REDCAT Presents West Coast Premiere of PARADES & CHANGES, REPLAYS, 11/11 - 11/14

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) presents the West Coast premiere of parades & changes, replays, a full-scale reinterpretation of Anna Halprin's 1965 masterpiece, parades & changes. Opening Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at REDCAT, parades & changes, replays runs for a limited four-night engagement through Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 8:30pm.

Improvising around a set of movement and music scores, dancers carry out everyday tasks, dress and undress, invent gestures, and disappear inside swirling rolls of paper in this full-scale reinterpretation of Anna Halprin's game-changing landmark of postmodern dance. The original piece, parades & changes, premiered in Stockholm in 1965 and was censored when the work premiered in New York. Its frank treatment of nudity, shook the dance world by challenging conceptions of the body, stillness, and the "ceremony of trust" (as Halprin named it) between performers and audience.

Now, nearly 40 years later, Halprin's utopian opus is re-examined through a contemporary lens and put to the test of today's social and artistic realities. Led by French choreographer Anne Collod, the collaboration includes a star-studded international team of influential choreographers and performers including Boaz K Barkan (Israel), Nuno Bizarro (Portugal), Alain Buffard (France), DD Dorvillier (U.S.A.), and Vera Mantero (Portugal). Electronica pioneer Morton Subotnick, who served as Halprin's music director from 1961-1966, joins the ensemble onstage at REDCAT to perform his original score. Le Monde describes the reinterpretation as "Full of aesthetic rigor and intense emotions, [parades & changes, replays] speaks to everyone... Nothing is missing."

In conjunction with the performances at REDCAT, Morton Subotnick and Anne Collod will be joined by other collaborators in a post-show discussion on November 12, 2009, about the process by which they reinterpreted parades & changes and the new work that has resulted from their collaboration.

parades & changes, replays is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts' American Masterpieces: Dance initiative, which is administered by New England Foundation for the Arts. Performances funded in part by FUSED: French U.S. Exchange in Dance, a program of the National Dance Project/New England Foundation for the Arts and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York with lead funding from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the French American Cultural Exchange and the Florence Gould Foundation. Additional support generously provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and Ovation TV.

Born in 1920, Anna Halprin has profoundly influenced and renewed dance, music and the visual arts in the past 40 years. In the early '50s, while a choreographer and a soloist with Doris Humphrey, she left New York and settled on the west coast of the United States, thus starting one of the 20th century's most radical and fertile artistic adventures, whose effects continue to inform many fields of art. Her summer workshops were the meeting-place for artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Robert Morris, who in particular practiced the famous tasks , a novel concept that introduced everyday gestures into the realm of dance and decisively influenced American post-modern dance. Nourished by the approaches of Moshé Feldenkrais and of Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, by Bauhaus theories, and by the humanist and pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey, Anna Halprin has unstintingly explored, developed and encouraged the creative process, especially in its collective form. She tirelessly challenges ways of thinking and acting, and aesthetic and political norms and boundaries, using scores, collective creation, improvisation and experimentation in natural surroundings, her involvement in 1960s protest movements, and long-term work with Aids and cancer patients. Halprin, who founded the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop in 1955, initiated fruitful collaborations with artists from all disciplines: many dancers and choreographers, of course, but also with Lawrence Halprin (her husband, an architect and landscapist), with musicians and composers (La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Luciano Berio&), and poets (James Broughton, among others), as well as painters and sculptors. She has created many pieces including Birds of America (1960), Four-Legged Stool (1962), Apartment 6 (1965), Myths (1967-68), and Ceremony of Us (1969). From 1971 onwards, her fight against cancer prompted her to radically alter her relationship with art -- she dedicated her own art to life, and used her creative processes to serve the seriously ill. This yielded Circle the Earth (1986-1991), The Planetary Dance (1987), Carry Me Home (1990) and Intensive Care (2000), among others. Now aged 88, she is still dancing, creating and teaching. Her latest piece, Seniors Rocking, features 50 people aged over 80. www.annahalprin.org

A graduate in biology and in the development of natural spaces, she chose to train in contemporary dance with Michel Hallet Eghayan in Lyon and then started performing with Pierre Deloche, Philippe Decouflé, Stéphanie Aubin and La Camionetta. With Dominique Brun, Simon Hecquet and Christophe Wavelet, she co-founded the Quatuor Albrecht Knust (1993-2001), dedicated to recreating choreographic works from the early 20th century (by Doris Humphrey, Kurt Joos, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Rainer, among others). In 2002, she created the non-profit organisation Eéfro's Project, through which she met Anna Halprin. She also works with Boris Charmatz, Laurent Pichaud and Cécile Proust. In 2005, she founded the non-profit organization. 

Morton Subotnick is one of the innovators of classical electronic music. His early work with Buchla synthesizers took him to the peak of the avant garde electronica world of the 60's. He has been an innovator in works that involve electronics and acoustic instruments, acoustic instruments manipulated electronically, and other multimedia combinations. His work often explores the way physical gestures of the performer can be manipulated electronically, and the influence that electronic processing has on a performance. In 1961, he co-founded along with Ramon Sender, the San Francisco tape Music Center. Among the people involved in the studio during its early days were Pauline Oliveros and Donald Buchla, an inventor of a voltage controlled synthesizer. Morton Subotnick also served as Music Director of the Anna Halprin Dance Company and the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop. His most famous work is from the late 1960's, Silver Apples of the Moon. This is an electronic tone poem created using the Buchla modular synthesizer. The work was extremely experimental for its day, and to this day sounds innovative. In it, Morton Subotnick applies modular control signals to all sorts of parameters of the sound, sending sounds careening through the left/right listening field, changing the timbre, controlling the speed of pulses and the pitch of sounds. It's an electronic tour de force. For the next few years, Morton Subotnick wrote many pieces for record, including The Wild Bull, Touch, and Until Spring. These were all created using modular synthesis on Buchla synthesizers. In the late 70's and 80's, he explored the combination of live performance and electronics with many works. Some of his better known works from this period include The Key to Songs, and Ascent into Air. His more recent work has combined orchestral ensembles with various electronic processing and sound generation. Jacob's Room, a piece commissioned for the Kronos String Quartet and Joan La Barbara, a vocalist, is a sort of multimedia opera. Other works include interactive CD-Roms, and even computer music games for children. The music community has recognized the achievements of Morton Subotnick. He has won many National grants and awards. He has taught at New York University and the California Institute of the Arts. Subotnick lives in New York and California traveling widely and often, presenting his music. www.mortonsubotnick.com

REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) opened by CalArts in 2003, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in this region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT is the newest partner in an international network of adventurous art and performance centers, which together are playing a vital role in the evolution of contemporary culture. REDCAT is a center for experimentation, discovery, and lively civic discourse.

REDCAT is located at the corner of W. 2nd and Hope Streets, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex (631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

For tickets and additional information, call REDCAT's Box Office at 213-237-2800, or visit www.redcat.org.

 

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