SITI Company Celebrates 20 Years

Since its founding in 1992, Siti Company has redefined contemporary theater in the United States through an innovative approach to collaboration, cultural exchange, and actor training. With the idea of the ensemble as its bedrock, SITI has served as a creative home for a core group of artists: ten actors, four designers, the director Anne Bogart, and a stunning list of international collaborators. Working together, SITI has not only reimagined what is possible both on and off the stage, but, more broadly, what it means to be a global artist in the new millennium. To celebrate its 20th year of groundbreaking theater, SITI will present its most ambitious and diverse season of activities to date.

As part of BAM’s 30th Next Wave Festival, SITI will present Trojan Women (After Euripides) in a new adaptation from Irish playwright Jocelyn Clarke. Running November 28—December 2, 2012 at the BAM Harvey Theater, Euripides’ powerful antiwar statement is brought to life in a propulsive new staging. Trojan Women (After Euripides) approaches the tale from a contemporary perspective, mining the universal struggle to move forward in the face of tragic, crippling loss.

In a daring collaboration with the acclaimed Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, SITI will premiere A Rite, an evening-length meditation on Stravinsky’s scandalous The Rite of Spring. Commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts, A Rite supports author Jonah Lehrer’s claim that a central tenet of Stravinsky’s work is the realization that “the engine of music is conflict, not consonance.” A Rite promises to be a modern Gesamtkunstwerk, combining the diverse, multi-disciplinary talents of two world-renowned companies into one evening of theater.

In a display of singular virtuosity, SITI will simultaneously create and tour a new version of Café Variations, which takes the original 30-person musical and turns it into an intimate, chamber work for six actors that weaves text from multiple Charles Mee plays with popular George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin songs. Through a series of café scenes, Café Variations unearths the possibilities of romantic adventure, hungry lust and newfound love in a joyous work that casts beloved Gershwin classics in a refreshing new light.

“It’s hard to believe that it has been 20 years, and that we have already created over 35 new productions, worked with so many incredible artists. I feel like SITI’s body of work is, in some ways, just beginning to become what it can be,” says Artistic Director Anne Bogart.

“Anne Bogart continues to impress me with the challenges that she sets for herself and the members of the company,” said Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer, Brooklyn Academy Of Music. “There is a special kind of artistic alchemy that erupts when they collectively approach the process of creation. It is evident in each distinctive work of art.”

“Anne Bogart is one of the leading lights of the American theater field,” said Ben Cameron, Program Director for the Arts, Doris Duke Foundation. “In her work with Siti Company, she has created a vocabulary uniquely her own—a language of profound intellectual inquiry, of stunning visual impact, a language born out of restless curiosity and impatience with complacency. Her influence, especially on a younger generation of emerging artists, is incalculable—she is a mentor, teacher, artist, colleague, giant.”