Love (World Premiere)
I Love You
Spectrum Dance Theater (SDT) presents the world premiere of LOVE, a new work by artistic director Donald Byrd that will feature live musical performances of Benjamin Britten’s Cello Suites by cellists Denise Djokic opening weekend and Seattle native Wendy Sutter closing weekend.
PERFORMANCE DATES & TIMES
Thursdays-Saturdays, June 21-23 & June 28-30, 8pm
Live solo cello performances
June 21-23: Denise Djokic
June 28-30: Wendy Sutter
LOCATION
Daniels Recital Hall, 5th & Marion, Downtown Seattle
Click here for map and directions.
TICKETS
General tickets $25
Students with ID $20 with ID
Teen Tix with Pass $5 (day of show only)
LOVE
The world premiere of LOVE concludes SDT’s 2011-2012 season, Byrd’s exploration of the most complicated of human emotions. The season, entitled “love: subject/object,” has been a retrospective of several narrative works that show “love” as a torturous, obsessive exercise in despair, frailty, and self-anihilation. LOVE — to be interpreted as resolution , solution, or rejection — will be a clear contrast from the rest of the season, not only for its abstract narrative, but also for its all ages accessibility.
Floating on two stages under the dome of Daniels Recital Hall and set to a live performance of Benjamin Britten’s Cello Suites, LOVE returns Byrd to the grandness of dance. The Cello Suites, a series of three compositions first composed for virtuoso cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, is notoriously difficult. Performed without break for 45 minutes, the piece requires stamina and technical prowess. Because of this, the work is rarely performed live.
Canadian cellist Denise Djokic will perform opening weekend, and Seattle native Wendy Sutter will close the run.
Cellist Denise Djokic has earned world-wide acclaim for her sincere, powerful interpretations and her bold command of the instrument. Djokic’s most recent recording – the complete Britten Solo Suites for the ATMA label – has received critical acclaim from renowned publications such as Fanfare and The Strad. The recording was declared “easily able to stand alongside the great recordings of Rostropovich and Wispelwey” by AllMusic.com. Djokic recently made her New York City concerto debut at Lincoln Center with the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas and Alondra de la Parra conducting Arturo Marquez’s “Espejos en la Arena”, as well as her European concerto debut with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra under Marcus Bosch. Other recent engagements featured appearances with the North Carolina Symphony, Portland Symphony, Syracuse Symphony, and the San Diego Chamber Orchestra, as well as performances of both Haydn Concerti with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mineria in Mexico City, in celebration of the 2009 Haydn Anniversary year.
Heralded as “one of the great leading cellist of the classical stage” by the Wall Street Journal, Wendy Sutter has proven herself as one of the leading soloists of her generation, widely acclaimed by critics in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other publications.
She has served as soloists under such conductors as Jaap Van Zweden, Marin Alsop, Gerard Schwarz, Dante Anziolini, Mikhail Jurowski, Michel Tabachnik and Tan Dun. Equally accomplished in the worlds of contemporary music, Sutter performed for 7 years as the cellist within The Bang on a Can “all-stars” collaborating and recording alongside Theo Bleckmann, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley.
In 1994 Ms. Sutter was invited by Mikhail Baryshnikov to give the world premiere of “A Suite of Dances” an on stage duet for Ms. Sutter playing Bach solo suites for cello accompanying Mikhail Baryshnikov. This piece was choreographed especially for these two artists by the legendary Jerome Robbins. Sutter continues to perform this work to this day with such prominent dancers as Damien Woetzel, Nicolai Hubbe and just this last season for the opening of the new Jerome Robbins Theater at The Baryshnikov Arts Center with Mikhail Baryshnikov.
The springtime of 2012 heralds a triptych of works that will be presented within large scale installations in non-traditional theatrical venues. The spaces will reflect Donald Byrd’s recent interest in subverting the traditional viewing relationship between dance and its audience. The first two dance works further develop Byrd’s previous explorations of works that first scandalized audiences at Sergei Diagahlev’s legendary Ballet Russes in fin de siècle Paris. But rather than re-staging the previous work, Byrd is creating entirely new evenings of fully immersive dance theater. The season finale will be a World Premiere work by Byrd.
