Bard SummerScape 2007: Spiegeltent Cabaret

SPIEGELTENT CABARET
Tickets: $25 (except where noted)

Opening Night Gala Celebration
Join us for the 2007 SummerScape opening night gala celebration. Tickets include pre-performance tipples and dinner in the Spiegeltent, a premium seat to the opening night of Doug Varone and Dancers and admission to the post-performance dance party combining the best of English contra, Irish ceili, and American square dance and music in partnership with the Dutchess County Arts Council’s “One River, Many Streams” folk program in the Spiegeltent. To reserve your tickets, please contact Stephen Millikin at or millikin@bard.edu.
July 5
Tickets: $175
Cocktails and dinner at 5:00 pm; performance at 8 pm; party at 10 pm
Susan Marshall & Company
“Watching Marshall’s choreography . . . I’ve been profoundly moved by the emotional resonance she coaxes from the simplest movements and patterns.” —Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice
A choreographer of the intimate exchange and the almost-unnoticed gesture, MacArthur “genius” Susan Marshall and her dance company have been bewitching audiences for 20 years. Now, in a new work commissioned for SummerScape, she’ll take on new challenges: dancing in the round for the first time, and becoming perhaps the first choreographer ever to sculpt a site-specific work for the Spiegeltent. With her will be the same dancers featured in her recent Bessie Award–winning dance Cloudless. Like that work, this one will be a series of dances drawn from the travails and serendipitous moments of everyday life; only, in honor of Edward Elgar (who wrote popular music for music halls) and Bard’s Spiegeltent, Marshall will incorporate elements of burlesque, cabaret, and vaudeville, distilled into the distinctive language of human gesture she’s known for.
July 6, 8, 12, 14, 15 at 8:30 pm
July 7, 8, 14 at 3:30 pm
Tickets: $35
Martin Creed
Martin Creed, British conceptual artist and Turner Prize winner, offers a one-night-only variety show on Saturday, July 7, at 8:30 pm, in the Spiegeltent. His performance is presented in conjunction with the CCS Bard Hessel Museum opening of the first American survey of his work, which embraces performance, text, music, video, and sculpture.
July 7 at 8:30 pm
The CCS/Hessel Museum’s Martin Creed exhibition runs from July 7 to September 16.
Summer hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 1–6 pm
Iva Bittová
One of the most remarkable personalities in Czech music, avant-garde vocalist-violinist Iva Bittová returns to SummerScape to perform an experimental mix of new music and Moravian folk music.
July 13 at 8:30 pm
Orange Star Dinner Show
“Subversive magus Ken Roht and a fabulous service crew dish up a sublime franchise benchmark . . . the most nourishing spread in town.”—Los Angeles Times, Critic’s Choice
The Orphean Circus’s Orange Star Dinner Show is a music-theater romp set in a surreal Wyoming dinner theater. Sibling rivalry, patriotism, ugly men in dresses, murder, broken fingernails . . . and no sign of dinner. This multimedia spectacle features a raucous, psychedelic mash-up of country, rock, and pop-minimalist music. Ken Roht is the L.A. cult artist/auteur who directed/choreographed Offenbach!!! for Bard’s 2006 SummerScape festival.
July 19, 21 and August 2 at 8:30 p.m.
Orphean Circus is presented in association with Bootleg Theatre, LA.
Wau Wau Sisters
Following last year’s packed-to-the-canopies show, the Wau Wau Sisters— Tanya Gagné and Adrienne Truscott —return with more of their highly “irreverent, sacrilegious, lascivious” (New York Times) brand of vaudeville.
July 20 at 8:30 pm
Professor Louie & The Crowmatix
Get in the groove with Professor Louie’s Woodstock ensemble, a great live band that plays “a tasty mix of rhythm & blues and rock & roll.”—The Record Review
July 22 at 8:30 pm
Free!
Bindlestiff Family Cirkus
Following last year’s sold-out run, the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus rolls back into town. In fact, they’ve set up shop in Hudson and are getting ready to regale SummerScape audiences with their bag of tricks and inventive Victorian Variety Show, rated PG13. Check out Family Fare for bundles of Bindle fun for all ages.
July 27 at 8:30 pm
The Elliott Smith Project: Speaking In Clowns
A dramatic song cycle based on Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on a Hill,
conceived and directed by Daniel Fish
This new music theater piece, The Elliott Smith Project: Speaking in Clowns, was conceived specifically for the Spiegeltent and inspired by Elliott Smith’s remarkable, posthumously released record. True Love Productions and Daniel Fish (who brought us 2005’s acclaimed Rocket to the Moon), along with a small ensemble of extraordinary performers, transform the privacy, pain, and pop-eccentricity of singer-songwriter Smith’s music into a beautiful and genre-defying theatrical experience.
July 26, 28, 29, and August 3, 4, 5
at 8:30 pm
Trio Loco: Mark Dziuba, Studio Stu, and Dean Sharp
This eccentric jazz trio takes the very best in classic jazz and originals and twists them into “jazz unstandards.” For these three players, nothing is sacred: lyrics are changed at will, familiar tunes put through a fun-house mirror, and yet the music is serious, sophisticated, and uncompromising in its execution. This is an in-tune, out-of-tune, offbeat outfit.
August 4 at 3:30 pm
Free!
The Blackamoor Angel
Conceived and written by Carl Hancock Rux, with music by Deirdre Murray, directed Karin Coonrod
A multidisciplinary artist, Carl Hancock Rux incorporates rap, slam poetry, and the oral traditions of 19th-century slaves into his writing. The Blackamoor Angel, his opera with Downtown jazz composer Deirdre Murray, tells the story of Angelo Soliman, an African in 18th-century Vienna and a friend of Mozart, via the performance of a Weimar-era traveling circus. The opera probes the secrets of the Moor’s relationship to Mozart, his involvement in Mozart’s final operas (Monostatos, in The Magic Flute, was based on Soliman), his mysterious death, and the reason for the heinous postmortem display of his body in the imperial Naturalienkabinett.
August 9, 10, 17, 18 at 8:30 pm
Special support for this program has been provided by The New York State Music Fund.
Dzul Dance
“Javier Dzul sent people twisting and turning with remarkable elasticity.”—New York Times
Dzul Dance fuses ritual and modern dance with daring aerial maneuvers, transforming bodies into earthbound and airborne forces of nature. The company is an exciting and unique intermarriage of forms, using intense physicality, innovative partnering, and amazing aerial work to bring pre-Hispanic culture to life.
August 11 and 12 at 8:30 pm
God Bless the Music Hall
What better place to relive the experience of the 19th-century British music hall than the Spiegeltent? Music hall stages were populated by colorful entertainers who presented saucy songs and dances, and by specialty acts such as stilt-walkers, escapologists, and cyclists. And while characters such as the dandified “toff” or “swell” sang of “Champagne Charlie” and the good life, others would tell the audience to “Pack up Your Troubles” and forget about reality. But not all was lighthearted: later in the century the music hall would resound with songs that fired imperialist enthusiasm. Many of the forms first encountered in the music hall linger on, and we invite you to rediscover their origins.
August 16 at 8:30 pm
BMF Closing Night: Slavic Soul Party!
“Fiery Gypsy brass, soulful Balkan anthems, and hip-grinding American funk [as] brash and strong as slivovitz” (New York Times). These New York City musicians mix brass band music from diverse immigrant backgrounds with American jazz and soul.
August 19 at 8:30 pm
Free!
SPIEGELCLUB
Thursday–Sunday at 10 pm
No cover charge
Offering a late-night bar with music and dancing, the SpiegelClub is the region’s most exhilarating summer gathering place, where audiences and artists can meet over a drink or a casual bite and enjoy SummerScape evenings at Bard. Join Ken Roht and his Orphean Circus for an eclectic mix of music and infectious fun, in a venue unlike any other.