Evening and Matinee Performances of RE: AWAKENINGS
Presented by NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
presents
Re: Awakenings evening and matinee performances
part of Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, April 17 – 21, 2013
Re: Awakenings (Music)
Orchestra of St. Luke’s
performs works by Tobias Picker and Michael Nyman
April 19 at 8:00pm
Re: Awakenings (Dance)
Donna Uchizono Company’s Out Of Frame
with a re-staging of State of Heads
April 18 at 8:00pm; April 20 at 4:00pm
Re: Awakenings (Theater)
Two versions of Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska
directed by Kim Weild and Karen Kohlhaas
April 20 at 8:00pm; April 21 at 3:30pm
All performances will also feature a screening of Bill Morrison’s
Re: Awakenings commissioned film with an original Philip Glass score.
New York, NY, April 5, 2013 – New York Live Arts is set to present several Re: Awakenings performances as part of the inaugural Live Ideas festival. New York Live Arts’ newest program initiative, Live Ideas is an annual humanities festival that will explore a different theme each year over several days. The inaugural festival, The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, will take place from April 17 through 21, 2013 and is comprised of more than 20 events, including performances, films and discussions that showcase works of art and spark conversations that engage the prevalent themes in the acclaimed neurologist’s works.
Featuring the critically acclaimed Orchestra of St. Luke’s in an evening of music inspired by the writings of Oliver Sacks, Re: Awakenings (Music) includes the U.S. premiere of renowned composer Tobias Picker’s Awakenings ballet suite accompanied by a solo dance performance by Daniel Hay-Gordon, choreographed by Aletta Collins. The orchestra will also perform in a concert version of selected passages from Michael Nyman’s opera The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. The evening’s music will be conducted by Samuel Bill and will feature three vocalists, Marnie Breckenridge (soprano), John Easterlin (tenor) and Mischa Bouvier (baritone). Performance will take place in the Theater at New York Live Arts on April 19th at 8pm.
Picker, called “our finest composer for the lyric stage” (The Wall Street Journal), is an American composer who is the recipient of numerous awards and has created myriad works, including operas, symphonies, quartets and more. Nyman, known as one of Britain’s most celebrated and innovative composers, has created works encompassing operas, string quartets, orchestral concertos and film soundtracks.
A Tourettic who was diagnosed in his 30s, Picker met Dr. Sacks in 1990 when introduced by a Parkinsonian artist friend in common. Over the years, they have formed a friendship founded partly on music and medicine; both artists mutually interested in the others realm of expertise.
Picker's Awakenings is an engrossing and lyrical score that had its premiere in 2010 in Salford, UK. In 1918 a mysterious sleeping-sickness epidemic swept across the world leaving hundreds of survivors in an unexplained paralysis. The powerful true stories of a group of very individual patients, catapulted temporarily but dramatically from their long slumber into their own emotionally-charged awakenings inspired Sacks’ legendary work Awakenings, which became the fodder for Picker’s score.
Nyman's The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat , dubbed a “neurology opera” by the Los Angeles Times, originated in 1986 and takes its impetus from Sacks’ bestselling work of the same name, a poignant study of a singer suffering from visual agnosia, making him unable to interpret visual stimuli in the typical fashion. “My first reading of the title text of The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, soon after the book was published in Britain in November 1985, curiously mirrored the way its central character, Dr. P, viewed the world: I scanned it, skipped from page to page, incident to incident, fascinated by the details, but seeing the whole,” explains Nyman. “These details, however, inescapably formed themselves into a new picture: an opera.”
Re: Awakenings (Dance) will feature Donna Uchizono Company on April 18th at 8pm and April 20th at 4pm in one world premiere and one restaged work. A choreographer with a knack for “making something out of nothing” (Philadelphia City Paper),Uchizono’s newest solo work, Out of Frame, was commissioned by Live Arts exclusively for Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks. A multi-media production, the work features music by Chopin and selected texts from Sacks’ Awakenings. The evening will also include the restaging of State of Heads, which originally premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in 1999. Featuring performance by Rebecca Serrell Cyr, Levi Gonzalez and Hristoula Harakas, with original music by “Bessie” Award winner James Lo, State of Heads explores the concept of disjointedness and the passage of time.
The third of the Re: Awakenings programs, Re: Awakenings (Theater)is comprised of two versions of A Kind of Alaska, Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s one-act play, presented on April 20th at 8pm and April 21st at 3:30pm. Written in 1982, the play was inspired by Sacks’ Awakenings and tells the story of the quickening back to life of a bedbound older woman.The Re: Awakenings (Theater) production will commence with a spoken language version of the work, directed by Karen Kohlhaas and performed by Lisa Emery, Rebecca Henderson and Reed Birney, with two American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters. The second iteration of the work will be a version rendered entirely in ASL, in celebration of Sacks’ special standing and work with the Deaf community in the U.K. and U.S., as represented in his book Seeing Voices. Directed by Kim Wield, the ASL version features performers Terrylene Sacchetti, Alexandria Wailes and Lewis Merkin.
All Re: Awakenings (Dance), (Theater) and (Music) performances will also feature Bill Morrison’s Re: Awakenings short film commissioned by Live Arts with an original score by composer Philip Glass. (See the complete listing of related events below.)
Live Ideas is made possible by the Ford Foundation. Additional support is contributed by The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, The JJC Foundation, The Opaline Fund, Daniel and Joanna S. Rose, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation, Judith Zarin, Mortimer B. Zuckerman and the Theatre Development Fund. Our media partners are the New York Observer and WNYC.
For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit the Live Ideas microsite at www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas..
Download a PDF of the complete Live Ideas schedule.
Listing info:
Live Ideas: The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, Apr 17 – 21, 2013
Highlighted Events:
Re: Awakenings (Music)
Featuring music composed by Tobias Picker and Michael Nyman, with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Samuel Bill and Daniel Hay-Gordon in a solo dance performance choreographed by Aletta Collins
Apr 19, 8:00pm
Tickets: 0, 5
Re: Awakenings (Dance)
Featuring Donna Uchizono Company’s world premiere of Out of Frame and the restaging of State of Heads, with performance by Donna Uchizono, Levi Gonzalez, Rebecca Serrell Cyr and Hristoula Harakas
Apr 18, 8:00pm; Apr 20, 4:00pm*
Tickets: 0, 5
* This event will be streamed live at newyorklivearts.org/liveideas
Re: Awakenings (Theater)
Featuring two versions of A Kind of Alaska (both spoken language and ASL), directed by Kim Weild and Karen Kohlhaas
Apr 20, 8:00pm; Apr 21, 3:30pm
Tickets: 0, 5
Related Events:
Musicophilia & Music Therapy
With Connie Tomaino, Aniruddh D. Patel, Joseph LeDoux, Jeffrey Kittay
This event will be streamed live at newyorklivearts.org/liveideas
Apr 17, 5:30pm
Tickets: 5
Sacks on Film
Bill Morrison in conversation with Lawrence Weschler
Apr 19, 6:00pm
Tickets: 0
The Tourette’s Community
With Tobias Picker, Lowell Handler, Jumaane Williams, Lawrence Weschler
Apr 21, 10:30am
Tickets: Free
Disembodiedness: Body Image & Propioception
Apr 17, 3:00pm
With Ian Waterman, Dr. Jonathan Cole, Marsha Ivins, Jennifer Hecht
Tickets: 0
Minding the Dancing Body
With Bill T. Jones, Alva Noë, Miguel Gutierrez, Colin McGinn, Gwen Welliver
Apr 14, 6:00pm
Tickets: 5
SOLD OUT. To be included on the wait list, click here.
The Deaf Community
With Kim Weild, Terrylene Sacchetti, Lewis Merkin, Aaron Kubey
Apr 21, 12:00pm
Tickets: Free
This event will be streamed live at newyorklivearts.org/liveideas
All events take place in the Theater and Studios at New York Live Arts
219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
T: 212-924-0077 | www.newyorklivearts.org/liveideas
Box Office hours:
Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm
