Winter 2014
36
BELOW The site-specific opera Invisible Cities was staged by The Industry and l.a. Dance Project at downtown’s historic Union Station. Directed by Yuval Sharon, the production featured music direction by Marc Lowenstein and costume design by E.B. Brooks, among other contributions by CalArtians.
courtesy of the industry. photo: dana ross
producing organization dedicated to supporting the city’s contemporary performance community. This fall, Wright and lapp have been involved in two major projects: the Radar l.a. international theater festival, which was presented by CalArts and redcat in association with Center Theatre Group, and Live Arts Exchange (lax), a co-production with Bootleg Theater. As part of Radar l.a., Wright produced the u.s. premiere of You Should Have Stayed Home, Morons, an English-language adaptation of the play written by Madrileño firebrand Rodrigo García and staged in situ in four separate locations— a dog park, a bar, a building stairwell, and an apartment interior—by Colombian director Manuel Orjuela. Concurrently, the first-ever installment of lax was set up to “pull contemporary theater and dance, film/video, animation, punk opera, and party into one space.” The lineup featured performances by Early Morning Opera, the company directed by Lars Jan (mfa 08); Poor Dog Group, a collective of School of Theater alums; director Chi-wang Yang (mfa 07); and Show Box l.a. Additional special events enlisted the talents of Timur & the Dime Museum, with Timur Bekbosunov (Music mfa 08), Zoe Aja Moore (mfa 11), and Miwa Matreyek (Film/Video mfa 07). Wright is also the School of Theater’s admission counselor and director of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, which she co-founded in 2008 with previous Sherwood Award winner Ian Garrett (mfa 08). Also at the Ovations Awards: In addition to Wright, honorees at the November 3 ceremony included alums Christopher Kuhl (mfa 05) and Jeff Teeter (mfa 06). Kuhl won the Ovation for Best Lighting Design for a Large Theatre for his work on The Nether at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, while Teeter received an Ovation Honor—a designation for recognizing outstanding achievement outside the standard award categories—for his video design for On the Spectrum at the Fountain Theatre.
INSTITUTE A cadre of CalArtians contributed this fall to the site-specific production of the opera Invisible Cities, by the experimental Los Angeles company The Industry and l.a. Dance Project, at the city’s historic Union Station. Dubbed “an invisible opera for wireless headphones,” this one-of-a-kind adaptation of Italo Calvino’s eponymous metafiction by The Industry’s artistic director Yuval Sharon, composer and librettist Christopher Cerrone, and choreographer Danielle Agami could be heard in full only via Sennheiser radio headsets, as audience members were invited to wander through the downtown transportation hub and encounter scattered singers and dancers among the station’s nighttime commuters. “What you hear is the same as everyone else, but what you see belongs to you alone,” explained Sharon ahead of the production’s opening night on October 19. Faculty member Marc Lowenstein, music director of The Industry, conducted an 11-piece orchestra, assisted by dma candidate Andreas Levisianos; the players included trombonist Matt Barbier (Music mfa 10), violinist Eric km Clark (Music mfa 06), bfa percussionist Jodie Landau, harpist Jillian Risigari-Gai (Music mfa 12), cellist Derek Stein (Music mfa 10), pianist Richard Valitutto (Music mfa 11), clarinetist Brian Walsh (mfa 08) and flutist Sarah Wass (Music mfa 03). On the theatrical production side, lead sound designer E. Martin Gimenez (Theater mfa 09) and bfa sound technician Veronica Mullins had the critical task of handling Sennheiser’s cutting-edge audio technology, while E.B. Brooks (Theater mfa 07) designed the costumes. Rounding out the CalArts production
contingent were The Industry’s general manager David Mack (Theater mfa 08), associate house manager Michael Yichao (Theater mfa 13), bfa assistant stage manager Rita Santos, and marketing outreach coordinator Mitchell Colley (Theater bfa 11). Invisible Cities was the second large-scale production from The Industry; its first was the widely acclaimed 2012 presentation of the “hyperopera” Crescent City, composed by faculty member Anne LeBaron with a libretto by fellow CalArts faculty Douglas Kearney (Critical Studies mfa 04).