Minneapolis, November 29, 2016— Intent on flipping expectations and blurring lines, Out There brings some of the world’s most intriguing experimental theater and performance works to the Twin Cities. Beginning as a modest two-weekend series in 1989, it has grown into a full-fledged monthlong festival featuring new global performances, workshops, dialogue sessions, salons, and other activities. We invite you to open your mind, brave the cold, and get Out There with us January 4–28 in the William and Nadine McGuire Theater.
OUT THERE 2017
A Festival of Performance Alternatives
January 4–28
See all four shows for $79.50 ($74.20 Walker members)
Unless noted, all events take place in the Walker’s William and Nadine McGuire Theater
Andrew Schneider
YOUARENOWHERE
Wednesday–Friday, January 4–7, 8 pm; Saturday, 2 and 8 pm
$28 ($22.40)
“Inventive … astounding … continually finds new ways to challenge and engage its viewers, to surprise and mystify us.” —New York Times
A not-to-be missed smash hit from New York’s downtown theater world, this rapid-fire, high-tech existential meditation teleports from physics lecture to pop culture and personal revelation while dissecting quantum mechanics, parallel universes, missed connections, and AA recovery steps. Using an array of electrifying visual and aural effects to produce a shifting landscape of sensory overload, YOUARENOWHERE warps linear time and “wholly transform[s] the performance space into an unsettling, unidentifiable elsewhere” (Artforum).
Support provided by Producers’ Council members Leni and David Moore, Jr./The David and Leni Moore Family Foundation.
Faye Driscoll
Thank You for Coming: Play
Walker Commission
Thursday–Saturday, January 12–14, 8 pm
$25 ($20)
“Faye Driscoll is a postmillennium and postmodern wild woman. A wild woman with a scrupulous sense of form that she tweaks into eye-opening weirdness. Ferocious, hilarious, and disturbing.” —Village Voice
Following the wildly popular Attendance in February 2016, Bessie Award–winning choreographer/director Faye Driscoll returns with the second part of her Thank You for Coming trilogy. Playful, irreverent, and rigorous, Play focuses on the consumption and fabrication of personal stories that help make our lives coherent. The choreography examines the lingering gaps and glitches (both physically and vocally) between what we say and what we do.
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. Additional support provided by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Okwui Okpokwasili
Poor People’s TV Room
Walker Commission
Thursday–Saturday, January 19–21, 8 pm $25 ($20)
“Okpokwasili is quite simply a virtuoso, an exquisite singer, speaker, writer, mover, a siren who draws us to danger.” —Chicago Tribune
Known for her intensely powerful performances, Bessie Award–winning Okwui Okpokwasili (Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room) considers the collective amnesia around women’s resistance movements in Nigeria, from the Igbo Women’s War of 1929 to the recent Boko Haram kidnappings and #BringBackOurGirls campaign. With collaborator Peter Born, she and three female performers mix ritualistic and hallucinogenic movement, song, video, and text, creating a dystopian narrative in which characters slip through the fissures of time to wander in a bush of ghosts.
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio
La Mélancolie des Dragons
Thursday–Saturday, January 26–28, 8 pm $28 ($22.40)
“A great, humorous, and deeply human, touching work.” —Der Standard (Vienna)
A hatchback has died in a beautiful snowy forest, stranding six metal-heads on their quest to build a hard rock–themed amusement park in protest of cheap consumerism. This deeply surreal fairy tale uses a disarming wit and hints of magical realism—with the help of 1980s rock and medieval recorders—to celebrate the absurdity, joy, and wonder of human existence. La Mélancolie promises a memorable, much talked-about theatrical experience. Conceived and directed by Philippe Quesne—one of Europe’s most distinctive performance-makers.
Support provided by Producers’ Council members Leni and David Moore, Jr./The David and Leni Moore Family Foundation. Additional support provided by the FACE Fund for Contemporary Theater, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and Institut Français.
Tickets
Tickets to Out There are available at walkerart.org/tickets or by calling 612.375.7600
Inside Out There
Saturdays, January 14, 21, and 28, 11 am–1 pm
$6 ($4)
Get the inside scoop from visiting Out There artists as they share their creative processes with demonstrations, improvisations, works-in-progress, and more. Advance reservations encouraged. Check walkerart.org in December for Inside Out There details.
GET MORE OUT THERE
Don’t miss your chance to talk with the artists and each other throughout the four-week festival. The City View Room (formerly Gather Restaurant) is open one hour before and after all shows.
Thursdays:
Meet the artists at a postshow reception in the City View Room (formerly Gather Restaurant)
Fridays:
Stay after the show for a Q&A with the artists.
Saturday evenings:
Join a postshow SpeakEasy conversation, led by local artists and
tour guides.
Free Gallery Admission
Walker gallery admission is free with a paid event ticket within one month of every performance.
Accessibility
The Walker is accessible to all visitors. Assistive listening devices, audio description, and ASL interpretation are available for performing arts events. For more information, call 612.253.3556 or e-mail access@walkerart.org.
Walker Art Center Performing Arts Program History
A catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences, the Walker Art Center examines the questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities. Established in 1927 as the Walker Art Gallery, in 1940 it adopted a new name and focused on modern and contemporary art exhibitions as well as screenings, performances and public programs. The Performing Arts program grew dramatically during the 1960s, presenting over 100 events a year and transitioning into a formal Walker programmatic department in 1970. Following a 1971 expansion and its 1988 opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, in 2005 the Walker opened a $100 million expansion which housed dedicated venues for all its disciplines including the 385-seat McGuire Theater. Today the Walker is one of the top-five most visited modern and contemporary art centers in the U.S. Multidisciplinary in focus, it is equally committed to advancing artistic innovation and interdisciplinary scholarship as it is with increasing access to lifelong learning in the arts. Approximately 1,600 artistic presentations engage 600,000 people per year through up to eight exhibitions; 170 film screenings; 85 performance events; the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden; and hundreds of residency, education, and community program events. Its 16-acre campus includes the highly acclaimed Herzog & de Meuron designed 385-seat McGuire Theater – home to one of the nation’s largest contemporary performance programs. The Walker is respected nationally and internationally as a groundbreaking leader in contemporary performing art presentations, residencies, and commissions. Led by Senior Curator Philip Bither since 1997, the Walker’s Performing Arts program under his tenure has been defined by its commitment to the increasingly blurred lines between artistic disciplines, including contemporary dance, new music-theatre, performance art, experimental theatre, avant-jazz, contemporary classical music, new global sounds and alternative rock and pop. In addition to animating its outstanding McGuire Theater, the Walker has also greatly expanded its placement of dance into gallery settings, in its sculpture garden, and beyond, to further encourage a conversation between forms. It has also continued it long-standing tradition of mounting work together with presenters, venues, community-based collaborators, and unique sites across the Twin Cities. Through its endeavors, the Walker has earned an international reputation as “one of America’s foremost experimental art spaces” (UK’s The Guardian).
Commissioning History Highlights
The Walker actively commissions work from emerging and established artists and provides artists intensive residencies to develop their work and connect their art and ideas with its audiences and neighboring communities. During the past decade alone, the Walker has commissioned more than 100 works involving hundreds of performing artists whose Walker commissioned works have travelled to 270 venues in the U.S. and 30 countries. The Walker helped to establish now common national practices like commissioning work from leading artists (Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp and many more) and our commitment continues to this day with 5-8 new commissions and production residencies per year. The Walker has hosted multiple residencies from hundreds of artists over the years, including longstanding relationships with artists such as Cunningham, Brown, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk, and more recently, vanguard artists such as Elevator Repair Service, Erik Friedlander, Cynthia Hopkins, So Percussion, and Ralph Lemon (who opened the 14/15 season with a new interdisciplinary work, Scaffold Room). 15/16 commission highlights include premieres like Sarah Michelson’s tournamento; Julian Crouch, Rinde Eckert, Paola Prestini’s Aging Magician; and Trajal Harrell’s The Ghost of Montpellier Meets the Samurai.
Acknowledgments
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 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: Goodale Family Foundation; 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./The David and Leni Moore Family Foundation; Mike and Elizabeth Sweeney; and Frances and Frank Wilkinson.