LCI's Repertory Likely to Dazzle Teachers and Students Alike

November, 01 2010

The school year is under way, and the lucky students whose schools work with Lincoln Center Institute can look forward to stellar works of art from our annual repertory. No one speaks better about their artwork than the artists who have created it, and below within the short descriptions, you will find a few excerpts from the interviews we have conducted with them. These interviews are the centerpieces of contextual information LCI researches and gathers for each work of art. The full interviews can be found on LCI's Web site at lcinstitute.org.

While we'll again offer the Bill T. Jones performance Ghostcatching, designed as a digital-video work, the noted choreographer and dancer also brings us a "live" work: his lauded Serenade/The Proposition. The work approaches the legacy of Abraham Lincoln as an investigation of history and our relationship to it. In the choreographer's own words: "Dance is, by its nature, fleeting. Ephemeral. With Serenade, which is a lot about memory and history, that becomes very important. History is fugitive. It's never really there. It's always our conjecture about what happened. This is true about dance movement as well."

Louder Than Words is "back by popular demand." The sketches, created by Gregg Goldston are dance, mime, and illusion rolled into one.

In music, there is American Art Song, a rich program of art songs composed in this country across several centuries, performed by Beata Moon (who also composed one of the songs, with text taken from Shakespeare's sonnets) at the piano, and baritone Steven Herring. The range of topics and emotions is vividly epitomized in such very different songs as Aaron Copland's hilarious adaptation of the old folk song, I Bought Me a Cat, and Margaret Bonds's I, Too, which uses Langston Hughes's poetry.

La Musica Flamenca is exactly what it says: flamenco music without dance, curated by Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana. During the interview with singer Alfonso Cid and guitarist Carlos Revollar, we were given brief impromptu performances delivered with passion. "[In our performance] we try to show flamenco's different phases," said Carlos. "We included a rap." Alfonso concurred: "We wanted the young audiences to engage in the program, so we included the elements from flamenco the way it is today—very real and actual"

Old friends come to our schools this year: Bob Green and Company will again perform bluegrass songs. Bluegrass was born in the mountains of middle America, from West Virginia to Kentucky, so it's only fitting that the program is titled Mountain Music.

Two new theater productions will grace the school stages. Exit Stage Left!, performed by Parallel Exit, is a primer in old-fashioned physical comedy. The company, following in the footsteps of such greats as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, has gained worldwide recognition with original skits that feature all the indispensable props: rubber chickens, balancing ladders, clowning, and...well, something called a balloon-o-phone. Says the company's director, Mark Lonergan, about the engagement of student audiences when watching physical comedy: "We love to hear children laughing. Children are so honest. Not only do they laugh, they'll also yell out, 'Look out, someone's behind you!' That's the greatest feeling for all of us."

On the other end of the comedy/tragedy spectrum is Hamlet. Like a lot of Shakespeare's work, Hamlet has the uncanny ability to speak to us as if it had been written just yesterday. The themes of betrayal and isolation, as felt by an increasingly flustered young man, are eternally relevant. The production, a collaboration between LCI and Lincoln Center Theater's Open Stages Education program, will premiere spring 2011.

For the first time, Lincoln Center Institute is offering Imagination Lesson Plans to local K-12 and teacher education schools. The 2010-11 Lesson Plans have been created for dance, digital art, visual art, and yet another LCI first: picture books as focus works of study. They are, respectively, Frederick, written and illustrated by Leo Lionni, and The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. Frederick is a morality tale in which the eponymous mouse, something of a poet-philosopher, finds his place within the community of hard-working friends and neighbors, and sees his poetic and imaginative talent reap its rewards.

The Arrival, spectacularly illustrated with scenes and creatures that are, by turns, extremely unusual and oddly familiar, is a story of the prototypical immigrant. A man sets off from his homeland, leaving his family and culture behind only to become "the other." His journey is one of identity and of finding a place of one's own in a new and strange world.

Another Lesson Plan is Three Posters by Helen Frankenthaler, who is one of the most important artists in the field of abstract expressionism. Her work has been featured in Lincoln Center's List Print and Poster program seven times. The three posters that will be studied are Mary, Mary; Solar Imp; and Aerie. The schools that study them will be able to keep the prints.

Imagination Lesson Plans are also offered for Ghostcatching, the digital video mentioned above, and Rapid Still by Brian Brooks, choreographer, dancer and LCI teaching artist. Rapid Still is another virtual-world dance: to create this digital work, Brian jumped into the air—both vertically and horizontally—over 800 times. Once edited, the jumps became an extraordinary collage lasting less than two minutes. Brian says: "I feel like this piece is actually an accident, like I ran into it. [One day] I was packing up my video camera, when I had a glimpse of an idea. Just this thought of videotaping a jump. I wondered, if I cut and edited the video to show the jump only at its peak, would it look like I was floating?" (To find out if it does, you have to watch the video.)

We hope you are as thrilled as we are about the variety of works of art that LCI is presenting this year. May the classrooms hum with excitement!

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