The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County proudly announces the MIAMI MADE WEEKEND schedule of performance events, including: Here & Now: 2010, co-produced with Miami Light Project, Incubator, and Outloud Showcases. The MIAMI MADE WEEKEND is the Adrienne Arsht Center’s annual showcase of new, innovative work, created by artists living and working in South Florida.
MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCES
Three world premiere works by local artists: HERE & NOW – March 5-7, 2010
FREE, BEHIND-THE-SCENES EVENTS
Works-In-Progress: INCUBATOR – March 6 & 7, 2010
Play Reading: OUTLOUD – March 6 & 7, 2010
Panel Discussions: TALKING HERE & NOW — March 6 & 7, 2010
Weekend Package tickets and single tickets are on sale now. Single tickets for HERE & NOW: Program A or Program B are $25. The $40 Full Weekend Package includes: tickets to HERE & NOW: Program A & Program B; Incubator; Outloud; and three Talking Here & Now industry and artist sessions. Tickets for Incubator, Outloud, and Talking Here & Now are FREE and ticketed. Tickets can be obtained through the Adrienne Arsht Center box office at (305) 949-6722 or online at www.arshtcenter.org.
MIAMI MADE WEEKEND: March 5-7, 2010
The MIAMI MADE WEEKEND features a weekend of new work in three innovative programs: Here & Now is the flagship showcase co-presented by the Adrienne Arsht Center and Miami Light Project; Incubator features up-and-coming local artists presenting works-in-progress; and Outloud is a new play reading session.
The MIAMI MADE WEEKEND, which expanded from a commissioning program into a full weekend of events in 2009, includes free workshops of works in progress, readings of unproduced plays, and discussions with artists and arts professionals, in addition to world premiere showcases presented during the annual Here & Now program. The selected Here & Now: 2010 artists and their works represent a diverse mix of music, dance and theater disciplines.
MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCES
HERE & NOW: 2010
Here & Now features the commissioned work of Rudi Goblen, Juraj Kojs, and Jillian Mayer. Here & Now is a joint commissioning project of the Adrienne Arsht Center and Miami Light Project dedicated to the professional development of South Florida-based artists.
“Supporting community-based artists is the single most important activity in which a cultural institution can choose to engage, and HERE & NOW is the most important artistic program that Miami Light Project has ever developed,” said Beth Boone, Artistic and Executive Director of Miami Light Project. “As such, we are thrilled to have the Adrienne Arsht Center as our partner, as we lead the charge to establish Miami as an internationally recognized cultural center. Miami’s artists not only reflect who we are as a community, they help to define it.”
Rudi Goblen’s Fare Welling is an interactive, one-man dance theater piece performed by Goblen that explores one man’s depression and morality through letters and conversations with the most influential people in his life. Rudi Goblen is an MC, poet, dancer, and actor. He has appeared with musical greats including The Roots, Mos Def, De La Soul, and is an acclaimed B-Boy and co-founder of the legendary crew, Flipside Kings. Goblen has traveled the world judging and competing in various competitions, and has won break dance competitions in France, South America, Holland, Canada, the U.K., and Asia. He is a recipient of the “Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant” (FAAR) from the Ford Foundation.
Created by Juraj Kojs, Neraissance: Self-powered Multimedia Art is a 24-minute multimedia composition in which three runners/performers work out on stationary bicycles and, with the assistance of dynamo systems, produce electrical energy. This energy then powers a microcosm of various small rotating, and light- and sound-emitting electronic objects. A truly contemporary piece of stage art, Neraissance addresses issues such as ecology, economy, and energy preservation. Juraj Kojs is the Director of Music Programs at Harold Golen Gallery in Miami, and a Postdoctoral Associate in Music Technology and Multimedia Art at Yale University’s Department of Music. In 2008, he received his Ph.D. in Composition and Music Technologies at the University of Virginia. Kojs has won multiple awards for his work, including the first place prize at the Eastern Electroacoustic Composition and Performance Competition and an honorable mention at the Digital Art Awards in Tokyo, Japan. His articles on cyber instruments have been published in journals such as Organized Sound, Digital Creativity, and Leonardo Music Journal.
Mrs. Ms, the new work by Jillian Mayer, is a multi-disciplinary experimental work that parodies conventional musicals and explores stereotypes about marriage and romantic unions. The main character ignores all negations of the truth in order to maintain a fairy book romantic life, which never comes to fruition. Sweet ideals of marriage to her beloved pet dog enter and flee quickly until she stumbles onto the often-ignored obvious method: self-love. Abstract and non-linear digressions of romance intertwine throughout to make the audience re-evaluate companionship through dance, song, and pop culture. Jillian Mayer is a visual and performance artist based in Miami. She is also a member of Heartbreakers, an all-female break dance group.
“These three artists were specifically chosen to represent the wide breadth of South Florida’s creativity, talent, and imagination. By bringing the work of South Florida’s most creative minds to the Adrienne Arsht Center stage, we continue to redefine the traditional boundaries of the performing arts and expand the repertory of works to be performed and enjoyed by future generations of artists and audiences,” said Scott Shiller, Executive Vice President of the Adrienne Arsht Center.
FREE, BEHIND-THE-SCENES EVENTS
INCUBATOR is a free, ticketed showcase of works-in-progress by Miami-based artists Letty Bassart, José Manuel Dominguez, and Vanessa Garcia.
Good, God, Go is a dance theater trilogy by choreographer, Letty Bassart. Miami-born, Letty Bassart is an inventive writer-choreographer with a knack for using her reverence for human experience and obsession with telling details to connect unlikely dots. Good, God, Go is a dance narrative, whose characters move the timeless and timely along a metaphoric chain link fence. The work features movement alliteration, gestural commas, and expanding symmetries. Along the way, Good, God, Go subsumes bits of Bertolt Brecht, Leonard Cohen, canaries, and the vibrancy of the present. Bassart is a graduate of the New World School of the Arts High School and has performed extensively in Miami and abroad with modern and Spanish dance companies. Her work has been performed in New York at Dance Theater Workshop, and she is a writer for Miami Artzine.
José Manuel Dominguez’s Hilo (Thread) is an interdisciplinary theater project that uses movement, poetry, visual art, and sound to express the ideas of evolution, adjustment, modification, and adaptation to change for the sake of survival. Having lost his eyesight many years ago, writer and actor José Manuel Domínguez juxtaposes his own memories with mythological characters, inviting the audience to contemplate their own limitations and their own possibilities for transformation. Hilo puts into play the realm of myths known and unknown, a world of fatal choices, and unexpected mystery. Directed by Lucia Aratanha, Hilo develops in a non-traditional format. Aratanha conceptualized a set with carefully woven ropes constructing imaginary chambers and passageways like the Labyrinth in the myth of Icarus. It is in this maze of ropes that the scenes move from dream to reality with no apparent chronology, staged as a metaphor for our own mind, where memories and dreams mingle. Hilo is written and performed in Spanish. Dominguez graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte, La Havana, Cuba. During the 1990’s he was a member of the avant-garde theater group, Teatro El Publico, and toured Cuba, Spain, and Brazil. In Miami, he is a writer for Spanish radio and is pursuing his Bachelor’s degree in Special Education at Miami-Dade College.
Model City, presented by Vanessa Garcia, is a multi-media exploration of what it means to create a useful urban environment; a sustainable city in the 21st century. Told through the lens of a street performer, the tale meanders in and out of global city corners — from the gritty cobblestones of New Orleans to the wind-swept shores of Cuba. From one distant shore to another, Model City evokes intimate slices of life as well as large-scale environmental disasters. At once a story told through visual art, photography, performance, and song, this is a tale about seeking and touching ground somewhere along the lines of where creation meets construction. Vanessa Garcia graduated from Columbia University, Barnard College, and has traveled from Japan to Ghana, gathering a global vocabulary that informs her visual and written work. Garcia writes for The Miami Herald, MondoExplorer.com, and The Art Basel Magazine, along with numerous other journals and online media outlets. She has been awarded a scholarship at the NY State Summer Writers Institute, a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, a residency at Arkansas Repertory Theater, and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami. She has taught at John Hopkins University, the University of Miami, and Miami Dade College. Garcia is currently at work on a novel and short story collection.
OUTLOUD is a free, ticketed play reading.
This showcase will feature a reading of a new play by Tarell McCraney entitled Wig Out! and is presented in cooperation with the African American Performing Arts Community Theatre.
Tarrell McCraney is an award-winning American playwright and actor and in 2008 became RSC/Warwick International Playwright in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. McCraney attended the New World School of the Arts High School, receiving the exemplary artist award and the Dean’s Award in Theater. He matriculated into the Theater School at DePaul University and received his BFA in acting. In May 2007 he graduated from Yale School of Drama‘s playwriting program where he received the Cole Porter Playwriting Award upon graduation.
As an actor he has worked with directors such as Tina Landau of the Steppenwolf Theater Ensemble Chicago, IL, David Cromer and BJ Jones artistic director of the North Light Theater (where he co-starred in the Chicago Premiere of Joe Penhall‘s Blue/Orange), and began a lasting working relationship with Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Etienne of the Bouffes du Nord, Paris. His Brother/Sister trilogy are set in the Louisiana Projects and explore Yoruba mythology, and Wig Out, which is set in New York drag clubs, explores McCraney’s experiences as a gay, black man. The third play in the Brother/Sister trilogy, Marcus: or the Secret of the Sweet has been optioned by London’s Young Vic Theatre. McCraney heads up an impressive list of out media professionals in the June/July 2009, Forty under 40, issue of The Advocate.
“The excitement to produce a staged reading of Wig Out at the Adrienne Arsht Center in downtown Miami, Florida comes from the fact that Tarell is a hometown boy whose talent is being recognized all over the world. AAPACT has been known to bring rich, biting material to audiences that are not used to experiencing theatrical work with such gutsy dialogue. Wig Out, a play about two competing drag houses promises to capture our imagination and fuel our thinking about this world of taboo,” said the African American Performing Arts Community Theatre Founder, Teddy Harrell, Jr.
Since 1998, the African American Performing Arts Community Theatre’s (AAPACT) goal has been to offer quality theatre for the underserved community of Miami-Dade’s Liberty City and Model City areas. AAPACT’s desire is to “Build Better Communities through Theatre” which the company has achieved as its slogan.
TALKING HERE & NOW
Talking Here & Now is a weekend talkfest about the creative process with those who create the art we see, hear, and feel. Sessions for artists and industry professionals will include:
Talking Here & Now: Get Involved, for those artists who are interested in participating in the commissioning process of future Here & Now productions.
Talking Here & Now: A Panel Discussion with Industry Leaders including: Charles Reinhart, Director, American Dance Festival; Baraka Sele, Assistant Vice President of Programming, New Jersey Performing Arts Center; and Cylde Valentin, Executive Director, The Hip Hop Theater Festival.
Talking Here & Now: Conversation with the Artists, featuring the current Here & Now artists, Rudi Goblen, Juraj Kojs, and Jillian Mayer.
Talking Here & Now: Industry panelists include esteemed guests:
Charles Reinhart, Founder & Director, American Dance Festival
Baraka Sele, Assistant Vice President of Programming, New Jersey Performing Arts Center
Clyde Valentin, Executive Director, The Hip Hop Theater Festival
Stephanie Hughley, Founding Vice President of Programming, New Jersey Performing Arts Center
Jason Palmquist, Executive Director, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
CALENDAR LISTING
The Adrienne Arsht Center
And Miami Light Project present
MIAMI MADE WEEKEND
Featuring Here & Now: 2010, Incubator, and Outloud Showcase Performances
Plus Talking Here & Now, a behind-the-scenes sneak peek with the artists and visiting arts industry leaders.
A full weekend program of local South Florida artists, working on the cutting-edge of new, contemporary performing arts in this weekend showcase of commissioned and in-progress works. Outloud, Incubator and Talking Here & Now performances are FREE and ticketed.
March 5-7, 2010
Carnival Studio Theater & Peacock Foundation Studio
(in the Ziff Ballet Opera House)
Adrienne Arsht Center
1300 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, FL, 33132
Single Tickets: $25
Weekend Package: $40
Single tickets are available online at: www.arshtcenter.org, in-person at the box office window, or by phone: (305) 949-6722. Weekend Package tickets are available at the box office window or by phone.