Guggenheim Museum Spring 2011 Performances

Here is a list of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum spring 2011 performances.

T.1912
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and The Wordless Music Orchestra
Thursday, April 14, 8:40 pm and 10:40 pm

Inspired by the Titanic, T.1912 is a site-specific staged audience experience conceived by visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the Guggenheim rotunda. At the core of the installation, Gavin Bryars’s large symphonic piece The Sinking of the Titanic (1969–) will be performed by The Wordless Music Orchestra. Audience members will “board” via the museum’s Peter B. Lewis Theater and will be ushered into the rotunda onto designated “decks.” During the performance, the audience will be invited to move within the ramps and rotunda in correlation with the shifting of the passengers aboard the Titanic as it began to sink. On Friday, April 15, the Guggenheim hosts a post-performance conversation with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Joan Young, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. The discussion follows the 2 pm screening of the seminal 1912 Titanic film In Nacht und Eis (In Night and Ice) in the New Media Theater located in the lower level of the museum and is free with museum admission. T.1912 is generously supported by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation. Film screenings are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Guggenheim.org/t1912

US Premiere
REIGEN ad lib
Performed by Dood Paard
Thursday and Friday, April 28 and 29, 8 pm
Saturday, April 30, 3 pm and 8 pm

Dood Paard, an Amsterdam-based theater collective working without a director or set designer, performs REIGEN ad lib, a verbatim and uniquely contemporary staging of playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (Full Circle, 1897). Scandalous during its time, Reigen was banned for more than 20 years, with only one unauthorized performance in Budapest in 1912. Performing on vintage mattresses, Dood Paard members are costumed in underwear and gaudy attire while sexual acts are intimated through stroboscopic projections of artist Marco Brambilla’s video Sync from Destricted (2006), a collection of short erotic films by various artists. This provocative play of love and lust assembles ten consummate dialogues between a motley collection of characters, all with the same goal: sex. Children under 17 not admitted. Watch the REIGEN ad lib video trailer on YouTube. REIGEN ad lib is generously supported by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation. This program is also supported in part by public funds from the Netherlands Cultural Services and by a grant from the Netherland-America Foundation. Guggenheim.org/reigenadlib

“Bright Field”: Music and Modernism
R. Luke Dubois and Typical Music
Tuesday, May 24, 6:30 pm

In the early 20th century, composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, and Igor Stravinsky were writing music in active dialogue with the social upheavals, intellectual currents, and political events of their day. They embraced the same radical spirit that inspired the visual arts and openly challenged core assumptions about art, music, and its engagement with society. The birth of modern music synched with the development of modern art as composers rejected romantic notions of music, providing a soundtrack from which new languages of abstraction were forged. This gallery program highlights music by composers such as Claude Debussy, Zoltan Kodály, and Anton Webern, performed by Typical Music, an ensemble comprised of New York New Music virtuosi Todd Reynolds (violin), Ashley Bathgate (cello) and Vicky Chow (piano). Heard alongside The Great Upheaval exhibition, the performance allows for the rare experience of a dialogue between art and music. A talk by American composer R. Luke DuBois, and host of the program, precedes the concert. Guggenheim.org/publicprograms

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
5th Ave at 89th St, New York City

Guggenheim.org/publicprograms