RIAF 2017 RIAF 2017 EXPECT THE UNEXPLORED EXPLORE THE UNEXPECTED

2017 RINGLING INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

OCT 18 – 21

For adventurous aficionados of ground-breaking art, the 2017 Ringling International Arts Festival (RIAF) presents a dynamic array of innovative, provocative, and ingenious expressions of music, movement, and mass spectacle. With a roster of international artists hailing from Belgium to Zimbabwe, RIAF challenges festivalgoers to expect the unexplored and to explore the unexpected at this annual exhibition of contemporary performance.

A musical spectrum spanning the folkloric to the avant-garde is found in the festival’s two music ensembles. From Zimbabwe comes Nobuntu, the acclaimed a cappella quintet. Having performed throughout Africa and across Europe, this ensemble of young women makes its US debut at RIAF with an inventive program ranging from traditional Zimbabwean songs to Afro Jazz and Gospel. Performed with pure voices, augmented by minimalistic percussion, traditional instruments, and authentic dance, Nobuntu honors its eponymous values of humility, love, unity, and family with an aim to transcend racial, tribal, and religious boundaries.

Closer to home, the virtuosi of ensemblenewSRQ bring two provocative encounters with new music to the galleries of The Ringling Museum of Art. In the first, the mysteries of sound and space are explored in the music of John Luther Adams as performed in the James Turrell

Skyspace; in the second, the profound challenges of Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas are embraced in an immersive experience set in the Huntington Gallery. As Sarasota’s newest collective of musicians, ensemblenewSRQ is reinventing the concert experience by inspiring audiences to participate in a new and ever-evolving musical culture.

Dance is both medium and message in two choreographic interpretations of 21st-century life. Operatic in scope and scale, Ing an Die weaves a palate of choreographic languages with symbolic imagery into a shape-shifting love story told amidst a pre-apocalyptic landscape. Choreographer James McGinn travels from his studios in Antwerp, Belgium, to present this work to a hometown audience in Sarasota. As an alum of Booker High School’s acclaimed Visual and Performing Arts program, McGinn trained in the US and Europe and has performed with such leaders in contemporary dance as Jonah Bokaer, Wally Cardona, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Jasperse, and many others.

Monica Bill Barnes & Company is a contemporary American dance ensemble that “brings dance where it does not belong.” Each new work they present is created and produced from a unique rulebook and set within the context of a borrowed environment. For Happy Hour, The Ringling Circus Museum is transformed into the Side Show Cabaret, where "two guys”— desperate to be popular—crash an after-hours party only to be hilariously inept in their quest. Performed by Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, Happy Hour starts with cocktails and laughs yet evolves into a life-changing event.

The narrative journey from image to stage is explored in two productions diametrically juxtaposed in scope and scale. Winner of the Total Theatre Award for Innovation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Portraits in Motion presents the intimate, yet broadly revealing, “thumb cinema” of photographer Volker Gerling. Since 2003, Gerling has walked over 3,500 km throughout his native Germany, sharing and creating flipbook portraits of the people he has met along the way in a heartwarming and moving solo performance.

In contrast, WANTED, by the Italian ensemble eVenti Verticale, is an outdoor performance spectacle set before a three-story high video screen. High overhead, two “wanted” men are on the run. Suspended in air, they take us on an adventurous trip that teeters between the fictions of animation and the pseudo-reality of computer graphics in this exhilarating work of aerial theater.

Finally, the production most emblematic of the RIAF spirit of adventure is White Rabbit Red Rabbit by playwright Nassim Soleimanpour. Forbidden to leave his native Iran, Soleimanpour has distilled the experience of a generation born amidst the hardship of the Iran-Iraq war into a wild, utterly original play. But the script comes to us in sealed envelopes and is presented to a solo actor at the onset of each performance. There is no rehearsal and no direction. The drama is realized in real time by both actor and audience in a cold reading of the script.

RIAF marks the opening of The Ringling’s Art of Performance season. New Stages follows in November and continues through April with a six-part series of global music featuring ensembles from Europe, South America, and the US.