jon Boogz: Love Heals All Wounds

ACT LOCALLY, SPECTATE GLOBALLY #internationalartists Faustin Linyekula: In Search of Dinozord (Democratic Republic of Congo) Mette Ingvartsen: 7 Pleasures (Belgium) In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields (France) The Freedom Theatre: The Siege (Jenin Refugee Camp) The Sachal Ensemble (Pakistan) Rivers of Sound (Everywhere!) THISISPOPBABY: RIOT (Ireland) JérômeBel: Gala (France) Gob Squad: War and Peace (Germany) Teatro La Re-Sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness (Chile) Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop (Belgium/Germany)

LAUGH TILL YOU CRY (OR VICE VERSA) #laugh/cry Adrienne Truscott: Asking For It Mx Justin Vivian Bond The Hypocrites: Pirates of Penzance THISISPOPBABY: RIOT JérômeBel: Gala Gob Squad: War and Peace Teatro La Re-Sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness

USE YOUR SENSES: LISTEN, LOOK, TOUCH, TRY #senses Joshua Light Show AUNTS Mette Ingvartsen: 7 Pleasures John Zorn: The Bagatelles Martin Subotnick: Silver Apples of the Moon DJ Spooky: Rebirth of a Nation The Hypocrites: Pirates of Penzance ICE: The Whisper Opera Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop

To purchase tickets, please visit nyuskirball.org For full calendar of performances please see Page 38.

JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW #VIEWS #SOUNDS #MINDBLOWING 50TH ANNIVESARY CELEBRATION SEPTEMBER 8 & 9 AT 7:30 PM “The Most Psychedelic Light Show of All Time!” Rolling Stone Tickets Start at $40.00 Combo pack: Buy one 9/8 ticket and one 9/9 for $60. (Save 25%) nyuskirball.org

5 Following the highly successful performances in 2012 and 2014, the Joshua Light Show returns to NYU Skirball to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The renowned multimedia artist Joshua White and his legendary team of collaborators create live visual masterpieces that move to the sounds of a remarkable roster of musical collaborators. Utilizing signature projection techniques, including lumia and its fabled “liquid light,” the Joshua Light Show improvises an intense visual experience to complement and enhance the live music experience. The JLS gained worldwide acclaim as resident artists at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East during the late 1960s and continued to amaze at Woodstock with the most celebrated musicians of the era. Today, JLS performs across the United States and Europe with the newest generation of music luminaries.

the “kabuki demon” (The New York Times) in Brooklyn’s psychedelia masters, Oneida. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is a composer of electronic music whose profile has quickly skyrocketed her into the mainstream. From her formative years on Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington state, she’s steadily amassed a global fanbase. Ethereal vocals soar overhead, weaving together a complex and beautiful tapestry of sound, with reference points in pop and avant-classical alike. Building upon their recent collaboration at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, Smith and the JLS make their first appearance in NYC together. Indefinite Article: R. Luke Dubois “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hands which plays, touching one key or another, purposively to cause vibrations in the Soul.” – Wassily Kandinsky, 1912/1913

joshualightshow.com September 8 Boss Hog, New York’s punk-blues legends, were formed by the rock royalty couple of Cristina Martinez (Pussy Galore) and Jon Spencer (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) in 1989 for an impromptu set at CBGB’s. Martinez performed in the nude, setting the tone for the band’s fiery ascent. By 1995, they had reached international fame and released a lauded, major label debut record. In 2017, the band—back with its most familiar lineup (featuring Jens Jürgensen and Hollis Queens)—put out its first LP in nearly 20 years, and are yet again taking New York by storm. Alongside the JLS’s iconic imagery, the band affirms its status as one of the greats and are yet again taking New York and the world by storm. Dave Harrington Group is an ever-evolving musical project anchored by Harrington’s forays into experimental rock, progressive jazz, and ambient electronics. Chaotic improvisations surge into tight rhythms, which melt into haunting atmospheres. Harrington, who toured the UK with the Joshua Light Show to great acclaim as one half of the band Darkside, brings together a number of his key New York collaborators and special guests to create a live soundtrack to the light show’s cinematic imagery. September 9 Man Forever, a platform for the broad-ranging compositions of John Colpitts, celebrates JLS’s 50th anniversary with his diverse ensemble, featuring superstars from the worlds of avantrock, jazz, and classical music, including upand-coming percussion trio, Tigue. Colpitts aka “Kid Millions” first came to acclaim as

From 1996-2003 I had a band called the Freight Elevator Quartet. We were, as the name suggests, a four-piece, with a cellist, a didgeridoo player, a drum machinist, and yours truly, playing all manner of restored analog synthesizers from the 1960s and 1970s. We performed improvised, long-form sets, often at art openings and warehouse parties. We didn’t have a guitarist, or a drummer, or a regular vocalist. One thing we did have, though, was live, projected visuals, typically driven by my friend and long-time collaborator Mark McNamara, using computer software I’d written to allow the sound of the band to be ‘visualized’ in different ways by effecting pre-rendered animations, appropriated video footage found online, and live feeds taken from wireless cameras. Very few of the people working as live visualists in New York City in the late 90s and early 00s would have experienced the original incarnation of the Joshua Light Show, and a straw poll of friends from that community tells me that many first learned about them from Kerry Brougher, Judith Zilczer, and Jeremy Strick’s Visual Music exhibition or through Video Out, Meredith Finkelstein and Paul Vlachos’ documentary about live A/V performers, both of which served to bring Joshua White and his collaborators back, as it were, into the spotlight around 2005. Liquid light shows were understood as integral to live music in the 1960s and early 1970s. We knew that somebody had to be responsible for the beautiful, impossibly saturated splashes of spherical light suspended above the heads of Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa in those photos and posters, but documentation of how it happened was a little thin on the ground, especially for the “lumia,” Joshua White’s

instrumental system of mirrors, mylar, and motors that could fragment and bend light, inspired by Thomas Wilfred’s color organdriven “eighth fine art” of projected light. The physical manipulation of light, with gels, oils, lamps, mirrors, and motors, is a visceral (and sometimes literally viscous), material, tactile, bespoke, and gestural art form. There’s no $100 starter kit you can buy at Guitar Center, and even the most psychedelic of presets in VJ software you might download won’t get you anywhere close. Experiencing it can feel like you’re taking part in a ritual out of a mythic past, before our images were video, these immaterial broadcast signals, first analog then digital, electric then computational, sent via wires and through air, a medium you can easily quantify and describe but never directly touch. There seems to be a strange incompatibility between these worlds, as if the liquid light and the scan lines and the pixels, the physical and the analog and the digital, can’t exist in the same space at the same time without some kind of rupture in the fabric of the universe. Josh and his collaborators are virtuoso performers on instruments that you don’t see directly; like the pit orchestra in an opera house, part of the wonder is the suspension of direct origin… the light is somehow, magically just there. Twenty years ago, I remember thinking about my group’s “multimedia” approach to performance as cannily strategic, addressing all manner of anxieties I had about how we were perceived by the audience. My primary anxiety was, are we interesting to watch? This naïve concern musicians have, that somehow visuals addressed a natural shortcoming of live musical performance as it became increasingly technological, is hilariously reductive and offensive to everyone involved, and one of my favorite things about the Joshua Light Show is that they turn this question on its head. The musicians they perform with are, if anything, at risk of being upstaged by the imagery. “Working in light is just as difficult as working in steel,” Josh told The New York Times in 1969. This is true, but the structures are every bit as magnificent and well crafted. Keep your eyes open. R. Luke Dubois, D.M.A., is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He is Associate Professor of Integrated Digital Media, Music Technology, and Interactive Telecommunications (NYU Engineering); Music and Performing Arts Professions (NYU Steinhardt); and Interactive Telecommunications (NYU Tisch).

Readings Adriano Abbado, Visual Music Masters: Abstract Explorations

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.

of Past and Present Artists (Milan: Skira, 2017).

Trans. Kegan Paul (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Barbara Bell, “You Don’t Have to Be High” in The New York

Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics

Times, December 28, 1969.

in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013).

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

“

THE MOST PSYCHEDELIC LIGHT SHOW OF ALL TIME!

— ROLLING STONE

Woods performing with the Joshua Light Show in 2014 Photographed by Ian Douglas

AUNTS #MOVES #SURPRISES #DANCEPARTY SEPTEMBER 15 AT 7:30 PM

“When you go to AUNTS, you go to something like a party: a gathering that orbits around multiple, overlapping performances, structured to facilitate chaos.” The New York Times Free/RSVP required nyuskirball.org

9 NYU Skirball’s backstage, dressing rooms, hallways and lobby (everything but the theater itself!) will be transformed when AUNTS takes over the building for this uptown/downtown performance extravaganza. Audiences will be able to wander and experience as many or as few performances as they choose, creating their own experiences through chance encounters. Bringing together contemporary artists and diverse audiences for this one-night-only event, AUNTS concludes the evening with an immersive dance party in NYU Skirball’s lower lobby. AUNTS was founded by Jmy James Kidd and Rebecca Brooks in 2005 and is currently organized by Laurie Berg and Liliana DirksGoodman. An underground platform for dance, AUNTS creates events in unconventional spaces with multiple performers, overlapping performances, open dance parties, multidisciplinary, body/non-body based, time oriented, finished/experimental/unfinished/ process art. Since 2005, AUNTS has organized approximately fifty events and hosted more than four hundred artists from multiple disciplines and at various points in their careers. auntsisdance.com Details Organized by Laurie Berg, Liliana DirksGoodman, Ali Rosa-Salas, and Ash R.T. Yergens. With: Alexandra Tatarsky, Christine Elmo, Freedom Dabka Group, Imma, Jahmal, B. Golden, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Katrina Reid, Lime Rickey International, Nia Love, Jeremy ToussaintBaptiste, DJ set by Br0nz3 G0d3ss and more. Indefinite Article: Rashaun Mitchell My most vivid AUNTS memory was a disorienting and hazy experiencing on a boat in 2010. The transience and instability of the rocking vessel created a visceral experience of AUNTS’ charge to defy “the regulation of institution.” As we all humorously swayed, beers in hand, Jmy James Kidd and Biba Bell rolled and writhed topless through the galley of the ship. They huddled between us and scattered around us, threatening to careen off the boat and into the waters surrounding New York City. They were absurdly committed to their ritual, and they hypnotized us in their attention to the act. Meanwhile the gender-fluid performance-artist Yozmit cast another spell with her powerful voice and transformation from a vision in a white diaphanous dress to a near-naked sea siren. Her then dramatic stillness highlighted the wild swaying of the boat and its audience and fellow

performers. This event, like all AUNTS events, was bewildering and beautiful, offering up hope, promise and possibility. Brotha sista, cuz, and fam, are all terms of endearment for non blood-related friends in African-American culture. They are subversive ways of redefining and reconstituting notions of family. In the queer ball scene, chosen “mothers” harbor and hand down their fierce legacies to “daughters.” For over a decade now AUNTS, which I like to think of as a radical contemporary dance company, has given the spotlight to the role of the parent’s sister. An aunt can also be an affectionate title for an older nurturing lady. Well, there’s nothing old or ladylike about AUNTS. Bad-asses Jmy James Kidd and Rebecca Brooks launched a whole new kind of family member, a sassy, fun and generous aunt, also known as an organization for unconventional modes of presenting dance in all its forms. Laurie Berg and Liliana Dirks-Goodman continue this spirited matriarchy and make much needed space for the marginalized aspects of dance and its surrounding culture. In fact, they prioritize the dancing that you catch out of the corner of your eye or only hear in the distance. The dancing that celebrates dancing and happens next to other dancing. The dancing that bubbles up after too many drinks. The dancing of emerging ideas. And the dancing of shifting, layered connections in a wonderfully inventive community of artists and art lovers. They create a family we all want to be a part of. Rashaun Mitchell is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dance Program. A celebrated performer and choreographer, he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Bessie awards, and is a licensed stager of the repertory of Merce Cunningham.

“

THERE’S NOTHING OLD OR LADYLIKE ABOUT AUNTS.

Readings Barbara Browning, I’m Trying to Reach You

Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens, Network Society and

(Two Dollar Radio, 2012).

Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Danielle Goldman, I Want to be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

André Lepecki, ed., On the Presence of the Body: Essays on

Press, 2006).

Dance and Performance Theory (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).

Nick Kaye, Site Specific Art: Place and Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000).

Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Jmy James Kidd, Laurie Berg, and Liliana Dirks-Goodman, “Dateline: Aunts” in Performance Journal (Issue #49, Fall 2016).

FAUSTIN LINYEKULA #MOVES #ENCOUNTERS #CONGO IN SEARCH OF DINOZORD US PREMIERE SEPTEMBER 22 & 23 AT 7:30 PM Tickets start at $40 Co-presented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s Crossing the Line Festival nyuskirball.org

11 Sur les traces de Dinozord (In Search of Dinozord) is an adaptation of a 2006 work that paid homage to the murdered Congolese political prisoner Antoine Vumilia Muhindo. Set to Mozart’s Requiem performed live by rising opera star Serge Kakudji, dancers and actors move through a landscape of ruins in the postapocalyptic Congo, looking for remainders of their dreams. In spoken word and solo dances, they delve into the wrenching history of the Congo, recounting legends from their childhoods and mourning the loss of a friend. Faustin Linyekula is an artist with a “live-wire intensity” (The New York Times). His riveting work often addresses themes of memory, forgetting, and dreams. With his country’s history as a catalyst, he considers the impact that decades of war, trauma, and economic uncertainty have on people’s lives. Performed in French with English supertitles. Part of BRIDGING, an initiative co-developed and supported by The Edmond de Rothschild Foundations. kabako.org Details Direction: Faustin Linyekula With: Serge Kakudji (singer), Jean Kumbonyeki Deba, Papy Ebotani, Yves Mwamba Bakadiasa, Faustin Linyekula (dancers), Papy Maurice Mbwiti, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo (actors) Text: Richard Kabako, Antoine Vumilia Muhindo Music: WA Mozart (Requiem, excerpts), Charles Lwanga Choir of Kisangani Joachim Montessuis (Nierica), Arvo Pärt (Pari Intervallo, Redeuntes in mi, Trivium, Annum per Annum), Jimi Hendricks (Voodoo Chile) Production: Studios Kabako / Virginie Dupray Co-production: KVS Theater, Brussels With support from the DRAC Ile-de-France / French Ministry of Culture and Communication

one of the most violent and volatile regions in the world. Between 1998 and 2003, more than three million people were killed in what is often referred to as “Africa’s World War.” The war started with a rebellion that was backed by Rwanda to overthrow Kabila’s government. Eventually, seven countries and several rebel movements were involved in the war. The violence has continued on a large scale after the official end of the war. Multiple militia groups, some of which were ethnically based, and some associated with conflicts in the neighboring countries, continued to fight for power and resources, and engaged in mass violence against the local populations. Civilians belonging to all ethnic groups have been exposed to extreme suffering and brutality, including widespread sexual violence. Because the conflict is not fought along clear ethnic divides as in the neighboring Rwanda or Burundi (partly because there are hundreds of ethnic groups in the DRC), the violence in the DRC is often hard to understand by outside observers. Multiple factors contribute to the ongoing violence, including interethnic tensions, illegal exploitation of mines and other resources by various parties (including international actors), local conflicts over land, corruption, and so forth. The complexity of the conflict in the DRC calls for interventions that address causes of violence at multiple levels—the local, national, and regional—simultaneously.

“

HE CONSIDERS THE IMPACT THAT DECADES OF WAR, TRAUMA AND ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY HAVE ON PEOPLE’S LIVES.

Rezarta Bilali, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Social Intervention at NYU’s Steinhardt College of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her research focuses on the social psychological underpinnings of intergroup conflict and violence in various international settings.

Indefinite Article: Rezarta Bilali Despite its vast natural wealth and material resources, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. During the colonial time, under the rule of Belgium’s infamous King Leopold II, millions of people died in brutal killings of genocidal proportions. Unfortunately, the mass violence has persisted in the postcolonial era under the dictatorship of Mobuto Sese Seko who ruled the DRC for more than three decades (until 1997). In the last two decades, the Eastern DRC has been the scene of local, national and regional warfare, becoming

Readings Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed,

Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

Goran Sergej Pristas, “Faustin Linyekula: The Right to Opacity”

Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse

in Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today

of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York:

Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2015).

PublicAffairs; reprint edition, 2012).

METTE INGVARTSEN: 7 PLEASURES

#MOVES #PLEASURES #NUDITY US PREMIERE SEPTEMBER 29 & 30 AT 7:30 PM

Tickets start at $40 “7 Pleasures confirms that in this culture, there’s hardly any state more complicated than being naked with others.” The Globe and Mail (Toronto) nyuskirball.org

13 At the heart of Mette Ingvartsen’s 7 Pleasures, twelve performers confront notions of nudity, body politics and sexual practice, questioning the borders between private and public space by literally placing the naked body in the middle of the theater public. In this American premiere, pleasure becomes a perceptual as much as a political question. How do we use pleasure’s joyful potential to disrupt cliché images attached to nudity and sexuality? 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 propositions that have been seen around the world. Mette was artistin-residence at the KAAITHEATER in Brussels from 2013 through 2016 and is currently part of the new artistic team at Volksbühne in Berlin. Please note: this performance contains nudity and mature themes.

Indefinite Article: André Lepecki As an experimental art form, dance is concerned with exploring and expanding the limits and the potentialities of its two main constitutive elements: movement and the body. In relationship to the former, contemporary experimental dance is deeply indebted to the pioneering work of the Judson choreographers, who, in the early 1960s, and literally just one block west from NYU Skirball, redefined what kinds of new movements dance could include in its repertoire. Those new, unexpected, nonballetic, or non-modern dance movements, ranged from embracing stillness (as in Steve Paxton’s Proxy, 1961), to choreographing a smooth distribution of gestures and steps so as to create one sole kinetic line (Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, 1966), or to simply have non-dancers walk across a stage (Steve Paxton’s Satisfying Lover, 1967). The expansion of dance’s movement vocabulary from mere walking to stillness was instrumental in reshaping European experimental dance in the mid-1990s – as seen in the important works of Jérôme Bel or La Ribot.

metteingvartsen.net Details Concept & Choreography: Mette Ingvartsen Performers: Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Johanna Chemnitz, Katja Dreyer, Elias Girod, Bruno Freire, Dolores Hulan, Ligia Lewis, Danny Neyman, Norbert Pape, Pontus Pettersson, Hagar Tenenbaum, Marie Ursin (permanently replaced by Gemma Higginbotham) Replacements: Ghyslaine Gau, Calixto Neto, Manon Santkin Light: Minna Tiikkainen Music & Soundtrack: Peter Lenaerts, with music by Will Guthrie (Breaking Bones & Snake Eyes) Set: Mette Ingvartsen & Minna Tiikkainen Dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejic Assistant choreography: Manon Santkin Assistant production: Manon Haase Assistant light: Nadja Räikkä Technical director: Joachim Hupfer & Nadja Räikkä Sound technician: Adrien Gentizon Company Management: Kerstin Schroth A production of Mette Ingvartsen / Great Investment

But what about that other crucial element for dance, what about dance’s relation to “the body,” in its many capacities, limits, potentialities? Over the past decade, Mette Ingvartsen’s work has offered some important clues on how dance may attend to the body in all its non-kinetic aspects — as a political, sexual, desiring, linguistic, historical, racialized, gendered, and agential flesh matter. Tellingly, since her early pieces, at the beginning of the 2000s, the Danish choreographer, today based in Brussels, has explicitly acknowledged a deep relation with the 1960s’ New York experimental scene. In 2004, Ingvartsen published her “Yes Manifesto” (2004) – a direct reference to Yvonne Rainer’s famous “No Manifesto” (1965). The “Yes Manifesto” is not quite a rebuttal of Rainer’s manifesto, but rather an affirmation of another set of priorities for dance’s experimental drive four decades later. It states, at a certain point: “Yes to materiality and body practice,” and it concludes with: “Yes to multiplicity, difference and co-existence.” The affirmation of how the materiality of body practices (including sexual practices) are deeply linked to “multiplicity, difference and co-existence,” has characterized Ingvartsen’s entire choreographic work ever since. Her desire to expand what is a body for dance and what sorts of other bodies can do with dance has lead her to create, in the late 2000s, pieces for objects and things: choreographies where human dancers are literally replaced by foam, vapor, colored lights, melting ice, and sparkling metal confetti; or where human dancers fuse with these matters as to become almost one with them (see the five works composing The Artificial Nature Series, 2009-2012).

Lately, Ingvartsen’s investment on the question of the body’s “materiality” has lead her to research one particular element: sexuality. Once again, the experimental New York performance scene of the 1960s becomes crucial source of inspiration. Yet, significantly, Ingvartsen will not look at the Judson choreographers as interlocutors for her approach to sex, sexuality, desire, even pornography, in dance. Instead, she initiates her series of works on sexuality (of which 7 Pleasures is one installment) by writing a letter to the American performance artist Carolee Schneemann asking permission to restage Schneemann’s 1964 performance Meat Joy. Schneemann politely declined, and the result of their epistolary exchange became the origin of Ingvartsen’s masterpiece, the solo 69 Positions (2014), which New Yorkers had a chance to see last year at MoMA PS1. In that “guided tour” to experimental performance of the 1960s (and whose other major reference has a direct link to NYU, Richard Schechner’s iconic Dionysus in 69 (1969), parts of which Ingvartsen reenacts), Ingvartsen explicitly looks at how sexuality and sex operate as major forces of political resistance; how they drive perception, taste, language, behavior, politics, desire, and the attribution of value in our consumerist societies of pornographic control. Now, with 7 Pleasures (2015), Ingvartsen pushes even further her research on the intricate relations between sex, pornography, power, pleasure, and political resistance initiated with 69 Positions. This powerful, visceral, and deeply poetic piece is a moving statement on the fleshed precarity and uncanny beauty of that which we still insist to call “the human body” specifically through out the opening twenty minutes of 7 Pleasures. Ingvartsen’s courageous experimental gesture is to address what dance, as an art form, but also society at large, have still so much trouble to tackle openly: the sexual drive of the human multitude, which, disturbingly, as 7 Pleasure’s long opening scene reminds us, may lead both to joyful collective assemblages of liberated enfleshment of pleasures, as well as to poisonous recurrence of fascism’s ultimate violations. It is a matter of deciding which dance, and which bodies, really matters. André Lepecki, Ph.D. is the Chairman of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. A scholar at the intersection of critical dance studies, curatorial practice, performance theory, contemporary dance and visual arts performance, his writings include “Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement” and “Singularities: Dance and Visual Arts in the Age of Performance.”

Readings Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects,

Amelia Jones, ed., Sexuality (Whitechapel: Documents of

Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Contemporary Art) (Boston: MIT Press, 2014).

Ramsay Burt, Ungoverning Dance (New York, Oxford University

André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance

Press, 2017).

(London: Routledge, 2016).

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?”, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

“

7 PLEASURES CONFIRMS THAT IN THIS CULTURE, THERE’S HARDLY A STATE MORE COMPLICATED THAN BEING NAKED WITH OTHERS. — THE GLOBE AND MAIL (TORONTO)

7 Pleasures photographed by Marc Coudrais

IN THE SOLITUDE OF THE COTTON FIELDS

#PLAYS #EXPERIENCES #IMMERSIVE OCTOBER 5 AT 7:30 PM & OCTOBER 8 AT 3 PM

NYU Kimmel Center Grand Staircase Free/RSVP required nyuskirball.org

17 In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields is a modern French classic by playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948-89) that portrays the relationship between a dealer and a client. As directed by the innovative French director and sound artist Roland Auzet, in a new English translation by NYU’s Judith Graves Miller, the action unfolds on the steps of the Kimmel Center’s Grand Staircase as an intense transaction between conflicting desires for drugs, love, connection, and a sense of existence. In Auzet’s production furtive exchanges are overheard by audience members equipped with headphones, allowing spectators to eavesdrop on the intimate, secretive, and trans-gressive negotiation of the deal. French composer, percussionist, and theater director Roland Auzet defines himself as a stage writer. An artist and performer with many interests and talents, Auzet received the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French Ministry in 2007 for his remarkable body of work in contemporary music, circus, dance, opera, and theater. The performances of “In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields” are made possible thanks to the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, FACE Foundation, La Muse en Circuit, Compagnie Act-Opus, and NYU-Center for French Civilization and Culture. Details Directed by Roland Auzet Translated by Judith Graves Miller With Becca Blackwell and Tory Vazquez Indefinite Article: Judith Graves Miller While widely admired in Europe, Bernard-Marie Koltès has not had the purchase in the United States that his talent and vision merit. His dark and heady theatre pieces take us to an uncomfortable and unfinished world, not the conventional concrete universe of American theatre. And he writes in long, complex, lyrical sentences that require both the skill of actors to bring poetry alive on stage and the patience of the audience to accept the mysterious — and often louche — exchanges engaged in by his intensely self-conscious characters. Translating Koltès, as I have done, for the NYU Skirball co-production of In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields, has meant allowing myself to be inhabited by his rhythms. But I have also been haunted by the sense that translating French theatre for the American stage can also often mean betting that the public will appreciate a slightly different esthetic, that

audience members will be prepared to listen to the unfolding of a dance of language. Other translators of Koltès have adapted his work to appeal to what they perceive as the public’s “taste.” Or they have made sense where Koltès suggests a kind of senselessness that nonetheless becomes understandable as obsession fills the stage space. Koltès builds his universe on a series of transforming images that I have attempted to convey. He asks indirect questions about the difference between men and beasts, about what it means to follow a straight path to a light that magically skews into an inescapable circle, about attempting to clinch a deal without ever knowing what the opponent has on their mind. Perhaps this is that enigmatic solitude of the cotton fields — existence conjured up as limitless, thankless labor, or as the blurred beauty of white soft flowers that hides a terrible, imploding violence. Judith Graves Miller, Ph.D. is Professor of French in NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences. A scholar of French and Francophone theater, she is the author of “Theatre and Revolution in France Since 1968” and “Ariane Mnouchkine.”

“

...THE BLURRED BEAUTY OF WHITE SOFT FLOWERS THAT HIDES A TERRIBLE, IMPLODING VIOLENCE.

Readings David Bradby, “Bernard-Marie Koltès: Chronology, Contexts,

Maria M. Delgado, “Bernard Marie Koltès: A Personal Alphabet,”

Connections,” New Theatre Quarterly 49 (February 1997).

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (Volume 33, Number 2), May 2011.

Maria M. Delgado and David Fancy, “The Theatre of BernardMarie Koltès and the “Other Spaces” of Translation,” New Theatre Quarterly 66 (May 2001).

JOHN ZORN: THE BAGATELLES #SOUNDS #EXPERIMENTS #GENIUS OCTOBER 6 & 7 AT 7:30PM

“Even a brief dip into his bagatelles — short, playful pieces — leaves your head spinning: exhilarated, exhausted … these are performances of exceptional warmth and camaraderie, of shared purpose and extroverted fun.” The New York Times Tickets start at $50 Combo pack: Buy one 10/6 ticket & one 10/7 ticket for $75 (Save 25%) nyuskirball.org

From March to May 2015 John Zorn wrote 300 new compositions collected in a book of music called The Bagatelles. NYU Skirball is proud to present a two-day marathon concert of 20 different ensembles performing over 100 different compositions from Zorn’s expansive new book of music. Hot from performing in Hamburg and Paris earlier in the year, these groups are performing better than ever and include core members of Zorn’s inner circle as well as exciting young players from the worlds of rock, jazz and classical music—many new to the Zorn universe. The only presentation of Zorn’s Bagatelles in New York City in 2017, these two marathon concerts feature 45 of the most creative musicians working in NYC today, including Dave Douglas, Craig Taborn, Mary Halvorson, Marc Ribot, Dave Lombardo, Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, Ikue Mori, Matt Mitchell, Julian Lage, Calvin Weston, Peter Evans, Erik Friedlander, Mark Feldman, Chris Otto, Sylvie Courvoisier, Jay Campbell, Dave King, Jim Black, Dan Weiss, Chris Speed and many, many more.

OCT 6 2017

OCT 7 2017

Bagatelled Quintet John Zorn (sax), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen (bass), Calvin Weston (drums), Dave Lombardo (drums)

Bagatelles Quintet John Zorn (sax), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen (bass), Calvin Weston (drums), Dave Lombardo (drums)

Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman Mark Feldman (violin), Sylvie Courvoisier (piano)

Brian Marsella Trio Brian Marsella (piano), Trevor Dunn (bass), Tyshawn Sorey (drums)

Mary Halvorson Quartet Mary Halvorson (guitar), Miles Okazaki (guitar), Drew Gress (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums)

Chris Otto - Mark Feldman Mark Feldman (violin), Chris Otto (violin)

Matt Mitchell Trio Matt Mitchell (piano), Kim Cass (bass), Dan Weiss (drums)

Matt Hollenberg - Nick Millevoi Matt Hollenberg (guitar), Nick Millevoi (guitar), Johnny Deblase (bass), Kenny Grohowski (drums)

Erik Friedlander-Jay Campbell Duo Erik Friedlander (cello), Jay Campbell (cello)

Ikue Mori Ikue Mori (electronics)

Trigger Will Greene (guitar), Simon Hanes (bass), Aaron Edgcomb (drums)

Kris Davis Kris Davis (piano), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Drew Gress (bass), Tyshawn Sorey (drums)

Vadim Neselofskyi Solo Vadim Neselovskyi (piano)

Gyan Riley and Julian Lage Gyan Riley (guitar), Julian Lage (guitar)

Chris Speed Trio Chris Speed (sax), Chris Tordini (bass), Dave King (drums)

Harris Eisenstadt Trio Chris Dingman (vibes), Eivind Opsvik (bass), Harris Eisenstadt (drums)

Peter Evans Solo Peter Evans (trumpet)

Craig Taborn Solo Craig Taborn (piano)

Jim Black Guitar Quartet Keisuke Matsuno (guitar), Jonathan Goldberger (guitar),Simon Jermyn (bass), Jim Black (drums)

Asmodeus Marc Ribot (guitar), Trevor Dunn (bass), Tyshawn Sorey (drums)

A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and “downtown legend,” John Zorn is a world renowned saxophonist, composer, improvisational maestro, and ardent promoter of experimental music. tzadik.com

Readings Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Guy Debord (Donald Nicholson-Smith, translator), Society of

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 2000).

Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works From

Richard Foreman (Gerald Rabkin, editor), Richard Foreman

the Final Period (New York: Exact Change, 2004).

(Art + Performance) (Boston: PAJ Publications, 2005).

Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music

Gerald Rabkin, editor, Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical

(Boston: Da Capo Press: 1993).

Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001).

Aleister Crowley (Scott Michaelsen, editor), Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader (Sun Vision Press, 2012).

THE FREEDOM THEATRE

#LIVES #QUESTIONS #JENIN THE SIEGE US PREMIERE OCTOBER 12–21 AT 7:30 PM AND 22 AT 3 PM

“An unexpectedly compelling theatrical experience with a rough and ready energy, and, in the very act of its telling, speaks for the voiceless and forgotten.” The Guardian (UK) Tickets start at $65 nyuskirball.org

21 The Siege is a dramatic retelling of the story of the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during the height of the second intifada. Drawn from interviews with survivors and witnesses, it is told from the point of view of some of the armed Palestinian fighters who found refuge in the church. Along with 200 civilians, they are given sanctuary by the church’s resident clergy and nuns, and spend 39 days there with dwindling food, water, and medical supplies. While the world is watching, the fighters are faced with the question of whether to struggle to the end or to surrender. The Freedom Theatre, based in the Jenin Refugee Camp, is dedicated to using culture and art as a catalysts for social change. Through workshops, classes and professional theater productions, the company helps Palestinian adults, youth, and women develop tools to deal with the hardships of daily life under occupation. Performed in Arabic with English supertitles. thefreedomtheatre.org Details Created & Directed by Nabil Al-Raee & Zoe Lafferty Written by Nabil Al-Raee Lighting by Andy Purves Set Design by Anna Gisle Music Composed by Dror Feiler Costumes by Mohamed Yousef Additional Music by Nikola Kodjabashia & Noor Al-Raee

audience to take a huge empathic leap, to sympathize with their enemies. We only know two things about the reception of The Persians: it didn’t win any prizes that year, but it made so strong an impression that many people wrote it down, passed it from hand to hand, and it became one of the very few Greek tragedies to survive the collapse of the classical world and come down to us today. The Freedom Theater of Jenin was founded by Juliano Mer-Khamis as a way of using art rather than violence to create political change. He understood that only by seeing each other as people, looking at seemingly intractable dilemmas from all sides, could change really come to his society. He was a brilliant actor, a courageous leader, and a hero: a man who gave his life in attempting to change the world. His friend and pupil, Nabil Al-Raee, has taken the theater Juliano founded to even greater heights. His play The Siege is a thoughtful, powerful look at his hometown, Bethlehem, and the siege of the Church of the Nativity in the spring of 2002. He gives us a great gift by dramatizing, in brilliant and visceral terms, what it felt like to the Palestinians who were holed up in the Church for over a month — their despair and passion, their anger and vulnerability, their arguments and their struggle. The Siege is necessary theater, doing what theater does best: opening the world up to us by seeing it through the eyes of someone else.

“

WHAT THEATER DOES BEST: OPENS THE WORLD UP TO US BY SEEING IT THROUGH THE EYES OF SOMEONE ELSE.

Oskar Eustis is an Arts Professor in NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Art and Public Policy Program. He has been the Artistic Director of the The Public Theater since 2005.

The US Tour of The Siege is produced by ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann in association with Friends of The Freedom Theatre. Indefinite Article: Oskar Eustis The very essence of the drama is empathy, the act of seeing through the eyes of someone different than yourself. The first extant drama we have in the western canon is Aeschylus’ The Persians, which tells the story of the Greeks’ entirely unexpected victory over the Persians in the second great invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Greek forces triumphed over Xerxes’ army, thus proving for the Greeks that free men fought better than slaves and mercenaries, and that democracy was more resilient than a dictatorship. A mere eight years later, Aeschylus retold this story — from the Persians’ point of view. The audacity of this act is breathtaking, even 2500 years later. Aeschylus was asking his

Readings Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre

Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace, editors, Inside/Outside:

Communications Group, 1993).

Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2015).

Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation (San Francisco:

Ari Shavit, My Promised Land (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013).

Harper Perennial, 2017). Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Matan Cohen and Tala J. Manassah, “The Freedom Theatre: Lessons from a Refugee Camp” in Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2015).

Straus and Giroux, 2003).

MORTON SUBOTNICK #SOUNDS #EXPERIMENTS #ANNIVERSARY SILVER APPLES OF THE MOON 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION NOVEMBER 3 AT 7:30 PM “The ‘founding father’ of electronica.” BBC Tickets start at $35 nyuskirball.org

23 future, indeed has shaped the way we live now. The technical breakthroughs of the work still influence music production, but more important is the musical impact.

Photographed by Jack Mitchell Pioneering American electronic music composer, and NYU faculty member, Morton Subotnick presents a rare concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking record Silver Apples of the Moon. The first electronic album ever to be commissioned by a classical record label, Silver Apples is now a modern classic and was recently entered into the National Registry of Recorded Works at the Library of Congress. Only 300 recordings throughout the entire history of recordings have been chosen. A founding member of the California Institute of the Arts, Mort has worked extensively with interactive electronics and multi-media, co-founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and often collaborating with his wife, Joan La Barbara. As one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and multi-media performance, and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre. mortonsubotnick.com

The first thing to notice is that Silver Apples was commissioned by Nonesuch records for distribution as a two-sided vinyl disc. Second, it was composed when Subotnick was one of the founding faculty members of the nascent Tisch School of the Arts, in a studio built by NYU on Bleecker Street. As Subotnick notes in an interview: “I thought three things about the piece. One, it had to be conceived for the medium, without instruments. Two, it had to be something that I really loved, that I’d want to hear again. And three, that the experience had to be a kind of trip, because it was in the living room. What a trip meant to me was that suddenly you’d be experiencing one kind of world, then suddenly another, as if in the desert, and around the bend you’re in a jungle, or on the moon, without knowing how you got there, so there’s no linearity” (Chadabe 1997, p. 148). Check, check, and check. Listening to it now, I’m struck by the raw beauty and musical flow of the work. The genre Silver Apples helped to spawn is sometimes referred to by what I think is a misnomer: “experimental” music. There’s nothing experimental about it. This is a fully-fledged musical vision by a gifted composer who knows exactly what he wants to say. I also hear the elemental velocity of a Subotnick composition – in particular the rhythmic propulsion that often takes over stands in stark contrast to the portentous avoidance of pulse one notices in “concert” works of the period. Mort wanted to a make a piece he would love and want to hear again. In constructing it he composed a work of elegance, vitality, and power that we all want to hear again, and will listen to for another fifty years.

“

THIS IS A FULLY-FLEDGED MUSICAL VISION BY A GIFTED COMPOSER WHO KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS TO SAY.

Robert Rowe, Ph.D. is Professor of Music and Music Education and Director of Music Technology at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. A scholar and composer, he is the author of “Interactive Music Systems” and “Machine Musicianship.”

Indefinite Article: Robert Rowe Morton Subotnick’s landmark electronic music composition Silver Apples of the Moon was composed fifty years ago in 1967. 1967 was, of course, a year of many milestones (the Summer of Love, the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). Mort’s work is remarkable for how it not only embodies that time, but for the way in which it embraces and prefigures the

Readings Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

of Electronic Music (Pearson, 1996).

David W. Bernstein, “Morton Subotnick” in The San Francisco

Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell

Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-garde

(New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

DJ SPOOKY: REBIRTH OF A NATION

#VIEWS #MATTERS #FLIPTHESCRIPT NOVEMBER 4 AT 7:30 PM

“An exhilarating exploration of the film’s political and racial themes.” Boston Globe Tickets start at $35 nyuskirball.org

25 A reimagining of director D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation is a controversial and culturally significant project that examines how exploitation and political corruption still haunt the world, but in radically different forms. The project was DJ Spooky’s first large-scale multimedia performance piece and has been performed around the world. Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is a composer, multimedia artist and writer whose work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. He has recorded a huge volume of music and collaborated with a wide variety of musicians and composers, among them Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, and many others. He also composed and recorded the score for the Cannes and Sundance Award-winning film Slam, and produced material on Yoko Ono’s recent album, Yes, I’m a Witch. djspooky.com Indefinite Article: Sheril Antonio The idea. Arthur D. Danto says that – “A work of art is an externalization of the artist’s consciousness; as if we could see his way of seeing and not merely what he saw. Whatever else art does it has to feed into an ongoing discourse on the nature of art, or we will judge it trivial.” To experience DJ Spooky’s “way of seeing” we must first understand the artist as spectator, one who stands amidst the world of knowledge, personal experiences, and the influential arts. Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) makes his spectatorship legible in Rebirth of a Nation by bringing seemingly disparate works into conversation. The backstory. The Birth of A Nation (1915) is a critical example of a film that connects cinematic art to the dissemination of cultural values. The film projected not only artistic innovation but also racial and political beliefs. This cultural artifact from celebrated innovative filmmaker D.W. Griffith, disseminated myths and truths of American life at the time. It also chronicled the casualties of our racial structure that unfortunately remain so central to the nation’s narrative. Robert Sklar informed us that – “movies were the most popular and influential medium of culture in the United States.” More importantly, he noted that these privileged and talented filmmakers not only perpetuated the culture, but in fact had “the power to create the nation’s myths and dreams.”

Thus, movies were a most effective means of disseminating widely held core values, racist stereotypes and socially accepted un-truths. African American stereotypes, according to Donald Bogle, were emblazoned on the American psyche via Griffith’s epic. Although African American filmmakers were making simultaneous images that countered these offensive stereotypes, Oscar Micheaux in particular, who made films from 1919 to 1948, these works were not part of the American mainstream. African American films were not in conversation with The Birth of A Nation because at the time, audiences were segregated and therefore such works had little effect on the general population. The legacy. With agreement about what the past has left us in both cinematic and cultural terms we can now examine how some artists integrate these legacies into their own work. Even though we now consider Black artists part of the mainstream, it was only in 1969 that a Hollywood studio funded the first African American film – Gordon Parks, Sr.’s The Learning Tree 1969. According to Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled (2000), made so thirty years later, little had changed over the past century. I would recontextualize some of the issues in Bamboozled

“

WE HAVE UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES TO REVISIT AND RE-ENGAGE WITH THE EVER PRESENT LEGACY OF OUR PAST.

and argue that a lot has changed, in particular, the participants in the conversation. With the possibilities envisioned by “woke” artists, we have unique opportunities to revisit and reengage with the ever present legacy of our past. The conversation. While for each of us the artistic and cultural indicators of the times are different the quest remains the same – to make sense of history and its influence on present. We can look to historians, reporters, preachers or teachers for guidance. More and more of us are looking to artists who we feel have taken on the role of modern-day philosophers. Here, with Rebirth of a Nation, we have an opportunity that will most certainly “feed into an ongoing discourse on the nature of art” – and trust me, it is not trivial. Sheril Antonio, Ph.D., is the Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an Associate Arts Professor in the department of Art and Public Policy. She is the author of “Contemporary African American Cinema.”

Photographed by 이관형

Readings Donald Bogle, Blacks in American Film and Television (New York:

Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical

Simon & Schuster, 1988).

Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of

Nickhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished

American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994).

Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

THE SACHAL ENSEMBLE #SOUNDS #ENCOUNTERS #PAKISTAN NOVEMBER 5 AT 7:30 PM

“God willing, the entire world will see that Pakistanis are artists, not terrorists.” Nijat Ali, conductor of The Sachal Ensemble Presented in partnership with World Music Institute Tickets start at $40 nyuskirball.org

27 No music lover could fail to be moved by the inspiring story of The Sachal Ensemble, the subject of the acclaimed documentary Song of Lahore by two-time Academy Award-winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. The musicians come from the Pakistani city of Lahore, which for hundreds of years was a thriving center of the arts on the Indian subcontinent. But in 1977, with the establishment of a conservative Islamic regime and Sharia law in Pakistan, most nonreligious music was discouraged. Esteemed musicians were soon out of work, having to hide their instruments away and to take jobs in coffee shops or driving rickshaws. In the early 2000s, a devoted group of surviving Lahore musicians gathered privately to rehearse and revive their tradition. They made recordings of classical and folk music at first; but, with local listeners for the music having dwindled away, the group began to make music for a global audience outside Pakistan. Fast forward to May 2016, when Universal Music Classics released the album Song of Lahore, a fully integrated Eastmeets-West companion album inspired by the sounds and story of the film. Come experience this incredible ensemble live. thesachalensemble.com Indefinite Article: Ben Ratliff The Sachal Ensemble is a group of Pakistani musicians from the city of Lahore, historically one of the great musical centers of the Indian sub-continent. Many of these musicians, or their families, had worked in the South Asian film industry. But that profession has long been in decline: first because of the rise of religious conservatism and the introduction of Sharia law through Pakistan starting in the late 1970s, which shut down the film and concert business; and later because of the influence of the Taliban, which since 2009 has attempted to ban most instrumental music-making in the areas where it holds power.

sponsored by the U.S. State Department.) In 2011, they filmed their version of the song and put it Youtube, where it was seen widely and eventually covered by the BBC. This led to the group’s invitation by Wynton Marsalis to perform at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall in 2013: seven Pakistani musicians with the 15-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, playing some of the musicians’ own compositions as well as Jelly Roll Morton’s “New Orleans Blues,” Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk,” and, yes, “Take Five.” The run-up to that concert later formed part of Song of Lahore, a well-received 2015 documentary about the Sachal project by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken. The concert at Rose Hall was a triumph of preconceived group arrangements and also of spur-of-the moment, individual solos. I reviewed it for the New York Times, and what I remember was its specificity: the idea, and the joyous proof, that music can transcend cultural divisions because of particular elements and impulses, such as four (and five!)-beat rhythmic structures—or, more broadly and metaphorically, improvisation. Though music is political, it can also outlast politics. Ben Ratliff teaches cultural criticism at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is the author of “Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty” and “The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music.”

“

...MUSIC CAN TRANSCEND CULTURAL DIVISIONS BECAUSE OF PARTICULAR ELEMENTS AND IMPULSES.

Izzat Majeed, a Pakistani businessman and music-lover, founded Sachal in 2004. At first he organized recordings of it in Lahore studios, and in 2007 he finished building his own brick-andmortar studio in the city. His goal was not just to restore a sound, but a context: not just a working ensemble, but an audience, even if he had to go outside Pakistan to find it. After recording Indian classical and folk albums, Majeed expanded the ensemble’s repertoire to western music, specifically jazz; he started with Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” (His father had taken him to Dave Brubeck’s concert in Lahore in 1958,

Readings Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Look But Only With Love: Into the Heart

Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

of Pakistan (New York: Regan Arts, 2017).

(New York: PublicAffairs, 2012).

Deborah Kapchan, ed., Theorizing Sound Writing (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017).

ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT & JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND

#LAUGHS #CHALLENGES #WHACKEDOUT NYU COMEDY FESTIVAL NOVEMBER 10 & 11 AT 7:30 PM

“Truscott is always a step ahead… with firecracker wit, sophistication and luminous humanity.” Guardian (UK) “(Mx Justin Vivian Bond) is the best cabaret artist of their generation.” The New Yorker Tickets start at $35 for each evening. Combo pack: Buy 1 Truscott and 1 Bond for $50. (Save 30%) nyuskirball.org

29 Adrienne Truscott November 10 at 7:30 Radical comedian, activist and performance artist, Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It mixes humor, dance, video and p*ssy-puppetry, while undoing the rules and rhetoric surrounding rape. Truscott straddles the world of standupand performance art, dressed only from the waist up and ankles down. Withcommentary from George Carlin, Louis C. K. and Robert De Niro, Truscotttakes on ducks, mini-skirts, rape whistles, Cosby and #45. Heavy at its core but light on its feet, Truscott makes jokes about rape all night long … even if you ask her to stop. Adrienne Truscott is a choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer and comedian. She has been making genre-defying work in New York City and abroad for over 20 years, has performed at many international festivals, and most recently a sold out run at Joe’s Pub. She is one half of the infamous Wau Wau Sisters and has worked with cult cabaret legends Kiki and Herb, Meow Meow, and John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus). Please note: this performance contains nudity and mature themes. adriennetruscott.com Justin Vivian Bond November 11 at 7:30 Mx Justin Vivian Bond presents a raucous and seductive evening of songs and stories. Declared a “cabaret messiah” by Time Out/London, Bond is a trans-genre artist living in New York City. As a performer, both on and Off-Broadway, Mx Bond has received numerous accolades, winning an Obie (2001), a Bessie (2004), a Tony nomination (2007), the Ethyl Eichelberger Award (2007). V authored the Lambda Literary Award winning memoir TANGO: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels (The Feminist Press, 2011). justinvivianbond.com

Indefinite Article: Ann Pellegrini When the joke’s on you, perhaps the best defense is getting there first? Both Adrienne Truscott and Justin Vivian Bond convert noxious stereotypes and painful legacies of marginalization into resources for the excluded. In this they show how turning the joke on oneself or one’s own group may disarm criticism from the dominant by beating it to the punch and the punch-line. Truscott’s and Bond’s bodies of work also defy settled genres and a politics of purity. Such unsettlements—aesthetic and political—are the joke’s work. Laughter comes upon us unbidden, and may even overpower or contradict our will or our reason or our politics. The joke slices in and releases the barely contained viscera of lust and aggression that social norms normally require us to deny. Think of the metaphors that surround successful humor: that joke “killed,” the audience “died” laughing. If this is success, what does failure look and feel like—and according to whose experience? Aggression may well undergird all humor. But we still need to ask into the inequalities in power such that some individuals or groups get slotted in, time and time again, as the butt of a joke. This is the joke as a kind of cultural truth teller. We may not always like what we hear, including—or especially?—when the laugh is pouring from our own mouth. As in: This isn’t funny, so, why am I laughing? Sticking with the disturbance of humor as it shakes our bodies and upends our borders, Truscott and Bond counter-punch and change up the rhythms of the expected. Truscott replays the rape joke with a feminist vengeance, daring us to really get the joke this time, understand how it works, what it does, for whom, to whom. Bond mixes up a witchy brew of musical standards you thought you knew, but now all bets are off as V stops and tells us a story, starts again, and launches us all into a different affective key. There is an element in all this of what queer performance studies scholar José Muñoz termed “disidentification,” an attempt to transform

a cultural logic from within. Such a transformation may require staying with the discomfort of laughing against your will, and refusing to refuse the toxins of dominant culture. It’s humor from the bottom up, and it potentially turns the hurtful joke another way. Both Truscott and Bond invite us to step into and laugh within the space they open between the original and its re-play. In such queer and feminist company, we will laugh ‘til we hurt—and on through to the other side—not because we’re kidding around. But because we aren’t. Because laughing matters. What new possibilities might we materialize through it? Ann Pellegrini, Ph.D., is a Professor of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her writings include “Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race.” She is the official Mixologist for NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

“

BRUTAL, BRILLIANT AND BRAVE.

— THE SCOTSMAN (ON TRUSCOTT)

Readings Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion

SPECIFICALLY FOR ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT

of Identity (London: Routledge, 2006). Sara Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects),” Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen

The Scholar and Feminist Online 8.3 (Summer 2010).

and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976): 875-893. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,

Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Boston:

in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

Beacon Press, 2004).

Sigmund Freud, vol. VIII, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).

Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997).

José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

SPECIFICALLY FOR JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND

Press, 1999). Justin Vivian Bond, Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and Ann Pellegrini, “After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp,”

in High Heels (New York: Feminist Press, 2011).

A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry

José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer

(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Brooklyn: South End Press, 2011).

Above: Adrienne Truscott photographed by Allison Michael Orenstein Opposite page: Mx Justin Vivian Bond photographed by David Kimelman

“

A CABARET MESSIAH.

— TIME OUT LONDON

LOST LANDSCAPES OF NEW YORK

#VIEWS #EXPERIENCES #NYC A RICK PRELINGER FILM EVENT NOVEMBER 12 AT 3:00 PM

“Beguiling.” The Los Angeles Tribune Presented in partnership with the Museum of the Moving Image Tickets start at $20 nyuskirball.org

33 Since 2006, film historian and archivist extraordinaire Rick Prelinger has presented twenty participatory urban-history events to enthusiastic audiences in San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, and at festivals throughout the world. For the first time, he is bringing his Lost Landscapes project to New York City. Lost Landscapes of New York (approx. 85 mins., HD video transferred from 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film) mixes home movies by New Yorkers, tourists, and semi-professional cinematographers with outtakes from feature films and background “process plates” picturing granular details of New York’s cityscape. The combination of intimate moments, memories from many New York neighborhoods, and a variety of rare cinematic perspectives forms a 21st-century city symphony whose soundtrack will be provided by the audience. Viewers will be invited to comment, to ask questions and to interact with one another as the screening unfolds. Lost Landscapes of New York will span much of the 20th century, covering daily life, work, and celebration, and including street views of the Lower East Side, Harlem, Williamsburg, and Bensonhurst; a ride from the The Bronx to Grand Central in the 1930s; old Penn Station before its demolition; the Lincoln Center area pre-redevelopment; street photographers in Times Square; 1931 Times Square scenes in color; Spanish Harlem in the 1960s; Manhattan’s exuberant neon signage; firefighting in the 1920s and 1930s; garment strikes in the 1930s; Depression-era “Hoovervilles”; crowds at Coney Island in the 1920s; Italian Americans in Brooklyn in the 1930s; and a visit to both 1939-40 and 1964-65 Worlds’ Fairs. This event is presented in cooperation with NYU Cinema Studies and its Orphan Film Symposium. Presented by the Museum of the Moving Image in cooperation with NYU. Indefinite Article: Dan Streible Rick Prelinger’s ongoing Lost Landscapes project continues his life’s work of saving thousands of neglected films and putting them back into the public sphere, where these otherwise orphaned moving images generate new knowledge and creative work. In the past decade he has presented archival compilations of rare footage documenting the changes wrought on American cities throughout the twentieth century. Prelinger has presented sold-out shows of Lost Landscapes of Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The Skirball Center premiere

of his first New York program assembles fresh cinematic views of the city as seen by amateur filmmakers, industrial producers, and littleknown directors. For students and teachers in NYU Cinema Studies and its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, Prelinger’s work continues to inspire and to amplify the work we do. His public advocacy for the significance of sponsored films and home movies, for example, has changed the ways in which we think about the history of documentary film and nonfiction television. His collecting and archiving of tens of thousands of films others thought too ephemeral to save has created an archival consciousness, which in turn helped NYU Tisch School of the Arts build its high-impact master’s degree program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP). When MIAP students work in archives, libraries, museums, and cultural organizations large and small throughout New York, they are now keenly aware of the value of film and video recordings without obvious commercial value. They learn the skills of preserving such work and the importance of making them accessible and showing them to new audiences. In 2000, when Prelinger Archives offered a thousand digitized orphan films from its collection for free download and creative reuse via the Internet Archive, it was a bold move. Now researchers, media makers, and archivists know well the positive impact that such access brings. Today the number of films available from the Prelinger Collection online is closer to 7,000 (more than a thousand home movies alone), and thanks to the prototype that created this culture of sharing, the Internet Archive now hosts 3.5 million moving-image works. As a collector, archivist, scholar, author, filmmaker, librarian, advocate, and visionary public intellectual, Rick Prelinger has helped shape the ways in which we use and think about media of many different registers. Amid so many jeremiads about archival loss and fears about media ownership, he offers a sometimes utopian voice about how to recover and revalue the films we have. Dan Streible, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he directs the department’s master’s program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation.

“

...PRELINGER HAS HELPED SHAPE THE WAYS IN WHICH WE USE AND THINK ABOUT MEDIA OF MANY DIFFERENT REGISTERS.

Readings Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films

Marcia Reiss and Evan Joseph, New York: Then and Now

(National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006).

(New York: Pavilion, 2016).

Marcia Reiss, Lost New York (New York: Pavilion, 2011).

THE HYPOCRITES: PIRATES OF PENZANCE #LAUGHS #DELIGHTS #FAMILYFUN NEW YORK PREMIERE NOVEMBER 29 TO DECEMBER 10

“A holiday show for all seasons … joyous … all you have to do is dive in maties.” San Jose Mercury News “An irresistible party … among the most carefree and joyous events served up this season.” The Washington Post Wednesdays-Fridays at 7:30pm, Saturdays 11am, 3 and 7:30pm, Sunday at 3pm Tickets start at $65. nyuskirball.org

35 Swimming pools, twinkly lights, a well-stocked Tiki Bar and beach balls welcome the audience to this raucous and utterly zany beach party adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. The entire audience joins the cast on the stage-beach, immersed in the action alongside sappy pirates, dewy-eyed damsels, bumbling bobbies and one very stuffy Major General. It is a spunky model of a (post)modern major musical. The Hypocrites, founded in 1997 by Artistic Director Sean Graney, is one of Chicago’s premier off-Loop theater companies, specializing in mounting bold productions that challenge preconceptions and redefine the role of the audience. The company has a reputation for creating exciting, surprising, and deeply engaging theater as it re-interprets classics and tackles ambitious new works. the-hypocrites.com Details Libretto by W.S. Gilbert Music by Arthur Sullivan Directed and adapted by Sean Graney Co-adapted by Kevin O’Donnell Music direction by Andra Velis Simon Scenic Designer: Tom Burch Properties Design: Maria DeFabo Lighting Design: Heather Gilbert Sound Design: Kevin O’Donnell Choreographer: Katie Spelman Costume Design: Alison Siple Cast: Shawn Pfautsch, Matt Kahler, Rob McLean, Tina Munoz-Pandya, Amanda Martinez, Dana Omar, Christine Stulik, Emily Casey, Mario Aivazian, Danny Goodman Produced by The Hypocrites Executive Director: Kelli Strickland Indefinite Article: Laurence Maslon The reception from the buoyant and boisterous Americans was beyond anything the British musical team could have imagined. Screaming throngs welcoming them when they arrived on our shores; fans clutching copies of their music, singing the fiendishly popular songs that had preceded them; audiences begging them for coveted seats to their first public performance in New York. It was pandemonium; it was the British Invasion; it was — Gilbert and Sullivan? Whatever delirium of the popular consciousness was raised in the U.S. by four hip moptops from Liverpool in the early winter of 1964 had already been scooped nearly a century earlier by two

middle-aged gents from the U.K.—both with walrus moustaches, one with a kidney stone, the other an inveterate curmudgeon. By 1878, Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert were the premiere songwriter/dramatists of light comic operetta in the Western world. Their H.M.S. Pinafore had taken the English-speaking leisure class by storm and it was so popular that—in the days before YouTube, copyright laws, and persistent attorneys—it was being played everywhere, without remuneration. America supposedly had three dozen rogue companies—performing the British team’s work in every conceivable venue and style, even Yiddish. However much they may have liked the fact that their musical material was amusing audiences, Gilbert and Sullivan themselves were—in the words of their beloved sovereign, Queen Victoria—“not amused.” They didn’t like being ripped off, or, to use a word that appealed to Gilbert, pirated. Pirated? Ah ha! The writers hit upon an astonishingly arduous idea for the 19th century; they would make the transatlantic voyage to New York City and premiere their latest work, called—with apparent irony—The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway. This would secure an American copyright immediately, while at nearly the same time, they set up an inconspicuous production on the west coast of England to secure an European copyright. In the days before pdfs and Skype—let alone transatlantic telephone calls, fax, or DHL — this was a mammoth undertaking, requiring Gilbert, who took care of staging issues, to work out everything in advance; his cast would have only hours to learn the material before the production’s New York debut on New Year’s Eve, 1879. Sullivan, who always did things at the last minute anyway, was in a worse bind. Once he hopped aboard the transatlantic liner Bothnia and blithely set sail for the States, he retired to his stateroom to finish the score to Pirates — only to discover he had left his handwritten draft of all the musical material back in London. (When I tell this story to my students at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, the collective groan of agony can be heard for miles around.)

and Broadway) were not only thrilled by the production itself, they basked in the reflected glory of making two British celebrities drag their wearied bottoms to America for their approbation. Sullivan and Gilbert simply stayed in their respective beds for a few days before making a tour of the northeastern United States for a month or two, as infatuated Americans tossed their hard-earned money at them. The personal and critical approbation for Gilbert and Sullivan (and for The Pirates of Penzance in particular) continues unabated to this day. Kevin Kline just won his third Tony Award this June; I recall his second Tony Award-winning performance, as the Pirate King, as if it were yesterday, buckling a comic swash (or swashing a comic buckle) while dueling with the orchestra conductor in the Central Park production of 1980. Since then, the score has been wrung through the pop culture ringer on innumerable platforms; if you’ve been parodied by both The Simpsons AND Phineas and Ferb, what worlds are there left to conquer? The Hypocrites’ immersive production seems the next logical step for enthusiastic New Yorkers to dive headfirst into The Pirates of Penzance, unless losing a handwritten manuscript of your masterpiece strikes you as a good time. (It’s happened to me as well as Sullivan—and I don’t recommend it.) Sullivan got the last laugh, as is only fitting. He wrote to his mother from New York: “The Pirates of Penzance is still doing enormous business every night and likely to last, so that at last I really think I shall get a little money out of America. I ought to, for they have made a good deal out of me.” Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program. A scholar of musical theatre, he is also the host and producer of the weekly NPR-member station radio program “Broadway to Main Street.”

The preparation of the world premiere of The Pirates of Penzance was in a word (or two) simply nuts. Security guards were posted to keep fans from stealing or cribbing the music and lyrics; there were temper tantrums about the quality of the singing and orchestra; Sullivan was scribbling pages of orchestrations so furiously that, apparently, the pit musicians were playing parts with fresh ink streaming down the page. It hardly mattered. The world premiere of this classic soufflé of merrymaking went over like a dream fantasy; audiences at the Fifth Avenue Theater (which, despite its name, was at 28th

Readings Ian Bradley, Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!: The Enduring Phenomenon

Sue Fliess (Author) and Nikki Dyson (Illustrator), How to Be

of Gilbert and Sullivan (Oxford University Press, 2005).

a Pirate (New York: Little Golden Books, 2014).

Rodolphe Durand and Jean-Philippe Vergne, The Pirate

Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody

Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

(Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Michael Goron, Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Respectable Capers’: Class, Respectability and the Savoy Operas 1877–1909 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

The Hypocritesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Pirates of Penzance photographed by Evgenia Eliseeva

“

BIG TIME FUN.

— CHICAGO TRIBUNE

NYU SKIRBALL 2017–18 38

To purchase tickets: Visit nyuskirball.org, call 212.998.4941 or visit 566 LaGuardia Pl, NYC All NYU Student Tickets are only $15: Visit NYU Home for more information Become a Skirball Member and save 30% on tickets: For more information visit nyuskirball.org/support NYU Faculty and Admin save 15% on tickets: For more information, visit NYU Home

Joshua Light Show September 8 & 9

DJ Spooky: Rebirth of a Nation November 4

Rivers of Sound February 10

National Theatre Live: Peter Pan September 10

The Sachal Ensemble November 5

THISISPOPBABY: RIOT February 15-17

AUNTS September 15

THE NYU COMEDY FESTIVAL Adrienne Truscott: Asking For It November 10 Justin Vivian Bond November 11

Jérôme Bel: Gala March 1-3

Lost Landscapes of New York: A Rick Prelinger Film Event November 12

Gob Squad: War and Peace March 28-31

Faustin Linyekula: In Search of Dinozord September 22 & 23 Mette Ingvartsen: 7 Pleasures September 29 & 30 In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields October 5 & 8 John Zorn: The Bagatelles October 6 & 7 The Freedom Theatre: The Siege October 12-22 Morton Subotnik: Silver Apples of the Moon November 3

National Theatre Live: Follies November 20 The Hypocrites: Pirates of Penzance November 29-December 10 National Theatre Live: Young Marx December 12 ICE: the whisper opera January 24-February 4

National Theatre Live: Julius Caesar March 25

Teatro La Re-Sentida: The Dictatorship of Coolness April 5-7 Lil Buck and Jon Boogz: Love Heals All Wounds April 13 & 14 Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Until Our Hearts Stop May 4 & 5

BECOME A NYU SKIRBALL MEMBER 39

When you join NYU Skirball, you become part of a lively community of artists, academics, and audiences that support our artistic programs and engage in enlightening conversations about contemporary arts and culture. Membership starts at $65 and offers a year’s worth of incredible benefits while helping NYU Skirball expand its reach through cutting-edge multidisciplinary performing arts. NYU Skirball Members enjoy discounts (up to 30% off two tickets), exclusive access, special pre-sale opportunities, invitations to special receptions, and more.

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS Member - $65 (Fully tax deductible) Benefits include: · Insider subscription to NYU Skirball’s e-newsletter · Discounts on NYU Skirball presentations (up to 30% off 2 Member tickets) & events throughout the year · Advance notice of upcoming events · Exclusive pre-sale opportunities · A personalized NYU Skirball Member card · Special discounts and offers at local Greenwich Village restaurants and shops Friend/Dual - $120 ($7 non tax deductible) All of the benefits Members receive plus: · Personalized membership cards (2) · Complimentary Skirball tote bag or gift · Complimentary ticket exchanges* (savings of $5 per ticket) · Invitations to Private Dress Rehearsals

Partner - $250 ($7 non tax deductible) All of the benefits Friends receive plus: · Waived ticketing fees (savings of up to $6 per ticket) · Exclusive access and invitations to meet artists · VIP seating for “Skirball Talks”* Advocate - $500 ($18 non tax deductible) All of the benefits Partners receive plus: · Complimentary soft drink/water/coffee/tea at the lobby café · Complimentary Skirball cup, available at the lobby café · Invitations to opening night parties (2) · Private backstage tour

Patron Circle - $1500 ($106 non tax deductible) All of the benefits Advocates receive plus: · Complimentary companion ticket to each show · Two complimentary drinks at the lobby café · Ability to purchase Skirball’s premium house seats* · Dedicated patron line for personalized customer service · Invitation to season launch party & announcement · Invitations to patron night dinners and receptions · Recognition in Skirball publications · Invitations to exclusive “Skirball Talks” Meet & Greets *Subject to availability For information on further benefits for gifts above $1,500, please contact the Skirball Development Office at 212-992-8482

NYU SKIRBALL FALL 2017

SEASON NYU SKIRBALL 566 LAGUARDIA PL NEW YORK, NY 10012

Nonprofit org. U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 80 New York, NY