CAP UCLA presents Pam Tanowitz/Brice Marden/Kaija Saariaho Four Quartets

CAP UCLA presents

Pam Tanowitz/Brice Marden/Kaija Saariaho

Four Quartets

February 15 & 16 at Royce Hall

“The greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.” —The New York Times

“It is an astonishing, wonderful thing.”  —The Guardian (5 Stars)

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) presents Pam Tanowitz/Brice Marden/Kaija Saariaho’s Four Quartets on Saturday, February 15 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, February 16, at 3 p.m. at Royce Hall. Tickets starting at $28 are available now at cap.ucla.edu, 310-825-2101, and Royce Hall box office.

Based on T.S. Eliot’s poems Four Quartets, the choreographer Pam Tanowitz along with painter Brice Marden and composer Kaija Saariaho have created a sublime new dance work. 

The poems are read aloud by actress Kathleen Chalfant while the choreography builds the outer framework and the new score by Saariaho (performed by The Knights) accentuates the connotation of the words. Marden’s work is in the form of four paintings that comprise the scenic design by Clifton Taylor. The 10 dancers perform together in solos and duets wearing billowing pale green and off-white costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung.

This is Tanowitz’s second season in a row with CAP UCLA, but this time with a piece featuring her own choreography: last April she danced as part of the Merce Cunningham centennial event Night of 100 Solos. 

Tanowitz has a reputation for fine footwork, but she has surpassed even herself with the choreography for Four Quartets. Unlike other choreographers, her exploration of dance-making is made with an unflinchingly post-modern treatment of the classical dance vocabulary. Tanowitz’s credits and accolades are extensive, her latest came in May of 2019 when she received an Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Funds for the CAP UCLA presentation of Four Quartets were provided in part by Royce Center Circle Endowment Fund and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation multi-year grant for Collaborative Intersections in the Visual and Performing Arts.

This performance concludes CAP UCLA’s 2019-20 Dance series. For more shows this season visit cap.ucla.edu/calendar/.

 

CALENDAR EDITORS, PLEASE NOTE:

CAP UCLA presents

Pam Tanowitz/Brice Marden/Kaija Saariaho’s

Four Quartets

Saturday, Feb. 15 at 8 p.m.

Sunday, Feb. 16 at 3 p.m.

Royce Hall, UCLA

10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles, CA 90095

 

Program:

Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot’s mysterious and beautiful masterpiece, is a rumination on time and timelessness and is now prized as one of the 20th century’s most stunning literary achievements. Seventy-five years after its publication, Eliot’s poetry cycle has inspired three astonishing contemporary artists to join forces in a ravishing union of dance, music, painting and poetry. American choreographer Pam Tanowitz, legendary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, and American modernist painter Brice Marden have created a vast and thrilling performance from Eliot’s meditations on past and present, time and space, movement and stillness. Joining them is Tony Award-nominated actress Kathleen Chalfant (Angels in America, Wit) performing Eliot’s text live. This unprecedented collaboration, the first authorized performance based on Four Quartets, promises to be one of the must-see events of the season.

 

Related Activity:

Listening to the Landscape

Inspired by TS Eliot, the CAP UCLA Poetry Bureau returns, with a bevy of poets composing on-the-spot poetry on the theme of time.

 

Credits:

Four Quartets is a Fisher Center at Bard production, co-commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard with major support from Rebecca Gold, where it received its world premiere in Bard SummerScape 2018, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Barbican London and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. GAGOSIAN is the lead corporate sponsor of Four Quartets on tour.

 

Tickets:

Tickets starting at $28

Online: cap.ucla.edu

Phone: 310-825-2101

UCLA Central Ticket Office: 310-825-2101, Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Royce Hall box office: open 90 minutes prior to the event start time.

 

Artists website: Pam Tanowitz | Brice Marden | Kaija Saariaho

 

About Pam Tanowitz

A celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance-making with a consistent community of dancers. Tanowitz is currently the Fisher Center at Bard’s Choreographer in Residence.

 Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a “rare achievement” (The New York Times).

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, 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 2016-2017 City Center Choreography Fellow. Her work was selected by The New York Times Best of Dance series in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019. 

She has been commissioned by New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Fisher Center at Bard, The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, Danspace Project, 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.

About Brice Marden

A contemporary American painter known for his subtle explorations of color and gestural lines. Like Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, and Agnes Martin, Marden’s canvases are the product of an ongoing investigation into the nature of abstraction and the medium of painting itself. “A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation,” the artist mused. “Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.” Born on October 15, 1938 in Bronxville, NY, Marden received his BFA from Boston University in 1961 and his MFA from Yale University in 1963, where he was taught by both Alex Katz and Jon Schueler. Marden’s early Minimalist works, such as The Dylan Painting (1966), gave way to the influence of Chinese calligraphy and the creation of his first gestural works—Cold Mountain paintings—during the late 1980s and 1990s. In 2006, The Museum of Modern Art mounted the large-scale exhibition “Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective,” which traveled on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art. The artist currently lives and works between Hydra, Greece and New York, NY. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. 

About Kaija Saariaho

A prominent Finnish composer and performer who is now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics. Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L’Amour de Loin and Adriana Mater and the oratorio La Passion de Simone. Saariaho has claimed the major composing awards in The Grawemeyer Award, The Wihuri Prize, The Nemmers Prize,The Sonning Prize, The Polar Music Prize. In 2018 she was recognized with the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In 2015 she was the judge of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Always keen on strong educational programmes, Kaija Saariaho was the music mentor of the 2014-15 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and was in residence at U.C. Berkeley Music Department in 2015. Saariaho continues to collaborate for the stage. Only The Sound Remains, her most recent opera collaboration with Peter Sellars, opened in Holland in 2016. In the same year her first opera L'Amour de Loin was presented in its New York premiere by the Metropolitan Opera in a new production by Robert Le Page. The Park Avenue Armory and New York Philharmonic presented a celebration of her orchestral music with visual accompaniment in October 2016. February 2017 saw Paris come alive with her work when she was featured composer for the Festival Presences. Her fifth opera, Innocence, will be premiered in the summer 2020. 

About CAP UCLA

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) is dedicated to the advancement of the contemporary performing arts in all disciplines — dance, music, spoken word and theater, as well as emerging digital, collaborative and cross-platforms — by leading artists from around the globe. Part of UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture, CAP UCLA curates and facilitates direct exposure to artists who are creating extraordinary works of art and fosters a vibrant learning community both on and off the UCLA campus. The organization invests in the creative process by providing artists with financial backing and time to experiment and expand their practices through strategic partnerships and collaborations. As an influential voice within the local, national and global arts communities, CAP UCLA connects this generation to the next in order to preserve a living archive of our culture. CAP UCLA is also a safe harbor where cultural expression and artistic exploration can thrive, giving audiences the opportunity to experience real life through characters and stories on stage, and giving artists an avenue to challenge assumptions and advance new ways of seeing and understanding the world we live in now.

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PRESS REVIEW TICKETS/PHOTO PASSES/INTERVIEW REQUESTS: Contact Geena Russo, Communications Manager, geena@arts.ucla.edu or 310-206-8744.

IMAGES: Available by request. Photo credit Maria Baranova.