News

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, and one of America’s most significant living composers, will receive the award at the League’s 74th National Conference in Nashville, June 3–5, 2019.

The Times interviews Damon Daunno and Amber Gray, stars of the original Bard SummerScape production. Daunno is reprising his role as Curly for the play’s Broadway run.

Includes Bard Music Festival’s 30th anniversary season, “Korngold and His World,” American premiere of Korngold’s grand opera The Miracle of Heliane, Daniel Fish’s lauded staging of Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta, and the world premiere of Grace and Mercy by choreographer Ronald K. Brown, with live music from Meshell Ndegeocello and others

This summer’s 16th annual Bard SummerScape festival comprises more than seven weeks of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, centered around the 30th anniversary season of the Bard Music Festival, “Korngold and His World.” This intensive examination of the life and times of Erich Wolfgang Korngold – the Viennese prodigy whose lush Romanticism would come to define the quintessential Hollywood sound – features themed concerts and panel discussions, together with a film series exploring “Korngold and the Poetry of Cinema,” and the long overdue American premiere of the grand opera that the composer considered his masterpiece, The Miracle of Heliane (“Das Wunder der Heliane”), in a fully staged new production by German director Christian Räth. To complement these offerings, Daniel Fish’s acclaimed staging of Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta provides an alternative look at Hollywood’s Golden Age, and Evidence, A Dance Company makes its festival debut with the world premiere of Grace and Mercy, a new SummerScape commission from choreographer and company founder Ronald K. Brown, with live music from Meshell Ndegeocello, Peven Everett, and Gordon Chambers. Cabaret and jazz highlight a generous program of events in Bard’s authentic and sensationally popular Belgian Spiegeltent. Taking place between June 29 and August 18 in the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s picturesque Hudson Valley campus, SummerScape 2019 once again makes for a full “seven weeks of cultural delight” (International Herald Tribune). London’s Times Literary Supplement lauds Bard SummerScape as “the most intellectually ambitious of America’s summer music festivals,” while Bloomberg News calls it “the smartest mix of events within driving distance of New York.” Travel and Leisure reports, “Gehry’s acclaimed concert hall provides a spectacular venue for innovative fare.” The New York Times calls SummerScape “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure,” Newsday finds it “brave and brainy,” Musical America judges it “awesomely intensive,” and the New York Post observes, “It’s hard not to find something to like, and it’s even harder to beat the setting.” Time Out New York, naming the festival one of “New York’s 20 coolest out-of-town spots,” declares: “The experience of entering the Fisher Center and encountering something totally new is unforgettable and enriching.”

The exhibition, on view through July 7, features materials collected by designer Jan Tschichold and created by the movement’s many members, including El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and László Moholy-Nagy.

“I believe it is important for all students—of all instruments and from all countries—to open their ears and minds to the sounds and traditions and musical ideas of other cultures.”

CCS Bard presents 14 exhibitions with more than 40 artists, offering a wide-ranging museum presentation organized by the graduating class of the Masters of Arts Curatorial Program. On view April 7–May 26.

The Lab for Teen Thinkers is a public humanities program that prepares rising juniors and seniors for future academic and professional success through civic development, mentoring, and internships.

Bard Graduate Center’s Lab for Teen Thinkers, which launched in the summer of 2017, is a public humanities program that prepares rising juniors and seniors for future academic and professional success through civic development, mentoring, and internship opportunities. During the five-week summer course, participants have access to the BGC study collection and its library with over 55,000 volumes. Offering a behind-the-scenes look at how New York City museums function, the program gives teens the unique opportunity to study objects and artifacts with a variety of scholars, curators, and graduate students working in the fields of material culture, decorative arts, and design history. The teens’ research culminates with an object biography, oral presentations, and dynamic digital projects created in the Media Lab, that are shared with the BGC community. 

In the summer of 2018, Teen Thinkers conducted independent research projects on the theme, Votive Objects and the Everyday. Their research was informed by the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place, which explored the things that humans choose to offer in their votive transactions. 

BGC talked with two of this year’s participants, Alex Szyperek, a junior at Bard High School Early College Queens, and Sergio Maldonado, a senior at DreamYard Preparatory High School, who offered their thoughts on the program.

Read the full story on the BGC website
 

The Oklahoma! revival that began at Bard SummerScape in 2015 will head to Broadway in March. For every visible gun onstage, a donation will be made to a nonprofit working to end gun violence.

“Despite the uncertainty that rising seas and coastal erosion bring to the region,” Hanusik writes, “hope persists.”

Teaching artists are Quilan “Cue” Arnold, Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie, Beth Gill, and Nia Love.

The Bard College Dance Program and the American Dance Festival have begun a new partnership that seeks to challenge the way dance is taught in higher education. Uniting critical inquiry and professional practice, the new program contextualizes students’ training with an annual focus on a pressing contemporary topic.

The partnership’s first year examines how two influential roots of modern dance—the African diaspora and Western European dance traditions—operate within contemporary practice and in particular how the education of dancers at American colleges and universities can be reimagined.

Leah Cox, dean of the American Dance Festival and Term Associate Professor of Dance at Bard, leads the partnership. Cox selected ADF faculty that seek to decolonize their classrooms by challenging the way that dance is traditionally taught. Each ADF faculty member represents a unique area of expertise and presents students with ways to overcome divisions within the dance field or between the field and the world at large.

“One of the most pressing issues we are dealing with as educators is the way that whiteness has structured the academy,” stated Leah Cox, who was a longtime member of the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company. “In dance, the influence of whiteness appears in content, pedagogy, and the way we create and organize courses. Western European–based forms are usually prioritized as foundational, and the way courses are structured—separating technique, composition, and improvisation, for instance—reflects a Western understanding of dance. The Bard-ADF partnership courses challenge these norms.”
This new partnership builds on the Bard Dance Program’s two previous professional partnerships, which began with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company (2009–15), then followed with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (2015–18). Maria Simpson, Bard College Dance Program director, states, “The Program was keen to pursue the next professional partnership with an entity that not only cultivates multiple artistic voices but also prioritizes the contemporary education of the dancer—an education that cannot lean exclusively in a Eurocentric direction.”

In the last five years, Bard’s Dance Program has expanded its curriculum to offer dance forms such as Palestininan Dabkeh and Contemporary West African Dance. The ADF partnership continues to build on Bard’s efforts to diversify the curriculum by creating courses that put different dance forms in conversation with one another. Working together, Cox and ADF faculty members designed partnership courses to provoke critical reflection among students through innovative pedagogy and collaborative teaching. Partnership activities in 2018–19 include:

• In the fall, choreographer and performer Nia Love cotaught two levels of contemporary movement practice with Cox exploring alignments with African diasporic and Western European dance forms.
• This spring hip-hop artist Quilan “Cue” Arnold teaches a movement course investigating the practical and pedagogical through-lines and differences between hip-hop and postmodern dance forms. Arnold also teaches a seminar in American popular dance and culture studies.
• “Bessie” Award–winning choreographer Beth Gill will engage students in physical research toward the development of her next creative project. Gill’s repertory class will ask students to examine how they currently locate an idea of themselves within various frameworks of politics, culture, psychology, family, race, gender, and sexuality. The class will culminate in an informal performance on May 15.
• B-girl, choreographer, and performer Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie will be the partnership artist in residence. Asherie will develop a new solo, work with students, and present her latest work, Odeon, at Bard’s Fisher Center on April 13 and 14, 2019.

“I’m thrilled to be working at Bard again,” stated Beth Gill, an ADF faculty member. “My past experience with Bard students was rich and inspiring and led to a whole new phase of working inside of my creative process.”

The partnership reflects the vision of the ADF School, which is known for its Summer Dance Intensive, Pre-Professional Dance Intensive, and Dance Professionals Workshop. “The School must be responsive and adaptable,” Cox said. “Today’s dance artists want their dance practice to reflect their identities and causes, and they want to challenge binaries that isolate us from each other.”

The ADF family of artists and faculty has grown to include newer members who engage these contemporary concerns, such as E. Moncell Durden, Gesel Mason, Michelle Gibson, and Abby Zbikowski, in addition to legends in the field like “Baba Chuck” Davis, Gerri Houlihan, Dianne MacIntyre, and Donald McKayle. The School has extended its curriculum to offer a weekly meeting group to discuss race, as well as regular discussions and reading groups on gender, sexuality, and social justice in the arts. In conjunction with its unwavering emphasis on professional training and contact with an international roster of companies and choreographers, these new offerings continue to make ADF an essential destination for dance artists worldwide.

More about the American Dance Festival

More about the Bard College Dance Program
 

Having Produced and Premiered Tanowitz’s Immensely Acclaimed Four Quartets, Bard Fisher Center Will Commission Three New Works by the Choreographer, Including a Collaboration with Sara Mearns, and Will Develop a Digital Archive of Her Body of Work

Bard Fisher Center announced today that it has selected Pam Tanowitz as its first Choreographer in Residence. Her residency is underwritten by a $1.2 million gift from dance philanthropists Jay Franke and David Herro. The appointment follows the success of Tanowitz’s Four Quartets, which was produced by and premiered at the Fisher Center last summer. The New York Times hailed the production as “the most sublime dance-theater creation this century: a dance for the soul.” 

In an era when many contemporary choreographers are working on an independent basis outside of traditional dance company structures, the Franke/Herro grant provides stability, generous funding, and optimal working conditions to Tanowitz and her collaborators. The three-year residency, which begins this month and concludes in December 2021, includes salaries and benefits for Tanowitz and select collaborators, administrative and touring support, rehearsal space, and professional development. In committing its space and staff resources to this full-service residency for three years, the Center is reimagining how it might support the creation of large-scale and ambitious art on a college campus, and piloting a development and research model that it hopes will prove scalable and replicable elsewhere in the field of American dance.

Bard Fisher Center will commission three new Tanowitz dances, beginning with a new work created in collaboration with New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns. Tanowitz’s second work, which she envisions as the concluding part of a trilogy that began with New Work for Goldberg Variations and Four Quartets, will premiere in the Center’s 2021 SummerScape Festival. The third commissioned work will be Tanowitz’s first performance to be sited in a museum or gallery space.

A major component of the residency will be the development of a digital archive of Tanowitz’s oeuvre, including the remounting and documentation of several of her performances. These archival initiatives will make her body of work more widely accessible to dance scholars, students, and the general public.

Finally, Tanowitz and her collaborators will engage broadly with Bard’s undergraduate programs through teaching, showings and performances, student access to rehearsals, and campuswide dialogue about the creative process.

As a creative research institution embedded on the campus of a premiere liberal arts college, the Fisher Center endeavors to pioneer a new and future-facing model of partnership between independent artists and arts organizations, on university campuses and beyond. In recent years the Center has created extended residencies for such artists as Sarah Michelson, Justin Vivian Bond, Will Rawls, Tania El Khoury, and Daniel Fish. Often this commitment includes a high level of production, financial, and administrative support for the artists. These efforts reflect the Fisher Center’s commitment to providing extended support for leading artists by shepherding projects from their initial development to their premiere, and beyond through management of the project’s touring, field advocacy, and career development for the artist.

Through this first-time gift to the Bard, Jay Franke and David Herro’s visionary leadership allows the Fisher Center to realize its commitment to new models of support at an unprecedented level. Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director for Theater and Dance, noted: “Pam Tanowitz’s appointment as Choreographer in Residence is a remarkable intervention in her creative life. The infrastructural and producing support she will receive at the Center will allow her the time and resources to develop her most ambitious productions, and the Fisher Center is reimagining its own practices as a site for the documentation, archiving, study, teaching, and dissemination of her choreographic work. Pam is one of our country’s greatest contemporary artists, who has already changed the landscape of American dance. Her choreographic works combine formal sophistication and invention, a curiosity about the possibilities of the body in motion, intellectual rigor, philosophical inquiry, a deep awareness of dance history that paradoxically points to the future, and staggering beauty. It’s thrilling to welcome her to the Fisher Center as a colleague, and to deepen our creative partnership over the next three years.”

In making the grant, Jay Franke said: “We are honored to make this gift in support of Pam’s voice, and to help elevate her work to new heights with the Fisher Center. It’s so exciting when an idea as bold and courageous as this program makes its way to the dance field. We hope our support inspires other major gifts that will create new possibilities for other American choreographers.”

“We are grateful for Jay and David’s inspired philanthropy, which demonstrates their long-term commitment to supporting transformative change in the field of dance” stated Bob Bursey, the Fisher Center’s Executive Director. “We look forward to deepening our relationship with Pam, which began with a commission and presentation in 2015, and continued with the three-year development of Four Quartets. We hope to demonstrate the possibilities for arts centers to work creatively with artists to address the evermore pressing challenges they face.”

In beginning her residency, Pam Tanowitz said: “I’m blown away by the forward-thinking minds of Jay Franke, David Herro, and the leaders of Bard Fisher Center. With this generous and unprecedented support, the company can continue our momentum after the success of Four Quartets. Simply put—it will give me the freedom to keep going.”

High-resolution images of Pam Tanowitz are available here. High-resolution images of Four Quartets are available here.

About Bard Fisher Center
Bard Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs. At once a premiere professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, Bard Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas and perspectives from the past, present, and future.

The organization’s home is the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. Bard Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Productions developed by the Fisher Center have been presented at venues including Lincoln Center, BAM, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Walker Arts Center, and Barbican (London). fishercenter.bard.edu

The Fisher Center illustrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Building on a 150-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow's thought leaders. bard.edu

About Pam Tanowitz
Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York–based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly postmodern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance making with a consistent community of dancers.

In 2016, Tanowitz was presented with the Juried Bessie Award for “using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus.” Other honors include an Outstanding Production Bessie award in 2009 for her dance Be In the Gray with Me, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in 2010, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University in 2013–14, a fall 2016 fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and named a 2016–17 City Center Choreography Fellow. Her work was selected by the New York Times Best of Dance series in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018.

When awarding Ms. Tanowitz the 2017 Baryshnikov Arts Center Cage Cunningham Fellowship, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the center’s artistic director, said in a statement that “her work is not an imitation of dance history, but is a distinct intellectual journey.” Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created for her company in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a “rare achievement” (The New York Times). Her most recent work, the 2018 creation Four Quartets, inspired by T. S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho, was called "the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (The New York Times).

She has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bard Fisher Center, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Duke Performances, Peak Performances, FSU's Opening Nights Series, and the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston.

Tanowitz has created or set work for City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, The Juilliard School, Ballet Austin, New York Theater Ballet and Saint Louis Ballet; and has been a guest choreographer at Barnard College, Princeton University, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Marymount Manhattan College and Purchase College.

Originally from New Rochelle, New York, Tanowitz holds degrees from The Ohio State University and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently a visiting guest artist at Rutgers University. Upcoming commissions from Paul Taylor American Dance, The Graham Company, and The Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America will expose new audiences to her work.
 

Matijcio, currently head of the curatorial department at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, will assume his new post in March.

Bard alumna Ruth Ungar and her band are providing support to a range of organizations, including the Bard Prison Initiative, with each $3 download of music through their website.

Each of the 45 fellows will receive an unrestricted $50,000 prize, awarded annually by the Chicago-based nonprofit United States Artists.

“It is crazy to me that we give away so much of our power as women in an attempt to conform to some ideal of physical perfection that is subjective and largely unobtainable.”

BHSEC Manhattan alumna Leah Hennessey ’07 cowrote and costars in Slash with Emily Allan. This two-woman show runs through January 31 at MX Gallery.

Handelman will receive up to $100,000 to develop her multichannel video installation Delirium.

Pianist Ran Blake and vocalist Jeanne Lee met at Bard College and released only limited recordings together. Now a new album brings to light two hours of previously unissued music.