Yerba Buena Center for the Arts announced its new programming for 2011–2012 which includes six West Coast premieres, three world premieres and one Bay Area premiere.
Programming covers contemporary visual, performing arts and film/video with outstanding innovative works from around the globe including Congo, India, France and Argentina as well the sixth edition of its signature triennial, Bay Area Now.
“We are very excited about the program for 2011–2012 here at YBCA,” noted Kenneth Foster, executive director at YBCA.
YBCA, located in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena cultural district, utilizes four “Big Ideas” to organize its wide-ranging programs and provide a context with which to engage the art. These ideas, which encompass art from all disciplines, are designed to focus an investigation of contemporary art and its relationship to the larger world. Using the Big Ideas as portals, YBCA has established a framework of thought that invites exploration and risk taking, quiet reflection and active engagement.
The Big Ideas are: ENCOUNTER: Engaging the social context; SOAR: The search for meaning; REFLECT: Considering the personal; and DARE: Innovations in art, action, audience.
Foster continued, “Despite the difficult economic times, artists keep on creating exciting and provocative work and YBCA is proud to continue to support artists who are breaking boundaries in form and content. We continue to be guided by our four ‘Big Ideas’ and find them even more potent now than ever before. Whether they are local or international artists from Asia or Africa, we’ve discovered some of the most extraordinary artists in the world and are thrilled to be bringing them to the Bay Area.”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 2011-12 Programming
In addition to BAN6, highlights of YBCA’s 2011–12 season include:
The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India (October 15, 2011–January 29, 2012/Galleries), a major exhibition of contemporary Indian sculpture, photography and video which represent the shifts and changes taking place in Indian culture as it finds new ways to negotiate the past and present, fact and fiction and new and old identities, during a period of societal flux.
Mark Bradford (February 18–May 27, 2012/Gallery 1) Organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and co-presented in San Francisco by YBCA and SFMOMA, this comprehensive survey of Bradford’s career to date will be on view at both venues, offering more than 50 works spanning 2000 to 2010. Included in YBCA’s presentation is the large-scale work Detail, an ark-like sculpture reconstructed from components of Mithra, originally created for the 2008 Prospect.1 biennial in New Orleans.
Retrospective Project: Eiko & Koma (March 15–17 & March 22–24, 2012/YBCA Forum) San Francisco is the final stop of theRetrospective Project, an evolving examination of the pair’s 40-year collaboration, in which YBCA will present two different programs ─Fragile: a intimate collaboration with Kronos Quartet that is part performance, part installation March 15–17, 2011, and Regeneration: Raven (2010), Night Tide (1984) and White Dance (1976) March 22–24, 2012.
Women’s Voices, Kronos Quartet with Special Guests Tanya Tagaq and Vân-Ánh Võ
(May 11–12, 2012/Novellus Theater at YBCA), a celebration of the incomparable range and beauty of the female voice.New Filipino Cinema (June 2012/YBCA Screening Room) This is a look beyond the officially recognized famous makers of the past to a new generation of younger, scruffy, low-budget artists who are now receiving international attention from some of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, yet are essentially ignored in the Philippines.
YBCA’s popular Big Idea Nights will be back in a slightly different guise this season as they merge with the exhibition’s opening night parties to provide an even more direct thematic link to the art in the galleries and the Big Ideas they represent. The evening will include cocktails, food, films, music, hands-on activities and an array of YBCA surprises.
New: Thrifty Thursdays Featuring $5 Tickets on Opening Thursday Nights
For the first time, YBCA will be offering $5 opening night Thrifty Thursday tickets for selected performing arts programs, including Faustin Linyekul/Studios Kabako: more, more, more…future, Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s red, black and GREEN: a blues, Dean Moss: Nameless forest, and Mariano Pensotti: El Pasando es un Animal Grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal).BAY AREA NOW 6:
July 9–September 25, 2011/GalleriesVisual Arts: Multimedia
$7 regular; $5 students, seniors, teachers; free for YBCA membersThe sixth edition of YBCA’s signature triennial exhibition, Bay Area Now, a roundup of exemplary talent showcases artists inspired by the region and beyond. Some are inspired by the local social and geographic environment from bucolic scenes of Golden Gate Park to African-American identity in Oakland. Many of the eighteen artists in BAN 6 also find inspiration from ideas and movements that gained currency in the 1960s and 1970s and their ongoing legacies. Chris Fraser’s light installations are reminiscent of the California light and space movement, Tammy Rae Carland’s photographs of female stand-up comedians are fueled by the energy of 1960s-era feminism. Like the early Bay Area conceptualists, Brion Nuda Rosch and Chris Sollars embrace the potential of discarded or banal materials and objects. Sean McFarland blends concepts borrowed from the New Topographics photographers with the formalism of 19th century American landscape photography. Reaching further back in time, Allison Smith’s deconstructions of early Americana and Ben Venom’s fusion of quilting and heavy metal music, which had its rebirth in San Francisco, provide fresh views on familiar histories. A few artists also look to the future, including David Huffman, with his Afro-futurist canvases and Ranu Mukherjee with her self-described neo-futurist hybrid video works. Whatever period of time these artists are influenced by, they provide a new vision to themes that resonate with what the Bay Area now offers in its cultural mélange of communities and micro-cultures.
Included is photography by Tammy Rae Carland and Sean McFarland; paintings by David Huffman and Robert Minervini; video works by Ranu Mukherjee and Richard T. Walker; sculptures by Mauricio Ancalmo, Suzanne Husky, Allison Smith, and Weston Teruya; conceptual work by Amy Balkin and Tony Labat; installations by Chris Fraser, Brion Nuda Rosch, Chris Sollars, and Rio Babe International; and textiles by Ben Venom.
World Premiere
Hafez Modirzadeh and ETHEL: In Convergence Liberation
Saturday, July 23, 2011, 8pm/YBCA Forum
Performing Arts: Music
$25 regular; $20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers
Drawing upon American jazz and Persian dastgah heritages, Bay Area saxophonist and composer Hafez Modirzadeh presents an entirely new suite of seven original works featuring ETHEL, acclaimed as one of America’s premier post-classical string quartets. The performance will also feature Amir ElSaffar, internationally renowned Iraqi-American trumpeter, as well as Boston based vocalist Mili Bermejo.
West Coast Premiere
Carla Kihlstedt: Necessary Monsters
Friday & Saturday, July 29 & 30, 2011, 8pm/Novellus Theater at YBCA
Performing Arts: Music
$20–25 regular: $15–20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers
YBCA presents the West Coast premiere of musician/composer/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt and poet Rafael Oses’ Necessary Monsters, a contemporary song cycle inspired by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. Kihlstedt leads an all-star Bay Area band, taking the audience on an expansive journey through their own imaginations.SFMOMA in Association with YBCA Presents
Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera Installation
By Virgil Thomson and Luciano Chessa; Libretto by Gertrude Stein
Featuring Ensemble Parallèle and Kalup Linzy
Preview: Thursday, August 18, 2011; 7:30pm/Novellus Theater at YBCA
$15–50 regular; $10–45 YBCA, SFMOMA, CJM members,
students, seniors, teachers, groups 10+
Friday & Saturday, August 19 & 20, 2011, 8pm; Sunday, August 21, 2pm/Novellus Theater at YBCA
$35–85 regular; $30-$75 YBCA, SFMOMA, CJM members, students, seniors, teachers, groups 10+
Performing Arts: Opera
On the occasion of SFMOMA’s landmark exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and YBCA’s Bay Area Now 6 (BAN 6), we present a new production of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s landmark 1927 opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. The first incarnation of modernism in American opera, Four Saints follows two 16th-century saints as they reminisce about their mortal lives and enjoy a heavenly picnic.At the time of its debut in 1934, Four Saints overturned operatic convention with a libretto by Stein that emphasized the sound of words over story. Spurred by Stein’s language play is Thomson’s sublime score, which celebrates the hymns and folks songs at the heart of American music. The new, multimedia-infused restaging is a rich artistic collaboration among Bay Area contemporary chamber opera group Ensemble Parallèle, composer Luciano Chessa, and video and performance artist Kalup Linzy. Based on Thomson’s final score, the new opera features re-imagined music, videos, and texts. Thomson’s “terrestrial” saints on stage are now doubled and complemented by “celestial” counterparts in video projections above. Like the original, the new opera subversively blurs the lines between art, music and literature, staying true to Stein and Thomson’s daring notion that in making art, as Thomson said, one might also hope to make miracles.
U.S. Premiere
YBCA and Z Space Present
Big Art Group: The People: San Francisco
Friday & Saturday, September 16 & 17, 8pm/Z Space, 450 Florida St., San Francisco
$10 regular; FREE for YBCA and Z Space membersPerforming Arts: Theater, Video
YBCA and Z Space welcome New York-based performance troupe Big Art Group back to the Bay Area with their new work, The People: San Francisco, a site specific, outdoor extravaganza that combines live theater with large scale, real-time video projection. Constructed from interviews with members of the local community who voice their thoughts about democracy, war, terrorism and justice, the performance riffs on the story of the Oresteia to examine the conflict between individuals and their society in the new age of networked government and the extraordinary forces reshaping contemporary democracy. There will be no seating for this standing-room-only event. The audience will occupy the street in front of Z Space to witness this spectacle as it unfolds live inside the building, as well as outside as large screen images are projected onto the side of the building.
World PremiereMarc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project: red, black and GREEN: a blues
Thursday–Saturday, October 13–15 and October 20–22, 2011, 7:30pm/YBCA Forum
Friday–Saturday: $25 regular; $20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachersThrifty Thursday, October 13 only: all tickets $5
Performing Arts/Installation: Dance, Music, Spoken Word, Installation
YBCA is pleased to present the world premiere of Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s newest project, red, black and GREEN: a blues (rbGb), a collaborative, multimedia performance work that examines environmental racism, social ecology and collective responsibility in an era of dramatic climate change. Designed as both a performance and an installation, rbGb blends poetic text, dance, music and film within a sculptural environment to more deeply engage the audience in an interactive and participatory experience.
Smut Capital of America: San Francisco’s Sex Cinema Revolution
July 14–August 25, 2011/Screening Room
Film/Video
$8 regular; $6 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers, unless otherwise notedSmut Capital of America is the title of Michael Stabile’s in-progress documentary which chronicles San Francisco’s reign as the center of porn production in the US during the early 70s. In 1969, San Francisco became the first city in the US to effectively legalize pornography, hugely boosting our reputation as a boomtown for sex, and eventually opening up the floodgates to the rest of the country. The series begins with a screening/discussion with Stabile and continues through August 25 with a wide variety of films made during the era. All will be presented in their original film formats, not digital transfers.
PAUSE: Practice and Exchange
PAUSE: Practice and Exchange activates YBCA’s Gallery 3 by creating an exciting new series of process-based exhibitions with artists in residence from the Bay Area and around the world. These works include lectures, performances and workshops that transform the exhibition space into a fluid and active experience for audiences. Key components are cross-generational projects and multi-disciplinary collaborative artworks with a focus on influence, process and mentorship from both international and local artists. Artists are in residence for two weeks after the opening of their exhibition for talks and events.
Allan deSouza: Close Quarters and Far Pavilions
October 1, 2011–January 8, 2012/Gallery 3Visual Arts: Photography/Big Idea: Reflect
Free with gallery admission
Close Quarters and Far Pavilions is based on the situationist method of the dérive, a purposeful, psychogeographic wandering to uncover and arrive at connections that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible. The title refers to the installation’s two sets of photographs, one of which maps the gallery floor, taken by the artist during walks in San Francisco. These suggest fantasies, desires, or memories of another place, whether of the migrant, the tourist or one who has never traveled. The other set of large-format photographs hangs on the walls, and are redactions of paintings by Henri Rousseau, the iconic modernist artist who painted numerous jungle scenes without ever having left his native France.Allan deSouza’s photography, text, installation, digital-painting and performance works are subtle explorations of cultural transitions that shift between the tangible and the imaginary, as he travels through varying corporeal, geographic and historical frames to reveal both their power and limitations.
Gina Osterloh: Ephphetha
January 21-April 8, 2012/Gallery 3
Visual Arts: Photography, Sculpture, Video/Big Idea: Soar
Free with gallery admission
Ephphetha marks a new arc in Gina Osterloh’s practice as she addresses perception, the body as prop, identity, and sight and blindness through photographic works, sculptures, and video. Her photographs depict rooms constructed of paper and fabric, demarcated with meticulous dot matrix and light patterns in which figures flutter between flatness and three-dimensionality. Osterloh’s new film work is a visual essay on physical blindness and identity, created in collaboration with a vocational massage therapy school for the blind in the Philippines called Ephphetha, an Aramic word meaning “to open up.” Through pared down materials and aesthetics, the artist addresses the structure of sight and perception.Nathalie Talec: The One Who Sees Blindly
April 2-July 8, 2012/Gallery 3
Visual Arts: Wall Works/Big Idea: Soar
Free with gallery admission
For The One Who Sees Blindly, Nathalie Talec brings together several artistic elements representing a range of her ongoing artistic concerns. The installation Help Corridor highlights her continuing fascination with the world of polar explorers and extreme cold. For Talec, the polar explorer is a metaphor for the artist and the cold is a metaphor for art, as well as the human quest for something vital and absolute. Accompanying Help Corridor, Talec presentsThe One Who Sees Blindly, wall works based on an unpublished series of watercolors. The artist collaborates with San Francisco Art Institute graduate students on a series of public programs and interventions.This French artist is based just outside of Paris. She has shown extensively in Europe, including the Pompidou Center and the Louvre in Paris, Galeria Mesta Bratislavy in Slovakia and Menshikov Palace in St. Petersburg. This is her second solo exhibition in the United States and her first on the West Coast.
VISUAL ARTS
The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India
October 15, 2011–January 29, 2012/Galleries 1 & 2
Visual Arts: Photography, Video, Sculpture/Big Idea: Soar
$7 regular; $5 students, seniors, teachers; free for YBCA members
The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India is a major exhibition of contemporary art by artists living inside the country as well as in the diaspora inspired by material culture, literature, and spirituality as well as social and political aspects of India. The triad of thematic threads—embodiment and the politics of communicative bodies, empirical perception in the experience of the sensuous, and the imaginary as a social practice—form the central thesis of the exhibition. Of particular interest are the artistic spaces that either incorporate these concepts or operate in a gap or fissure as overlapping metaphoric structures that impact our lives, our thoughts and art. These themes play a role, but with a different weight or emphasis for each of the three specific areas of production represented by the following subheadings:Social Spheres of Materiality and Beingness with sculpture by Anita Dube, Rina Banerjee, Siddhartha Kararwal, Bharti Kher, Shilpa Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty, Sreshta Premnath, and Thukral and Tagra; Living the Body with photography by Nikhil Chopra, Gauri Gill, Sunil Gupta, Dhruv Malhotra, Pushpamala N., Tejal Shah, Bharat Sikka, and Anup Mathew Thomas; and Embodiment as a Political Weapon with single-channel video by Ayisha Abraham, CAMP, The Otolith Group, and Raqs Media Collective. As India begins to play a more central role on the world economic stage, the work of its artists will become even more widely acknowledged vehicles for expressing aspects of India that are hard to convey outside the terms that art provides.
Mark Bradford
Co-presented with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
February 18–May 27, 2012/Gallery 1
Visual Arts: Large-Scale Abstract Paintings & Collaged Materials/Big Idea: Encounter
$7 regular; $5 students, seniors, teachers; free for YBCA and SFMOMA members
Mark Bradford is best known for large-scale abstract paintings made from a variety of collaged materials, including billboard paper, permanent-wave end papers, newsprint, carbon paper and other papers layered together (or stripped apart) and then manipulated with nylon string, caulking and sanding. Often incorporating references to the social conditions of a particular location, these works not only extend the possibilities of contemporary painting, they offer an unusual and highly individual examination of the economies (often defined by race, gender and class) that structure urban society in the United States, and specifically in Leimert Park, the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where the artist lived as a child and continues to maintain his studio. Bradford’s South Central neighborhood also inspired hisMerchant Posters series, which employs reconfigured text and graphics from advertising posters collected from the area. Bradford is a 2009 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award recipient. Organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and co-presented in San Francisco by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and SFMOMA, this comprehensive survey of Bradford’s career to date will be on view at both venues, offering more than 50 works spanning 2000 to 2010. Included in YBCA’s presentation is the large-scale work Detail, an ark-like sculpture reconstructed from components of Mithra, a piece originally created for the 2008 Prospect.1 biennial in New Orleans.
Audience as Subject, Part 2: Extra Large
February 18–May 27, 2012/Gallery 2
Visual Arts: Video/Big Idea: Dare
$7 regular; $5 students, seniors, teachers; free for YBCA and SFMOMA members
Audience as Subject is a two-part exhibition that reverses the role of the audience from that of spectator to subject, exposing the dramatic narrative underlying public gatherings of people. By focusing their attention on the characteristics and behaviors of individuals in a group environment— body language, facial expressions, attitudes, gestures and actions—the artists challenge our perceptions about participation in civic life as they reveal what we collectively become when we gather together to participate in a common experience and the effect this has on our individuality. The two parts of the exhibition will take place at YBCA over a period of approximately two years. Part 1, Medium(Oct 20, 2010–Feb 6, 2011) explored medium-sized audiences in such venues as concert halls, theaters and lecture halls. Part 2: Extra Large looks to artists to represent how audiences look, how they behave and where they gather, as one way of understanding the attraction that being among others has had in recent years, whether at a music concert, soccer match or political rally. These images reveal unique qualities about our behavioral styles, our aspirations and yearnings, and our desire to gather and experience an event of monumental scale together. These gatherings are set against new paradigms in an age when virtual worlds, electronic friendship and texting have changed the ways that we can participate in a large community of like-minded people with similar interests, cultural affiliations or political leanings. Partial list of participating artists includes: Andrea Bowers, Stephen Dean, Ryan McGinley, Gonzalo Lebrija, Rabih Mroué, Melanie Smith and Wang Qingsong.Performance
West Coast Premiere
Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako: more more more…future
Thursday–Saturday, September 29–October 1, 2011, 8pm/Novellus Theater at YBCA
Performing Arts: Dance/Big Idea: Encounter
Thrifty Thursday, September 29 only: all tickets $5
$20–25 regular; $15–20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers
In this raucous and provocative performance, Linyekula’s choreography embraces creative destruction and stakes a claim to his own no-future society. Three dancers, including Linyekula, twist and rage to the seething poems of Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, a political prisoner in Kinshasa and childhood friend of Linyekula’s, set in song by music director Flamme Kapaya, an exceptional guitarist and a major star in Congo. Driven by the rhythms of Kapaya and his five-member on-stage band, more more more…future is a fierce celebration of hope in the face of despair.
Choreographer and director Faustin Linyekula creates intricate and powerful performance works which reflect on the political, social and cultural history and present-day struggles of his home country. Through personal stories, communal activity and beautifully crafted choreography, his works subvert the dominant images of contemporary D.R. Congo with their resourcefulness and hope. More more more…future is part of YBCA’s commitment to international work, and particularly to contemporary African artistic practice. This is YBCA’s third presentation of Faustin Linyekula.
World Premiere
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company: Light Moves
Featuring the Paul Dresher Ensemble
Thursday–Saturday, November 3–5, 2011, 8pm/Novellus Theater at YBCA
Performing Arts: Dance/Big Idea: Soar
$25–30 regular; $20–25 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachersThe Margaret Jenkins Dance Company has played an integral role in shaping the cultural fabric of San Francisco for over three decades. YBCA is pleased to welcome them back to our stage with their latest piece, Light Moves, a unique synthesis of dance, animation, live music and poetry, which takes the audience on a journey through shifting landscapes inspired by the naturally occurring cycles of light. Light Moves marks the first collaboration between choreographer Margaret Jenkins and critically acclaimed multi-media artist Naomie Kremer, known for her innovative way of digitally deconstructing her paintings by animating hundreds of individual elements as they move through space. This new work also reunites Jenkins with longtime collaborators Paul Dresher, an internationally recognized composer, and poet Michael Palmer, a recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award. Dresher’s new score, performed live by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, intersects with Kremer’s moving images, Palmer’s text and the kinetic radiance of the dancers’ bodies, to reveal the emotional character and stories that lie within these cycles of light.
Left Coast Leaning
Thursday–Saturday, December 1–3, 2011, 8pm/YBCA Forum
$15 regular; $10 YBCA members, seniors, teachers, groups of ten or more; $5 students
Performing Arts: Various Performance Disciplines/Big Idea: Encounter
YBCA and Youth Speaks Living Word Project are proud to present the third edition of Left Coast Leaning. Artists chosen to participate inLeft Coast Leaning reflect the unique pulse of the West Coast arts scene. The festival format enables audiences and artists to engage in a shared dialogue that crosses performance disciplines. By celebrating the diversity of cultures that lie at the heart of West Coast society,Left Coast Leaning presents an alternative to the negative image of hip-hop arts that is projected by contemporary media and challenges artists and audiences to viscerally engage with each other. Our hope is to shift marginalized art forms such as spoken word, media arts, performance installation, puppetry, deejaying and contemporary folklore from the periphery to the center of contemporary performance. Left Coast Leaning integrates disparate ideas both outside and within the city of San Francisco to establish the Bay Area as a place for artists, scholars and arts lovers to encounter this dynamic and flourishing New Majority American art form.
West Coast Premiere
Dean Moss: Nameless forest
Thursday–Saturday, January 19–21, 2012, 8pm/YBCA Forum
Performing Arts: Dance, Multidisciplinary Performance/Big Idea: Dare
Thrifty Thursday, January 19 only: all tickets $5
$25 regular; $20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers
Nameless forest, Dean Moss’s most ambitious work to date, is a visceral and charged reflection on the role and risk of individuals in society. In this remarkable collaboration with contemporary South Korean sculptor Sungmyung Chun, Moss layers a mix of reality and the surreal to question subjectivity and the nature of perception. Diary fragments by photojournalist Mike Kamber, mirror and neon effects by visual artist Gandalf Gaván, and a score by environmental sound composer Stephen Vitiello intensify the deeply committed performances of Kacie Chang, Eric Conroe, Aaron Hodges, Pedro Jiménez, DJ McDonald and Sari Nordman, who are joined onstage at each performance by several audience initiates.
Dean Moss creates rigorously constructed performance works that explore identity and perception. His multidisciplinary practice includes performance, dance, video, audio and visual design. Recent projects have focused on innovative audience participation and trans-cultural, cross-disciplinary collaborations. His performance and video works have been presented and exhibited at major performing arts centers around the world and he has received several prestigious performing arts-related grants, fellowships, residencies and awards.
Bay Area Premiere
Mariano Pensotti: El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco (The Past Is a Grotesque Animal)
Thursday–Saturday, February 16–18, 2012, 8pm/YBCA Forum
Performing Arts: Theater/Big Idea: Reflect
Thrifty Thursday, February 16 only: all tickets $5
$25 regular; $20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers
Argentinean writer and director Mariano Pensotti’s The Past is a Grotesque Animal follows the lives of four characters, whose different stories and worlds collide and merge, make contact and then go their separate ways. The piece becomes a compelling portrait of a generation of porteños (inhabitants of Buenos Aires) trying to make sense of their lives in rapidly changing times over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. As in many of Pensotti’s pieces, the audiovisual element is integral to the play’s structure, giving the theater a cinematic dimension. The action is staged on a permanently revolving disc divided into four spaces, each providing a home to the vital moments in the lives of these four everyday heroes.
Mariano Pensotti studied cinema, visual arts and theater and his performances have been presented in Argentina, as well as in festivals and venues in Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, Latvia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Austria, Spain, Chile, England, Denmark and Switzerland.Retrospective Project: Eiko & Koma (two programs)
West Coast Premiere: Fragile in Collaboration with Kronos Quartet
Thursday & Friday, March 15 & 16 2012, 5pm & 9pm/YBCA ForumSaturday, March 17, 2012, 3pm & 7pm/YBCA Forum
$10 regular, students, seniors, teachers; free for YBCA members
Raven, Night Tide, White Dance
Thursday–Saturday, March 22–24, 2012, 8pm/YBCA Forum
$25 regular; $20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers
Performing Arts/Stage and Living Installation/Big Idea: Reflect
In honoring the local Bay Area arts’ community that has supported Eiko & Koma since 1976, Eiko & Koma will bring a special two-week residency consisting of two programs and an exhibition/installation.Program One: Fragile (2011)
Eiko & Koma and Kronos Quartet have created an intimate performance work, half stage piece and half living installation, that viewers are invited to experience from multiple viewpoints.
Program Two: Regeneration: Raven (2010), Night Tide (1984) and White Dance (1976)
Regeneration is a focal point of Eiko & Koma’s multi-year Retrospective Project, an evolving examination of the pair’s 40-year collaboration.
San Francisco is the final stop of the Retrospective Project and the YBCA season will celebrate Eiko & Koma’s long history with Bay Area audiences, venues, community and artists. In the late ‘70s Eiko & Koma made San Francisco their second home for a few months out of each year. They performed their early works such as White Dance and Fur Seal in multiple venues and toured the West Coast from a base in San Francisco.
West Coast Premiere
David Zambrano: Soul Project
Friday & Saturday, April 27 & 28, 2012, 8pm/YBCA Forum
Performing Arts: Dance & Song/Big Idea: Dare
$25 regular; $20 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers
Soul Project is a series of surprising, virtuosic solos performed to sublime live recordings of classic vintage soul music, each lasting the length of a song, during which audience mingles, gets close to the cast and witnesses the dance from any angle they choose. Each performer is on their own movement quest to embody the dance as deeply and powerfully as the singer reveals the song. With the order of the solos and their location and function left to chance, each night’s performance is unique.
Conceived by internationally renowned improviser, choreographer and teacher Zambrano, in collaboration with seven remarkable dancers from Greece, Mozambique, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Venezuela, Soul Project simultaneously creates a sense of heightened perception and grounded physicality. All at once the experience is intimate and personal— witnesses feel every tremble and sigh of the performers’ bodies—and communal, as together with the rest of the audience one anticipates the next dancer and the next song, and shares in the discovery as it begins.
World Premiere
YBCA and Kronos Performing Arts Association Present
Kronos Quartet with Special Guests Tanya Tagaq and Vân-Ánh Võ: Women’s Voices
Friday & Saturday, May 11 &12, 2012, 8pm/Novellus Theater at YBCA
Performing Arts: Music & Song/Big Idea: Reflect
$25-30 regular; $20-25 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachersSan Francisco’s own Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet continues its multi-year partnership and residency at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with a program featuring the artistic voices of contemporary women composers and performers. Women’s Voices features works written specifically for the Quartet – including the world premiere of a new piece by composer and musician Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, co-commissioned by YBCA and the Kronos Performing Arts Association, as well as three Bay Area premieres: Laurie Anderson’s Flow, Nicole Lizée’s Death to Kosmische, and Derek Charke’s Tundra Songs, featuring acclaimed Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq.
Film/Video
The following is a partial selection of upcoming film programs; dozens more will be announced throughout the remainder of 2011 and for 2012.
The Films of Nicolás Pereda
Big Idea: Dare
October 2011/Screening Room
$8 regular; $6 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers, unless otherwise noted
Nicolás Pereda stands as one of Mexico’s finest discoveries, with a deeply assured style and provocative subject matter. At just age 27, he is quietly becoming one of world cinema’s dominant voices. His ultra low-budget films were described by Variety film critic Robert Koehler as each having “its own thrusts, quirks, obsessions and concerns, they flow together and interconnect, forming by the end of viewing a kind of gestalt.”Women and Children Last: Masculinity and Film
Big Idea: Reflect
November 2011/Screening Room
$8 regular; $6 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers, unless otherwise noted
An off-beat survey of representations of masculinity in film, including a night of vintage male physique posing films from the Athletic Modeling Guild, work by independent icon John Cassavetes, and a recently-discovered documentary on female wrestling from the early
‘70s.
11th Annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
Big Idea: EncounterMarch 2012/Screening Room
$8 regular; $6 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers, unless otherwise noted
Every March we present a selection of powerful films with distinctive human rights themes. The power of film to challenge the viewer and promote calls to action cannot be underestimated. Rather than wallow in despair, the films in this program will put a human face on threats
to individual freedom and dignity.New Filipino Cinema
Big Idea: Encounter
June 2012/Screening Room
$8 regular; $6 YBCA members, students, seniors, teachers, unless otherwise noted
This program looks beyond the officially recognized famous makers of the past to a new generation—younger, scruffy, low-budget artists who are now receiving international attention. Many of these filmmakers are getting their work shown in some of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. Yet most, if not all, of them are essentially ignored in the Philippines. To some extent, they are “exiles” in their own country, and the series takes this idea as a
starting point.
(photo: Paula Court)
