Minneapolis, May 26, 2011—The Walker Art Center announces its 2011–2012 performing arts season today, featuring global innovators in dance, theater, music, and multimedia work. Continuing its ongoing commitment to developing contemporary performance, the Walker has commissioned six new works including Big Dance Theater’s Supernatural Wife (Thursday–Saturday, November 17–19) – poet Ann Carson’s fresh adaptation of Euripides’ Alkestis; the world premiere of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company’s Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show, a new work employing an all-female cast and crew to present her hilarious, disorientating, take on feminism and gender fluidity (Thursday–Saturday, January 5–7); Hussein by Spalding Gray award-winning Lebanese performance/visual artist Rabih Mroué (Saturday, January 14); Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s new work, Story/Time (Thursday–Sunday, February 16–19), a collection of 90 one-minute stories drawn from Jones’ life and ideas featuring original music and video; and spoken word/hip-hop theater artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph returning to the Walker with visual artist Theaster Gates performing the new work red, black and GREEN: a blues (Thursday–Saturday, March 15–17), a new multimedia piece focused on environmental justice and social ecology.
The Walker’s 2011–2012 performing arts season is highlighted by A Merce Cunningham Celebration (Friday, October 28–November 6), a 10-day festival of dance works, talks, and workshops dedicated to the legendary innovator of modern dance and unveiling the Cunningham collection of sets, props, and costumes recently acquired by the Walker. The festival includes the final chance to see a performance of some of the master’s most seminal works before the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) disbands at the end of 2011. The Walker’s relationship with Cunningham dates back to 1963, when MCDC first performed in Minneapolis. Since then, the Walker actively supported Cunningham’s work over 45 years through nine residencies, three commissions, an exhibition, and some 17 separate engagements, including three world premieres and two U.S. premieres.
The Walker’s performing arts season opens with Despair Be Damned: New Music and Dance from the Congo, a two-part mini-festival featuring Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula (Festival of Lies at the Walker, 2007) performing more, more, more … future, a collaboration with Kinshasa-based guitarist Flamme Kapaya (Friday and Saturday, September 23 and 24) and the U.S. debut tour of the Congolese soukous/rumba innovators Staff Benda Bilili (Tuesday, September 27).
Other highlights this season include the return of the perennially popular Out There series – a four event globally-minded performance festival; and a two-day survey of diverse bands led by critically acclaimed jazz composer/pianist Vijay Iyer.
Philip Bither, McGuire Senior Curator of Performing Arts, comments, “The daring work of global dance, music, theater, and performance innovators in the Walker’s 2011–2012 season reflects a world living through dramatic change. Artists lead the way—this has long been central to our beliefs at the Walker. Their creations allow us to absorb, celebrate, or mourn the beauty or the exquisite pain of living in our times. The work we offer spans contemporary dance, experimental theater/performance, new jazz, avant-folk, new global and alt-classical music, and the multiple hybrids of forms in between.
“More than ever, the coming season reflects our commitment to support the freshest, most timely works and ideas by commissioning boundary-pushing artists—from large-scale visions by master innovators such as choreographer Bill T. Jones (in his own kind of tribute to Cunningham/Cage) to dynamic new creations by mid-career artists Big Dance Theater, Young Jean Lee, and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and including voices new to Minnesota and the Walker such as Rabih Mroué and Brooklyn indie folk heroes the Lisps. Fierce visionaries, iconoclasts, shapeshifters—the transnational and hyper-connected artists of the Walker’s 2011–2012 performing arts season boldly take us into the future. We look forward to sharing the adventure with you.”
Season Preview with Philip Bither
The public is invited to a free 2011–2012 Performing Arts Season Preview on Thursday, September 15, at 7 pm in the William and Nadine McGuire Theater. McGuire Senior Performing Arts Curator Philip Bither will discuss the dance, music, and theater events that make up the performing arts season.
Tickets for the 2011–2012 performing arts season go on sale Tuesday, July 19
. Unless otherwise noted, tickets will be available by phone (612.375.7600) and online at tickets.walkerart.org.
WALKER ART CENTER’S 2011–2012
PERFORMING ARTS SEASON
Unless otherwise noted, all events take place in the William and Nadine McGuire Theater.
($) = ticket prices for Walker Art Center members
SEPTEMBER
Despair Be Damned: New Music and Dance from the Congo
This two-part mini-festival of new Congolese music and dance brings two of the Central African country’s most inspiring contemporary ensembles to the Twin Cities. Conflict and unimaginable national hardship can give rise to unexpectedly inspired art, and after decades of civil war, corruption, and economic collapse, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is producing tense and cathartic work with themes of creativity, courage, and promise rising amidst the ashes that are universal and deeply human.
Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako DANCE
more, more, more … future
Friday and Saturday, September 23 and 24, 8 pm
$25 ($21)
“To be positive is the most subversive. Celebrating is a way of resisting. We are still alive in all of this.” —Faustin Linyekula
Part galvanizing dance, part cathartic concert, this rebelliously fierce celebration balances fury with hope, despair with joy. In a complex dance-music-theater production, Congolese choreographer Linyekula (Festival of Lies at the Walker, 2007) and his company of remarkable male dancers return in a collaboration with Kinshasa-based electric guitar star Flamme Kapaya on his U.S. debut tour. In this raucous and provocative performance, the dancers twist and rage to the seething poems of Antoine Vumilia Muhindo—a political prisoner in Kinshasa and childhood friend of Linyekula’s—set to the infectious dance-pop rhythms of ndombolo (the bastard daughter of the rumba) created by Kapaya’s five-member onstage band.
Support provided by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Staff Benda Bilili MUSIC
U.S. Debut Tour
Tuesday, September 27, 8 pm
$30 ($26)
The Cedar, 416 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis
“Like all the finest African bands, Staff Benda Bilili’s swirling complexity removes the option to do anything but dance … Havana cantina, Kinshasa slum, psychedelic club, or London arts centre—this crack outfit would tear the roof off anywhere.”— Independent
Join us for an unusual, moving, and completely memorable night of music. This 12-member group of street musicians from Kinshasa has become an international sensation for their mesmerizing sounds and invented instruments. While the band cooks up beaty Congolese soukous and rumba, Staff Benda’s voices conjure the crooners of Havana, the toasters of Kingston, and the Godfather of Soul himself. The group, several of whom who have been polio-afflicted since youth, features singer/guitarists perched on customized tricycle/wheelchair hybrids fronting the group, a killer acoustic rhythm section, and weirdly infectious, invented instrument solos. This international phenom considers itself to be the real journalists of Kinshasa, with joyous songs that document and comment on everyday life with raw power, delicacy, and beauty. Copresented with The Cedar.
Support provided by The McKnight Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
OCTOBER
Lucy Guerin, Inc. DANCE Structures and Sadness
Thursday–Saturday, October 6–8, 8 pm
Thursday, $18 ($15); Friday–Saturday, $25 ($21)
“A work of rare beauty, presenting piercing insights with calculated subtlety.” —Trespass Magazine (UK)
Testing gravity and flirting with disaster, Lucy Guerin and her company make their Midwest debut in this construction of a precarious world teetering on collapse. An Australian choreographer renowned for her distinctive and rigorous vision, Guerin translates engineering principles—compression, suspension, torsion, failure—into an arresting movement vocabulary. Using an elaborate neon light design and a variety of wooden flats assembled throughout the show by the dancers to form a life-size house of cards, Guerin explores humanity’s universal trust in the built environment, and the fallout when that trust is betrayed. This “quietly devastating and potent work” (New York Press) will have a particular resonance in the Twin Cities as it’s based on the 1970 collapse of a bridge in Melbourne that killed 35 workers.
A Merce Cunningham Celebration
Friday, October 28–November 6
In March 2011, the Walker announced the single largest visual art acquisition in its history—the purchase of the sets, props, costumes, and selected documentation of the late visionary choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), a towering figure in American art and culture. Known for his many collaborations with leading visual and musical artists and designers of the past 60 years, he forever changed the very essence of dance. In celebration of its nearly 50-year relationship with Cunningham, the Walker offers a 10-day festival of dance works, talks, and workshops as well as the first of several exhibitions of the new collection opening November 3. The festival concludes with the final chance to see a performance of some of the master’s most seminal works before the company disbands at the end of 2011.
Exhibition: Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg
November 3, 2011–April 8, 2012
From 1954 to 1964, choreographer Merce Cunningham and visual artist Robert Rauschenberg collaborated on 10 dances for Cunningham’s company. An exploration of the rich collaboration between two legendary figures, this exhibition features newly acquired, Rauschenberg-designed sets, props, and costumes, as well as other works by the artist from the Walker’s collection.
Jérôme Bel (Part of A Merce Cunningham Celebration) DANCE
Cédric Andrieux
Friday–Saturday, October 28–29, 8 pm
$16 ($12)
“All Bel creations have both a real honesty in their straightforward presentation and engagement with the audience… [this piece] shows us dance from the inside. Mr. Andrieux doesn’t just explain that the work is hard, often boring, sometimes humiliating yet transporting—we see it all clearly.” —New York Times
Known for conceptual, often slyly hilarious choreographic work, Jérôme Bel returns to the Walker with a beautifully spare and poetic evening of movement and storytelling created for Cédric Andrieux. Providing a behind-the-scenes look at Andrieux’s career, from his training in France to his time with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Lyon Opera Ballet, the performance integrates spoken English with dance excerpts created by renowned choreographers like Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. This work opens the world of dance and performance, offering insights into the iconic image of the performer.
NOVEMBER
Merce Cunningham Dance Company DANCE
Farewell Legacy Tour
Antic Meet (1958); RainForest (1968); Pond Way (1998)
Friday–Saturday, November 4–5, 8 pm; Sunday, November 6, 2 and 7 pm
Sunday, $40 ($35); Friday-Saturday, $45 ($40)
“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back … nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”
—Merce Cunningham
A tribute to Cunningham’s enduring genius, this program specifically designed for the Walker showcases three distinct eras of his career and features some of the premiere collaborations with leading 20th-century artists crucial to his artistic vision. Robert Rauschenberg created set pieces and props for Antic Meet, the absurdist romp that was part of Cunningham’s first Walker performance in 1963 and not seen here since. RainForest features Andy Warhol’s floating silver mylar pillows, which become part of the choreography, and the quietly majestic Pond Way plays out against a stunning pointillistic backdrop by Roy Lichtenstein. The live score by musicians long associated with Cunningham led by his Music Director Takehisa Kosugi showcases the work of additional landmark collaborators, including John Cage, David Tudor, and Brian Eno.
Big Dance Theater THEATER/DANCE
Supernatural Wife
Walker Commission
Thursday–Saturday, November 17–19, 8 pm
Thursday, $18 ($15); Friday–Saturday, $25 ($21)
“Each medium is perfectly mastered—dance, video, theater and song combine in making this tragedy a complete and hybrid form, enriched with knowing winks—the ancient aligns with modern technology.” —Les Trois Coups, Avignon
New York’s Big Dance Theater has gained an avid international following for its stunning theatrical hybrids with dark comic touches—“fiercely visual work [that] can move you to tears” (Time Out New York). Their newest creation is poet Ann Carson’s fresh adaptation of Euripides’ Alkestis, a rarely performed but profound exploration of death, selfishness, and self-sacrifice that shows off the company’s seamless mix of experimental theater, multimedia performance, and dance that includes a Greek chorus and soundscapes by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang (Bang On A Can).
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts.
Choreographers’ Evening DANCE
Curated by Chris Schlichting
Saturday, November 26, 7 and 9:30 pm
$22 ($18)
“A welcome—and very accessible—bouquet of performances showcasing some of the area’s many talented dancemakers.” —TC Daily Planet
For almost 40 years, Choreographers’ Evening has celebrated the remarkably diverse range of Minnesota dance—from established choreographers playing with new ideas to some of the freshest emerging talent. This year’s guest curator, local dance mainstay and bon vivant choreographer Chris Schlichting, brings his expansive view of dance to a program that is destined to spark debate and will surely chart new directions in the art of movement.
Support provided by The McKnight Foundation.
JANUARY
Out There 2012: New World Performance
January 5–28
For 23 years, the Walker’s month-long Out There Festival has served as the region’s premiere platform for presenting works in alternative theater and new performance. In 2011, Out There presented a range of innovative, surprising productions from across Europe. For this year’s performances, the Walker invited leading theatrical freethinkers from artistic hot spots around the world—New York, Tokyo, Beirut, and Buenos Aires.
Out There Package:
See all performances for $50! Call the box office to take advantage of this offer: 612.375.7600.
Single Tickets
$18 ($15) Thursday; $22 ($18) Friday–Saturday
Out There and Then Some
During the four-week festival, meet and talk with the artists after the shows, and participate in Saturday-morning workshops with Out There company members. Visit walkerart.org for details.
Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company THEATER
Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show
Walker Commission/World Premiere
Thursday–Saturday, January 5–7, 8 pm
$18 ($15) Thursday; $22 ($18) Friday–Saturday
“She offers the pleasure of brazen theatrical inventiveness.” —New Yorker
“My work has never been about lecturing and bullying people,” says Lee. “It’s been about tricking and confusing them into submission in a playful/fanged way.” In her second Walker commission, she uses an all-female cast and crew to present her hilarious, disorientating exploration of feminism and gender fluidity. This theatrical provocateur uses movement by irreverent New York choreographer Faye Driscoll, tongue-in-cheek video and Lee’s brilliant, sometimes surreal text to upend accepted societal notions of female beauty and power in this darkly comic and unsettling production. Performance contains only nudity.
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Rabih Mroué THEATER
Looking for a Missing Employee and Hussein
Walker Commission/Debut U.S. Tour
Thursday–Saturday, January 12–14, 8 pm
$18 ($15) Thursday; $22 ($18) Friday–Saturday
“[He is] to Beirut what the Wooster Group is to New York: a blend of avant-garde innovation, conceptual complexity and political urgency, all grounded in earthy humor.” —New York Times
In his U.S. debut tour, Lebanese performance and visual artist Rabih Mroué illuminates the elusive nature of personal and national memory with Looking for a Missing Employee, an intriguing and timely performance puzzle. Using video with multicamera feeds, he brilliantly channels storytelling, historic detritus, and live sketch art. This charming yet unflinching tale unearths the mutable realities of daily life in his homeland and the ever-increasing skepticism that swirls around Middle Eastern leadership. Mroué will also present his latest short piece, the lecture/performance Hussein, a work-in-progress co-commissioned by the Walker, on Saturday, January 14, as part of Inside Out There. In English.
Rabih Mroué is the recipient of the 2010 Spalding Gray Award from P.S. 122, the Andy Warhol Museum, On the Boards, and the Walker Art Center.
chelfitsch/Toshiki Okada THEATER
Hot Pepper, Air Conditioning, and The Farewell Speech
Thursday–Saturday, January 19–21, 8 pm
$18 ($15) Thursday; $22 ($18) Friday–Saturday
“chelfitsch is one of the most acclaimed phenomena in Japan’s theater scene from the last decade.” — CNN
Known for his highly stylized hybrid of oddly humorous text, distinct lighting, and idiosyncratic movement, Japanese writer-director Toshiki Okada and his company chelfitsch follow up their 2009 Out There engagement with a trio of interconnected stories about youthful low-level office workers. Suddenly considered disposable, these twenty-somethings regard current capitalism and its cultural toll with a dark and unmistakably Japanese sense of humor. Each story in the triptych combines Okada’s singular style interwoven with the perfectly chosen work of a modern musical artist— John Cage, John Coltrane, and Stereolab. A fresh voice in international theater, Okada strikes the perfect balance between wit and poignancy, crystallizing the daily lives of another country’s lost generation. In Japanese with English supertitles.
Support provided by the Performing Arts Japan program of the Japan Foundation.
Mariano Pensotti THEATER
El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco (The Past Is a Grotesque Animal)
Thursday–Saturday, January 26–28, 8 pm
$18 ($15) Thursday; $22 ($18) Friday–Saturday
“Pensotti has a fine facility with irony, with the fine balance between comedy and tragedy and, most of all, with the ability to capture an epic psychosis in an unpretentious nutshell.” —British Theatre Guide
It’s 1999 in Buenos Aires. Mario, Laura, Pablo, and Vicky are in their mid-twenties and ready for careers, love, and adult life. Over the next 10 years, Argentina’s economy will collapse and their dreams and the world will turn unexpectedly. In this fast-paced, multilayered “mega fiction,” Argentine theater director Mariano Pensotti deftly unfolds a span in the lives of these interconnected characters, ingeniously using a turntable set to convey time’s ceaseless march and divide the action into four spaces in which vital moments play out in their lives. The players realize how easily real life can transform into fiction and back again. In Spanish with English supertitles.
FEBRUARY
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company DANCE
Story/Time
Walker Commission
Thursday–Sunday, February 16–19, 8 pm, Sunday matinee, 2 pm
Thursday evening/Sunday matinee, $34 ($29); Friday–Saturday, $38 ($33)
“[Jones’s] gifts: pungent, purposeful character development, compelling storytelling and pure-dance interludes of slippery and often deeply romantic choreography.” —Washington Post
Bill T. Jones, 2010 recipient of the 33rd Annual Kennedy Center Honors for being one of America’s most accomplished dance-makers and creative force behind Broadway hits Spring Awakening and Fela!, returns to the Walker with his 12-member international company and a new work. Story/Time weaves together a cascade of 90 one-minute stories told center stage by the iconic choreographer himself and drawn from his life and ideas—minimal, funny, poignant, surreal, philosophical, anecdotal, political, and poetic. Original music and video complement his inventive narrative and choreography. With a formal structure inspired by composer John Cage’s Indeterminacy (1959) and a set reminiscent of Merce Cunningham’s OCEAN, the work operates on the principle of chance to create and layer movement and music and reach a truth that mirrors real life.
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts.
MARCH
The Sound of Surprise: MUSIC
The Music of Vijay Iyer – A Two-Day Mini-Fest
Thursday and Friday, March 1 and 2, 8 pm
$22 ($18)
“Vijay Iyer is, simply put, one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today.” —Pitchfork
Celebrating the inspired range of musical expression by award-winning composer Vijay Iyer, this two-night blowout features a broad cross section of his diverse projects by “one of the most challenging and satisfying talents in jazz today” (Boston Globe). Look for his stellar trio (Marcus Gilmore, drums and Stephan Crump, bass), his quintet (featuring Indian guitar sensation Prasanna), his hot and fresh 21st-century global chamber music trio Tirtha, and his genre-busting duo collaboration with Paris-based hip-hop artist/poet Mike Ladd and several of his virtuoso solo works. Iyer’s album Historicity topped almost every jazz writer’s year-end best-recording lists in 2010. This ambitious survey is a rare treat from one of America’s most insatiably curious and talented sonic explorers. Different programs will be featured each night.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph with Theaster Gates THEATER
red, black and GREEN: a blues
Walker Commission
Thursday–Saturday, March 15–17, 8 pm
Thursday, $18 ($15); Friday–Saturday, $25 ($21)
“Joseph is the real deal, swinging with such confidence that you grasp for adjectives to capture his skills.” —Star Tribune
Spoken word/hip-hop theater artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph presents a new multimedia work on environmental justice and social ecology that questions collective responsibility (his own included) in a time of dramatic climate change. In an exhilarating, interactive performance of dance, text, and visuals, Joseph is joined onstage by dancer/actor Traci Tolmaire, drummer/beat boxer Tommy Shephard, and vocalist/visual artist Theaster Gates, who is also designing the set. Set into Gates’ malleable stage installation of repurposed building materials and clay objects, and heightened by Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi’s vivid films and graffiti murals drawn from a series of art and eco festivals Joseph created with several different communities nationwide, including Minneapolis. red, black and GREEN: a blues follows Joseph’s 2008 critically acclaimed the break/s, also co-commissioned by the Walker. The poetry and performance in rbGb posits the idea that valuing your own life, the life of your community, is the first step in valuing the planet Earth.
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, and The McKnight Foundation.
The 802 Tour MUSIC
Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, Doveman, and Nadia Sirota with Guest Artists
U.S. Exclusive Engagement
Thursday – Friday, March 22–23, 8 pm
$22 ($18)
“They crafted another beautiful night on The 802 Tour…. Visit the carefree, unshackled realm of boyhood one more time and muck around in deep, dark music.” —Examiner.com
This exclusive U.S. engagement by the groundbreaking twenty-something collective of composers/performers (and old Vermont friends) fuses contemporary classical, deeply rooted folk, and modern pop. The evening features Nico Muhly (perhaps the most renowned composer of his generation, with major works premiered by New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and an opera commissioned by the Metropolitan in the works), avant-folkie Sam Amidon, melancholic/ambient singer-songwriter Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett, and violist supreme Nadia Sirota, all backed by some of Minnesota’s top string players. Collaborators, kindred spirits, drinking buddies—this evening will feature shared music, inspired solos, and new musical ideas all floated in an air of sonic camaraderie and landed with astounding ability.
APRIL
Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 MUSIC
Saturday, April 14, 8 pm
$30 ($25 Walker members) in advance; $35 ($30) day of show
The Cedar, 416 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis
“As a performer, Seun is far more of a chip off the old block than Femi, and with a gruffer and more streetwise sounding vocal delivery. And with his dad’s old band Egypt 80 behind him, he’s a force to be reckoned with.”
—BBC
In 1991, nine-year old Seun Kuti awed a sold-out First Avenue audience as he performed a precociously defiant version of one of his father’s songs before Fela took the stage. He returns for the first time to Minneapolis more than 20 years later as one of the most important figures in Afrobeat. Combining the pulsating African funk/jazz pioneered by his father with his passion for R&B and the blunt realism of hip-hop, Seun Kuti has found his own voice. His latest release, the Brian Eno–produced From Africa with Fury: Rise, “a sharp, intense and funky set … offers a state-of-the-continent address that builds on Kuti’s legacy as the son of the late Nigerian Afrobeat king…” (Spinner.com). In his Midwest debut, saxophonist Kuti is joined by Fela’s legendary 16-piece Egypt 80 band. Copresented with The Cedar.
The Lisps MUSIC/THEATER
FUTURITY
Walker Commission
Thursday–Saturday, April 26–28, 8 pm
$18 ($15); Friday–Saturday, $25 ($21)
“Melodramatic, witty, inventive and downright intoxicating. I was not fully prepared for the sheer genius that is FUTURITY.” —Music Slut
As the Civil War rages around him, Union soldier Julian Munro and Lord Byron’s brilliant daughter, Ada Lovelace, attempt to invent an omnipotent steam-powered brain designed to save humanity before it destroys itself. Featuring up-and-coming Brooklyn indie-rock band the Lisps, this quirky new music-theater piece melds traditional Americana, Brechtian choral elements, and avant-rock, resulting in a unique and compelling portrait of war, human imagination, and technological hubris.
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
MAY
Tortoise + Minneapolis Jazz All Stars MUSIC
Friday, May 4, 8 pm
$22 ($18 Walker members)
“Tortoise is one of the rare groups that defy easy classification despite their status as founding fathers of the late-‘90s post-rock boom.” —Paste Magazine
Chicago’s indie legends Tortoise return to the Walker to join forces with some of the Twin Cities’ most influential jazz and rock innovators for an exploratory collaboration in sound and form. Unique in the world of contemporary music, Tortoise is known for its boundless intellectual dub, dance, ambient, and minimalism. This 612 meets 312 experiment features gifted players, new ideas, and a remarkable shared musical vision. Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, John McEntire, and Jeff Parker play along with some of Minneapolis’ finest musicians in this singular performance.
David Zambrano DANCE
Soul Project
Friday–Saturday, May 11–12, 8 pm
$25 ($21)
“If there were prizes for wiliness in dancing, David Zambrano would win them all. He looks deft enough to slip through cracks, dive into keyholes, invade your heart. He’s loose and resilient without any loss of precision.” —Village Voice
Soul Project is a series of virtuosic solos, each lasting the length of a recording by classic soul singers such as Aretha Franklin, Ike and Tina Turner, Bettye Lavette, James Brown, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. Throughout the performance, the audience is invited to mingle, move along, get close to the cast, and witness the dance from any angle they choose in this clublike atmosphere on the McGuire stage. Influential Venezuelan choreographer David Zambrano conceived and directed Soul Project in collaboration with a hand-picked cast of seven remarkable performers from Mozambique, Slovenia, Greece, Slovakia, the U.S., and Venezuela. After the Saturday performance, the stage turns into a dance party, with the cast and audience celebrating the rousing end of the Walker’s 2011–2012 season.
Support provided by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, and The McKnight Foundation.
Walker Channel
Watch live webcasts of Walker programs, such as Making Music and Talking Dance lectures, and mine archives that include podcasts, remarks by hundreds of contemporary artists from a variety of disciplines, panel discussions involving critics and audiences, artist talks and musical and literary performance by some of today’s leading voices. Visit channel.walkerart.org
Online Conversations
After the show, join a conversation about it online, where you’ll also find articles, reviews, and interesting facts about each event. Visit the Walker Facebook page and blogs.walkerart.org
A Think and a Drink
Join other Walker members for this exclusive event that brings together curators and artists before a performance to socialize over light snacks and a drink at our cash bar. Limited space and discounted tickets available. Make a reservation at membership@walkerart.org or 612.375.7655
SpeakEasy
Meet at the back of the Balcony Bar after every Saturday dance and Out There performance for an informal dialogue with a Walker tour guild and a local choreographer or theater artist. Think book club with a performance. Jump into the discussion or just listen in as other hash it out after the show. Your questions. Your answers. Risk-free.
Balcony Bar
The upper balcony of the McGuire Theater is the place to meet the artist, talk about the show and enjoy a drink ($5 wine, $3 beer, $2 soda) and snacks. Open one hour prior and after all performances. For details, visit walkerart.org
Performing Arts Supporters
The Walker Art Center’s performing arts programs are made possible by generous support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris Duke Performing Arts Fund, the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund, The McKnight Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Producers’ Council
Performing Arts programs and commissions at the Walker are generously supported by members of the Producers’ Council: Russell Cowles; Sage and John Cowles; Robert and Katherine Goodale; Nor Hall and Roger Hale; King’s Fountain/Barbara Watson Pillsbury and Henry Pillsbury; Emily Maltz; Dr. William W. and Nadine M. McGuire; Leni and David Moore, Jr.; Josine Peters; Mike and Elizabeth Sweeney; and Frances and Frank Wilkinson.