Is it a rock concert? Modern dance? A plea for environmental action and the rights of Indigenous peoples? Cut the Sky by Marrugeku, Australia’s preeminent dance theater ensemble of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, is all three. As soul singer Ngaire belts out tunes ranging from Nick Cave to Buffalo Springfield Australian “post-soul” music, Marrugeku’s “incredibly...
Raphaëlle Boitel began her career as a young girl when she and her family ran away to join the circus. A mesmerizing contortionist and aerialist, Ben Brantley of The New York Times called her “truly ravishing.” Peak Performances introduced American audiences to Boitel’s boundless talents in 2016 with her luminous directorial debut “The Forgotten.” In...
Imagine a world in which classical ballet, modern dance icon Martha Graham, and questions of cultural appropriation collide with clowns, basketball players, and hula dance, and you may begin to grasp the creative force, intelligence, and wit of choreographer Ann Carlson. In “Elizabeth, the dance,” she pays homage to “the visionaries and teachers” of modern...
The final work in Faye Driscoll’s three-part Thank You For Coming series, Space is an intimate shared performance, and a liberatory ritual that confronts life’s most notable transition. Alone with the audience, Driscoll constructs a temporary world upheld by pulleys, ropes and the weightiness of others, to invoke the sensations of absence. At the center of the work is the human body—built for action, self contained, and driven by its longing for the felt world. Space calls forth new presences and offers an enlivened contemplation of our shared conclusion.
Romeo Castellucci is one of Europe’s best-known directors, a firebrand known for productions that are as thought-provoking as they are visually stunning. He returns to Peak Performances with the American premiere of “Democracy in America,” freely inspired by the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Castellucci conjures majorettes who stir the crowd’s enthusiasm for democracy in...
“Thank You for Coming, [an] ambitious new series of works, is no less than a new vision of society.” — The New Yorker Faye Driscoll is an award-winning choreographer and director whose work has been described as “creative, awkward, hilarious, goofy, surprising, rowdy, randy, chaotic, and sweet.” (Berkshire Eagle) Thank You for Coming is her...
What do you get when you toss together nine jugglers, 80 apples, and four crockery sets? “Smashed,” a tea party you’ll never forget, created by Gandini Juggling, the thinking person’s jugglers. Nine well-dressed, perfectly respectable young people take the stage and, under the guise of a quaint afternoon tea, engage in the dark art of...
HATUEY: Memory of Fire is a soaring Cuban-Yiddish opera, a love story set in a Havana nightclub in 1931. Oscar, a young Jewish writer who escaped the pogroms in the Ukraine to make a new home in Cuba, falls in love with Tinima, a beautiful singer and passionate revolutionary of Taino descent. As Oscar pens...
Karin Coonrod brings her groundbreaking production of Shakespeare’s most controversial play, The Merchant of Venice, to the US. Coonrod first stage to mark the 500th anniversary of its creation.
