Intensity, surprise, urgency, humanity, complexity, provocation, joy—these words bind the experiences awaiting Twin Cities audiences in the Walker Art Center’s 2019–2020 Performing Arts season. Announced today, the season features daring new works by a diverse spectrum of some of the most provocative and inspiring creators of our time—emerging, midcareer, and master global artists—as they reflect on a world of resistance and reinvention, investigation and empowerment. Featured performances span music, theater, and dance, many of which also integrate elements of literature, design, architecture, moving image, visual art, and beyond.
“At times of uncertainty and crisis, artists sound the alarms on what we may not be fully seeing, examine and reflect deeply on our times, present us unimagined possibilities for hope, and offer us real-time poetry for the soul,” said Philip Bither, McGuire Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts.
The 21 events feature three world premieres by Ted Hearne, Makaya McCraven and Danez Smith, five Walker commissions by Faye Driscoll, Makaya McCraven, Miguel Gutierrez, Ted Hearne, and Ligia Lewis, and numerous Midwest premieres including Nature Theater of Oklahoma, KOKOKO!, Bruno Beltrão, Perfume Genius and Kate Wallich, Teaċ Damsa, Tina Satter/Half Straddle, Ligia Lewis, and Back to Back Theatre.
“We are more committed than ever, given our political times, to welcome leading global creators to the Midwest. This year we are proud to present artists from Brazil, Ireland, Germany, Slovenia, England, and Australia. And, we bracket the year with two remarkable contemporary music collectives from Central and Southern Africa—KOKOKO!, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and BCUC (Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness) from Soweto, South Africa—as part of an ongoing collaborative effort with the Cedar to seek out of vital innovators across the continent of Africa and introduce them to Minnesota audiences,” said Bither.
The season also includes many international, large-scale triumphs by acclaimed artists such as Brazil’s street dance post-modernists Bruno Beltrao/Groups de Niteroi, the irreverent and wildly inventive Nature Theater of Oklahoma, algorithmic theater inventor Annie Dorsen, and Australia’s Back to Back Theatre featuring their uniquely ambitious performances. In one of the season’s largest, most exciting productions, co-presented with Northrop, the Irish dance-theater visionary Michael Keenan Dolen spectacularly deconstructs the famous story ballet Swan Lake, placing it in poverty-stricken Irish midlands of today. The performance features nine powerful contemporary dancers, two world-class Irish actors, a huge imaginative set and emotionally textured original live music by the fantastic Dublin trio Slow Moving Clouds.
Other season highlights include Kyle Abraham; Maya Beiser with Lucinda Childs David Lang and Wendy Whelan; Choreographers’ Evening, curated by SuperGroup; Annie Dorsen; Mary Halvorson, and Kronos Quartet with Terry Riley. The Walker is pleased to be partnering on some of the season’s key projects with the Cedar, First Avenue, Graywolf Press, Minnesota Public Radio, Northrop, University of Minnesota, The O’Shaughnessy and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series.
“There is something almost sacred in gathering together today to collectively experience live art in the moment,” said Bither. “This community’s interest in challenging, new forms of live performing arts has been at the heart of the success of the Walker’s performing arts programming over the past six decades. We look forward to welcoming you back for 2019–2020’s global, relevant, impassioned, transformative, and extraordinary experiences—21 opportunities to connect with the future of 21st-century live art!”
WALKER ART CENTER’S 2019–2020 PERFORMING ARTS SEASON
Theater/Dance
Midwest Premiere
Nature Theater of Oklahoma and EN-KNAP Group: Pursuit of Happiness
Friday and Saturday, September 13–14, 8 pm
$28 ($22.40 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“It would be a shame to reveal how this bizarre, painful, hilarious, almost two-hour horror comedy ends. Along the way, Pursuit of Happiness generates an orgy of images, memories and emotions in the heart and mind of the viewer.” —De Theaterkrant
The notoriously inventive New York–based performance enterprise, led by co-creators Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, Nature Theater of Oklahoma returns with the Slovenian dance company EN-KNAP Group to interrogate the meaning behind the Declaration of Independence’s “pursuit of happiness” as an “unalienable right.” Think spaghetti western with an Austrian sales rep, a trip to Baghdad, and some unsettlingly happy cowboy dances added into the mix. Physical comedy and artistic parody, hypermasculinity and military might, declamatory speeches and whiskey-soaked sexuality: this theatrical adventure comments on Western tropes with poignancy, critique, insight, and hilarity.
Contains mature content.
Read New York Times review
EN-KNAP website
Nature Theater of Oklahoma website
Music
Midwest Premiere
KOKOKO!
Friday, September 20, 8 pm
$25 at the door, $20 in advance ($20, $16 Walker members)
The Cedar Cultural Center
416 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis
“KOKOKO! is an explosive new musical collective that thrives on ingenuity and induces a frenetic trance.” —TIME
Using instruments constructed from typewriters, glass bottles, engine parts, and various containers, this Congolese music collective makes irresistibly danceable music that they call “tekno kintueni.” Inspired by electronica, hip-hop, and a mix of traditional African musical styles, KOKOKO!’s organic, exuberant sound, created in collaboration with French producer Débruit, merges political messaging with hypnotic dance rhythms. At the forefront of artistic originality, the band recycles yesterday’s junk into tomorrow’s propulsive sounds, straight from the heart of Kinshasa.
Copresented by the Cedar.
Read TIME review
Read DJ Mag on KOKOKO!
KOKOKO! website
Music
Lonnie Holley, featuring Nelson Patton and Shahzad Ismaily
Saturday, October 5, 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“Every era has its prophets, and Lonnie Holley….speaks to the anguish and tumult of modern life with extraordinary fury and perception.” —Pitchfork
Alabama-born Lonnie Holley lives with a remarkable backstory marked by hardship, poverty, and pain but also self-evolution and transcendence.
Through his sculptural assemblages and his Sun Ra–meets–Sam Cooke sound, he’s emerged as a singular American visionary devoted to glorious improvisation and shamanistic transformation. In his first Minnesota performance, featuring multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and the experimental electronics, percussion and trombone duo Nelson Patton, Holley unleashes his unflinching insights on race in America with sonic soul, mystical spirit, and authentic generosity.
Read Pitchfork on Lonnie Holley
Read The New Yorker on Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Holley website
Music
Walker Commission / World Premiere
Makaya McCraven: In These Times, with opener Astralblak
Friday, October 18, 7 & 9:30 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“McCraven, a Chicago-based drummer, producer and beat maker, has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality.” —New York TimesBridging generations of adventurous music with his improvisational genius and ecstatic beatwork, drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven performs a timely Walker co-commissioned musical suite—his most ambitious work to date.
A “beat scientist” who has galvanized audiences and garnered critical acclaim across the globe while helping to introduce jazz and improvisation to the next generation, McCraven is joined by trumpeter Marquis Hill, guitarist Jeff Parker (Tortoise), bassist Junius Paul (Art Ensemble of Chicago), saxophonist Greg Ward, and harpist Brandee Younger (Moses Sumney). Music is community in this multimedia performance that includes a string section, vocalists, and a video collage made from archival footage of black activists and influential music innovators.Twin Cities–based funk, soul, and hip-hop collective Astralblak opens, channeling the black experience through a new Minneapolis sound.Presented in association with First Avenue.Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund.
Read New York Times review
Read Rolling Stone on Makaya McCraven
Makaya McCraven website
Astralblak website
Dance/Theater
Midwest Premiere
Teaċ Daṁsa: Loch na hEala (Swan Lake)
October 24–27
Thursday–Saturday, 8 pm; Sunday, 2 pm
$45, $32 ($36, $25.60 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“With this new reimagining of Swan Lake [Michael Keegan-Dolan] elevates it to a place of bleak, funny and astoundingly poetic beauty.” —The Guardian (UK)In this gorgeous, large-scale contemporary adaptation of the famous story ballet, the lake is black plastic, the prince is suicidal, the swans wear convent frocks, and the set is an assemblage of concrete and steel. From the imagination of Michael Keegan-Dolan, one of Ireland’s foremost dance and theatermakers, comes a world of magical realism with a beauty as fierce and rugged as Ireland itself. Ancient Irish mythology meets modern Ireland head-on in a performance laced with comic vignettes and raw, exquisite movement. The piece has become an international hit since its sold-out premiere at the Dublin Theater Festival. This rare US presentation includes an emotionally textured Nordic- and Celtic-infused score, performed live by Dublin’s Slow Moving Clouds.Contains mature content.Copresented by Northrop, University of Minnesota.Support provided by Culture Ireland.
Read The Guardian review
Read Irish Times preview
Teaċ Daṁsa website
Dance
Midwest Premiere
Bruno Beltrão/Grupo de Rua: Inoah
Friday–Saturday, November 8–9, 8 pm
$28 ($22.40 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“With Inoah, [Beltrão] proves that he can start the world and the language of hip-hop again with each creation.” —Libération
With his Rio-based, 10-person crew Grupo de Rua, choreographer Bruno Beltrão deconstructs hip-hop to fully realize the potential of the street form’s translation to the stage. With utter virtuosity, Beltrão combines sophisticated stage craft with contemporary dance and raw hip-hop, rapid-fire cadences, athletic suppleness, and gravity defying artistry. In this rare US performance, Grupo de Rua unleashes popping and breaking in a masterwork of urgent choreographic invention. It’s a heart-stopping dance of stylistic brilliance.
Read Liberation review
Read New Yorker preview
Music
Walker Commission / World Premiere
Ted Hearne: Live Things
Thursday–Friday, November 21–22, 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“Some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre.” —PitchforkThe lush, stingingly true poetry of Dorothea Lasky has inspired Los Angeles–based composer Ted Hearne’s new theatrical song cycle, igniting hearts and minds with ferocity and grace. With frank observations of the everyday intertwined with revelatory maneuverings of his own voice, Hearne’s smart mélange of traditional and contemporary tonalities has an accessible pop sheen.
He is backed by a quintet of nationally in-demand musicians for this intimate 12-song suite that engages audiences in a complex loving meditation on the personal and the domestic, while savoring the depths of the wildness within. A real-time installation by conceptual artist Rachel Perry, with direction and lighting by Peabody Southwell, turns the music and poetry into a living, fruiting organism.Copresented and co-commissioned by the SPCO’s Liquid Music Series and the Walker Art Center, with support provided by the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund.
Read Pitchfork on Ted Hearne
Read New York Times on Ted Hearne
Ted Hearne website
Rachel Perry website
L-R: Jeffrey Wells, Erin Search-Wells, and Sam Johnson.
Dance
Choreographers’ Evening 2019: Curated by SuperGroup
Saturday, November 30, 4 & 7 pm
$25 ($20 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“Once the turkey (or Tofurky) is devoured, it’s time for another November ritual—Choreographers’ Evening.” —Star Tribune
A post-Thanksgiving tradition that plumbs the Twin Cities dance communities for tantalizing work by early to established movement-makers, this year’s Choreographers’ Evening is curated by SuperGroup—the deliriously inventive performance collaboration of Erin Search-Wells, Sam Johnson, and Jeffrey Wells. Expect a bold array of works—from the playful to the visceral, experimental to traditional, solo to group pieces, uncategorizable to style-specific—selected by this collective of creative thinkers whose own practice spans dance, theater, and performance. Audiences love this annual must-see showcase that offers a full spectrum of movement styles by diverse and ever-evolving dancemakers.
Read The Star Tribune preview
SuperGroup website
Music/Dance
Midwest Premiere
Kate Wallich + The YC x Perfume Genius: The Sun Still Burns Here
Thursday–Saturday, December 5–7, 8 pm
$35 ($28 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“Mike Hadreas, the artist better known as Perfume Genius, has always been a physically expressive performer, and he’s made dance a crucial part of his generally stunning live shows and videos. And now he’s about to make it a focus.” —Stereogum
The beautifully constructed dance worlds of Seattle-based choreographer Kate Wallich meld with the gloriously ornate theatrical pop/electronic music of Perfume Genius to create the evening-length The Sun Still Burns Here. This radical integration of dance and live music features outstanding performers burning through a postmodern swirl of classical and contemporary movement. The piece delves into what the artists describe as “a spiritual unraveling of romantic decay,” which will “undeniably lure you and immerse you somewhere far from the workaday world,” (Seattle Times).Copresented by the SPCO’s Liquid Music Series.
Read Stereogum preview
Perfume Genius website
Kate Wallich website
OUT THERE 2020
January 9–February 1
This year, two artists new to the Walker and two returning favorites push back and look forward, reframe and reposition. Their concerns are ours: identity, race, sexuality, and the meaning of intelligence. Through a range of theatrical aesthetics, they engage us with revelatory works by turns playful and dark, political and personal, gothic and supernatural. They interrogate labels and preconceptions, the artificial and the organic.
OUT THERE WEEK 1
Theater
Midwest Premiere
Tina Satter/Half Straddle: Is This A Room: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription
Thursday–Saturday, January 9–11, 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“Is This A Room is a beautiful work—impassioned yet made with a cool hand; straight-faced yet often funny. It is also devastating because damn, the real world is a hell of a writer.” —Artforum
After the FBI interrogated Reality Winner, a 25-year-old former Air Force linguist, the transcript of the encounter ignited director Tina Satter’s theatrical imagination. Satter’s company Half Straddle replicates, word by word, the verbal dance between the whip-smart Winner and reality-twisting agents, demonstrating how military interrogation tactics, toxic masculinity, and systemic marginalization resulted in her conviction for espionage. Funny and suspenseful, engaging and enraging, the production re-creates one afternoon spent in a bizarre and secret world—the turning point of a personal life wrenched irrevocably into the political.
Read Artforum review
Read New York Times preview
Half Straddle website
OUT THERE WEEK 2
Dance/Theater
Walker Commission
Miguel Gutierrez: This Bridge Called My Ass
Thursday–Friday, January 16–17, 8 pm
Saturday, January 18, 4 & 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“A dense, audacious and wickedly funny work that…contains multitudes and unflinchingly bears their weight.” —New York TimesMovement artist Miguel Gutierrez’s second Walker commission provocatively investigates identity politics, Latinx clichés, and Western concepts of form, drawing from (in part) the influences of the groundbreaking 1981 feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Gutierrez and five diverse Latinx performers amplify stereotypes to move past respectability politics within an unstable environment of bodies, light, sound, and text (in Spanish, with surtitles). The chaotic, playfully erotic production concludes with an over-the-top version of an absurdist telenovela.Contains mature content.Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Walker Art Center in partnership with Bates Dance Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theatre, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, and NPN. This project is also made possible in part by support from the NPN Artist Engagement Fund.
Read New York Times review
Read Dance Enthusiast review
Miguel Gutierrez website
OUT THERE WEEK 3
Dance/Theater
Walker Commission / Midwest Premiere
Ligia Lewis: Water Will (In Melody)
Thursday–Saturday, January 23–25, 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“Like the best science fiction, Lewis’s work is most successful in its insistence that the spare can be made spectacular.” —ArtforumFour performers delve into a deconstructed landscape of water in this dark, theatrical meditation on showbiz, the surreal, sensuality, and the end of times.
Created by Berlin-based/US choreographer Ligia Lewis, a rising star in Europe’s world of performance, the work quickly departs from gothic melodrama to poetically wrestle with the concept of “will.” Deploying an ingenious movement vocabulary with song, text, and a string of pearls, the performers unpack gender and race, hopelessness and potential, alienation and belonging. Contains mature content. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund.
Read New York Times preview
Read Ligia Lewis in the Brooklyn Rail
Ligia Lewis website
OUT THERE WEEK 4
Theater
Midwest Premiere
Back to Back Theatre: The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes
Thursday–Saturday, January 30–February 1, 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“[Back to Back Theatre] have never let the fact that their performers have a range of physical and intellectual disabilities define, or indeed, confine them from pushing and transforming our expectations of what theatre can be. Long may they continue to do shows.” —Time Out Melbourne
Interrogating the parameters of traditional theater and their own perceived disabilities, the five performers in Back to Back Theatre challenge contemporary presumptions about artificial intelligence and the human mind. With this unapologetic and piercingly fresh new work, Australia’s leading independent theater company returns to the Walker for the third time. Miscommunication, mistakes, and misunderstandings abound as a group of activists holds a public meeting for a frank discussion about a history we would prefer not to know and a future that is ambivalent. Storytelling, design, light, and sound thread through the mayhem, until clarity emerges amid community.Contains mature content.
Read Time Out review
Read the Conversation on Back to Back Theatre
Back to Back Theater website
Music
Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl and Thumbscrew (Fujiwara/Formanek/Halvorson)
Saturday, February 8, 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“When all her influences click into place, the result is like little else, in any genre. The pileup of melody often feels luxuriously imaginative.” —PitchforkCelebrated as a trailblazing guitarist and formidable band leader as well as a masterful jazz artist, improviser, and composer, Mary Halvorson performs with her band Code Girl in concert with singular vocalist Amirtha Kidambi (singing Halvorson’s lyrics), saxophonist and vocalist María Grand, and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. Bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara (her bandmates from Thumbscrew) also join in. As Halvorson’s songs slip between diverse sonic nodes and songwriting modes, her musical messages offer both encryption and revelation. The bristling collective power trio Thumbscrew, a cooperative in the truest sense, opens.
Read The Nation on Mary Halvorson
Mary Halvorson website
Thumbscrew website
Dance
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham
Saturday, February 29, 7:30 pm
$44.50, $34.50, $24.50 ($35.60, $27.60, $19.60 Walker members)
Northrop
84 Church Street SE, Minneapolis
“Abraham has made waves…with his seamless blend of contemporary vocabulary with hip-hop and pedestrian movements, creating works that are both technically stunning and resoundingly human.” —Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)Movement innovator and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Kyle Abraham draws from myriad sources (hip-hop culture, classical music, visual arts) to create his urgent, expressive choreography. Showcasing his malleable sensibility and virtuosic nine-member company A.I.M, the program includes Abraham’s intensely intimate, new solo INDY, a fleeting work of shifting personas; Drive, a hypnotizing feat of athleticism within a clublike atmosphere; and Meditation: A Silent Prayer, grounded by visual artist Carrie Mae Weems’s potent text invoking police violence against African Americans. The all-female state by Andrea Miller (Gallim) is a trio of arresting and evocative movement, while Strict Love, a mid-’90s favorite by Doug Varone, is set to music by the Jackson 5 and Diana Ross.Copresented by Northrop, University of Minnesota.
Read New York Times on Kyle Abraham
Read Dance Magazine profile
Kyle Abraham website
Dance/Interdisciplinary/Visual Arts
Walker Commission
Faye Driscoll: Thank You for Coming: Space
March 10–15, 2020 (Dates Subject to Change)
Walker Art CenterTickets to this performance will be on sale early this fall.
“A visceral embodiment of grief and loss combined with a fierce proclamation of the ecstasy of living.” —Montclair LocalOne of dance/performance’s most astonishing experimental voices, Faye Driscoll wraps up her Walker-supported trilogy—Thank You for Coming—with a moving requiem on art, the body, loss, and human connectivity. Space builds on and diverges from Driscoll’s earlier works, beloved by audiences across the country, with “an exhilaratingly personal culmination of the series” (Artforum). The intimate new piece is informed by art-historical imagery and emerges as a collaborative creation between the artist, her astute design collaborators, and the audience. Driscoll will be in residence at the Walker in Spring 2020, reimagining her “dangerously seductive” (NJArts.net) work as a unique performance-installation experience, one to be savored with celebratory devotion.Dates subject to change. Check back in early fall for more details about this interdisciplinary project and related events.Commissioned by the Walker Art Center with support provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund.
Read Artforum Review
Read Montclair Local review
Faye Driscoll website
Music/Theater
Annie Dorsen: Yesterday Tomorrow
Friday–Saturday, March 27–28, 8 pm
$26 ($20.80 Walker members)
McGuire Theater
“Perhaps the most experimental jukebox musical ever conceived.” —Bomb MagazineDirector and inventor of algorithmic theater, Annie Dorsen remounts her acclaimed multimedia work Yesterday Tomorrow, created with elements of chance and computer-based artificial intelligence. Ever intent on “nuancing the algorithm,” Dorsen starts with the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and ends with the song “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie, using software that randomly prompts three vocalists to sight-read the songs as they are deconstructed and reassembled. With the scores projected above them, the performers evoke the music’s emotional appeal in a hauntingly beautiful work of musical theater as playful as it is meditative, raising questions around the nature of human creativity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Read Culture Bot review
Read New York Times review
Annie Dorsen website
Dance/Music
Maya Beiser, Wendy Whelan, Lucinda Childs & David Lang: The Day
Tuesday, April 7, 7:30pm
$45, $35, $30 ($36, $28, $24 Walker members)
The O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University
2004 Randolph Avenue, St. Paul
“A gut punch…nothing short of life itself: by turns hopeful, funny, surprising, and tragic.” —New York TimesA momentous melding of multidisciplinary creative genius, The Day integrates the work of cello virtuoso Maya Beiser, minimalist postmodern choreographic legend Lucinda Childs, acclaimed contemporary composer David Lang, and dance luminary Wendy Whelan (recently named co-artistic director of the New York City Ballet). A two-part requiem to 9/11, The Day is a bold, sensory exploration of life and the eternal. Through unforgettable movement and music, the performers weave together memory and resilience, mind and soul, in a collaborative music/movement/theater work on universal themes.Copresented by The O’Shaughnessy.
Read New York Times preview
Maya Beiser website
Lucinda Childs website
David Lang website
Wendy Whelan website
Music
Kronos Quartet and Terry Riley
Saturday, April 25, 8 pm
$38 ($30 Walker members); $75 VIP tickets (limited availability)
The Fitzgerald Theater
10 East Exchange Street, St. Paul
“For centuries, the string quartet was the perfect embodiment of classical decorum. Then along came the Kronos Quartet.” —The Telegraph (UK)For 45 years, Kronos Quartet has been blazing sonic trails, expanding notions of classical and chamber music, while regularly appearing at the Walker. Though the group has commissioned more than 1,000 works by an array of international composers, their deepest and longest-lasting relationship has been with pioneering minimalist Terry Riley. In a program celebrating Riley’s 85th birthday, Kronos honors one of American music’s most influential living composers, joined onstage by Riley (on keyboards) and his son Gyan Riley (guitar). The “genial, bearded guru of American music” (New York Times) who influenced generations of artists—from Phillip Glass and Steve Reich to the Who and Brian Eno—Riley helped drive Kronos’s polystylistic philosophy. The all-Riley program underscores his ever-evolving global aesthetic, the quartet’s distinctive approach to performance, and why they’ve been blowing minds for decades.Copresented by Minnesota Public Radio.
Special Ticketing for Kronos Quartet and Terry Riley
Tickets are available only through Etix and First Avenue ticket outlets. This performance is not eligible for package discounts.
Member Discounts
Walker and MPR members receive a discount on tickets using a special Etix link. Walker members, check your member e-newsletter or email orders@walkerart.org for more information. MPR members, call 800-228-7123. Discounts available online only.VIP Tickets
A limited number of $75 VIP tickets are available. VIP ticketholders will have prime seating and an opportunity to meet the performers at a post-show reception.
Read New York Times on Terry Riley
Read The Telegraph on Kronos
Kronos Quartet website
Terry Riley website
Music
Midwest Premiere
BCUC (Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness)
Thursday, May 7, 7:30 pm
$25 at the door, $22 in advance ($20, $17.60 Walker Members)
The Cedar Cultural Center
416 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis
“[An] energetic, unique and magic formula; the voices of their ancestors, mixed with funk, punk-rock vibrations, hip-hop, Fela-inflections and much more.” —BBC Radio Having royally shaken up South African music with their powerful blend of “Africangungungu” (the name BCUC has given to its Afro-psychedelic mix of a cappella street music, funk, soul, hip-hop, and rock-and-roll), the seven-piece Soweto-based collective is ready to rock Minneapolis audiences for the first time. With their stirring harmonies and vibrant energy, BCUC has been proclaimed the new sound of South Africa, mesmerizing global audiences with ecstatic performances. The beat never stops as BCUC generates a timeless sound, connecting ancestral traditions and histories to the spirituality and future of the people. Copresented by the Cedar.
Read The Guardian review
Read TimesLIVE on BCUC
BCUC website
Poetry/Music/Dance
World Premiere
Danez and the Homies
Friday–Saturday, May 15–16, 8 pm
Suggested ticket price: $20
Everyone is welcome, regardless of ability to pay. Choose a ticket price for this performance: $20, $15, $10, or $5. For more information, or if you are unable to pay, please contact orders@walkerart.org. (Member and package discounts do not apply.)
McGuire Theater
“These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable.” —New Yorker
Poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist Danez Smith has galvanized diverse communities nationwide with their profound contemplations on race and gender, desire and mortality. A finalist for the National Book Award, Smith’s volume Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) confronts a too often violent, racist, and homophobic America with hope in the form of resistance, humor, sexuality, and rebirth. Celebrating the release of their new collection Homie (Graywolf Press) out January 2020, which reflects on friendship and community, the St. Paul–based artist hosts a range of local and national artist friends whose work spans poetry, music, dance, and performance, including Chicago-based singer/composer Jamila Woods and poet/filmmaker Fatimah Asghar, among others.Presented in association with Graywolf Press.Contains mature content.
Read NPR interview
Read Seattle Times Interview with Danez Smith
Danez Smith website
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