Radicals. Choirs. A billion nights. A big read. Whodini. Ruth B. Kaki King. A dance to the Beatles. Stories from survivors. Five merchants of Venice.
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas has announced all the acts for its 2018 edition, which runs June 9 to 23 in downtown New Haven.
Tickets to the dozens of festival events went on sale as soon as the schedule was announced Thursday night. This is a departure from previous years, when there has often been a two-week period between the announcement and the on-sale date.
Arts & Ideas Director of Programming Chad Herzog says that the festival is “representing the voices of others. We are able to share beliefs, experiences and world views we don’t always get in this country. We do our damnedest to give everyone a voice.”
Highlights of the 2018 festival include:
* A provocative production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” adapted and directed by Karin Coonrod, in which all five of the show’s cast members share the role of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. “Karin sees a little bit of Shylock in each of us,” Herzog says. The show, which will be performed outdoors in the Yale Law School courtyard June 19 to 23, premiered in Venice, Italy, in 2016 and was seen in New Jersey last year.
* The family-friendly father/son adventure story “A Billion Nights on Earth” June 14 and 15. The theater event was created by Thaddeus Phillips and Steven Dufala using giant puppets, giant props and extraordinary special effects.
* Guitar virtuoso Kaki King with her one-woman multimedia concert experience “The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body” June 20. Herzog says the festival has commissioned a new work from King for a future festival.
* “Radicals in Miniature” June 12 and 13, in which theater artist Ain Gordon and percussionist Josh Quillen tell stories of those who inhabited the New York arts scene of the 1970s and ’80s, from club legend John Sex to disco star Sylvester and early Cro-Mags drummer David Hahn.
* The Yale International Choral Festival June 13 to 16, featuring vocal ensembles from Germany and Switzerland, Mexico, Sri Lanka and New York.
* Free concerts on New Haven Green with saxophonist Elan Trotman, guitarist Rohn Lawrence and The Rahsaan Langley Project (June 9); the all-female progressive mariachi act Flor de Toloache and the Chicano band Las Cafetera (June 10); ’80s rapper Whodini (June 13); singer/songwriter Ruth B (June 16); and Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar backed by 10 members of the Rivers of Sound Orchestra and 13 members of New Haven Symphony Orchestra (June 17).
Two key Arts & Ideas events had been revealed before this main announcement: Mark Morris Dance Company’s “Pepperland,” scored to Beatles songs and new compositions by Ethan Iverson (June 21 and 22); and the premiere of “Requiem for an Electric Chair” by Congolese theater maker Toto Kisaku (June 22 and 23) based on his own experience of nearly being executed due to his political theater work. “Toto’s story is so unbelievable,” Herzog marvels, “that you expect it only to be something you’d see on a stage.”
A prevailing theme of the festival will be “immigrants,” Herzog says. “It ties in to a lot of the events, including ‘Requiem for an Electric Chair,’ ‘A Billion Nights on Earth’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice.'” Portraits of immigrants by photographer Joe Standart will be seen on buildings around New Haven and figure prominently in festival publicity.
“We’re asking,” Herzog says, “what does it mean to be a citizen today?’ I’m not saying we have the answers. Hopefully, we have the right questions.”
A new series that began last year, “Altar’d Spaces,” will return to Arts & Ideas with performances by a range of music acts: The Coastal Reeds (June 12), Elegant Primates (June 12), The Joe Carter Samba Rio Trio (June 13), Zikina (June 14), The Recess Bureau (June 19), Carte Noire (June 19), The Meadows Brothers (June 20) and The Kenn Morr Band (June 20). The “Altar’d Spaces” concerts take place in four historic churches on or near the New Haven Green.
There are nearly 20 talks on the “Ideas” end of Arts & Ideas. Among them: “I’ll Be Your Qubit! — The Entanglement of Quantum Physics and Art” with quantum physicist Michel Devoret and artist Martha W. Lewis (June 12); “Designing for the Five Senses — Storytelling in an Oversaturated World” with Itamar Kubovy of Pilobolus and Bruce Mau of Massive Change Network (June 13); “Refugee Resettlement — A Noble Tradition Under Attack” with Chris George of IRIS (June 14); “How To Make Your Town Somewhere Everyone Wants To Live” with folksinger/author Dar Williams; and “The Act You’ve Known for All These Years — Deconstructing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ with Beatles scholar Scott Freiman (June 20).
There will be lunchtime concerts on New Haven Green by Voci Angelica Trio (June 12), the Elm City Dance Collective (June 13), Haven String Quartet (June 14) and Toxic Holiday (June 15), as well as an afternoon “Family Series” featuring the Elm Shakespeare Teen Troupe (June 12), Tanglewood Marionettes (June 13), guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan (playing two premiere works commissioned by the festival, June 14) and Lou Del Bianco storytelling show “In the Shadow of the Mountain” (June 15). Evening weekday concerts on the Green include Funky Dawgz Brass Band (June 12), a different set by Aaron Larget-Caplan (“Music of the East and West,” June 12) and the 100-voice-strong New Haven GospelFest (June 15).
Strongwoman Betty Brawn twists metal and tears books in half June 9 and 10 on New Haven Green. “You’ll be surprised at what this woman can lift,” Herzog says.
The new local political theater troupe Survivors of Society Rising performs on the Green June 9. The third annual “Limitless” dance competition on the Green takes place June 16.
The dozens of festival-organized bike tours, walking tours, boat tours and dining/tasting experiences are now contained under a single broad category titled “Trex.”
The popular Box City project, where participants decorate cardboard buildings then receive zoning permits to place them in a model cityscape, will be on the Green June 16 and 17.
The three neighborhood festivals that take place in New Haven before the main festival will no longer be called “pop-up” festivals. Herzog says the committees that oversee the events said, “We’ve been here five years. Can we drop the name ‘pop-up'”? The neighborhood festivals occur May 19 in The Hill, May 20 in Dixwell and in Fair Haven May 26.
For the fourth time in its history (and the second year in a row), the International Festival of Arts & Ideas will be involved with the National Endowment for the Arts’ literary initiative The Big Read. The book to be read and discussed this year is poet Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric.” Rankine received this year’s Arts & Ideas Visionary Leadership Award at a ceremony in March. The Big Read encompasses several weeks of events, which began in April and continue through mid-June.
One Arts & Idea tradition that will not be returning: the public readings of new musicals workshopped by the Yale Institute of Music Theatre. Yale ended the program last year.
As for where it all happens, Yale’s black-box Iseman Theater will host “Radicals in Miniature” and “Requiem for an Electric Chair.” The large Yale University Theatre is the site of “A Billion Nights on Earth.” “Pepperland” will be danced at the Shubert. There won’t be any A&I shows at Long Wharf Theatre or at the Yale Repertory Theatre this year.
The Yale Law School Courtyard, where “The Merchant of Venice” will be staged, was for many years the location of a popular Arts & Ideas outdoor concert series, which ended around a decade ago after numerous shows had to be canceled due to rain. Herzog says there has been public demand for a return to shows in the courtyard. “And what better place to have ‘The Merchant of Venice,'” he says, “than the Yale Law School Courtyard?” The play ends in a trial scene.
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas is known for introducing New Haven audiences to accomplished artists whose stars are continuing to rise.
A featured artist from last year was choreographer Camille A. Brown, whose piece “Black Girl” was commissioned by Herzog before he joined Arts & Ideas. Since Arts & Ideas, Brown has been acclaimed for her work on the Broadway musical “Once on This Island” and the televised “Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert”). “People who had the opportunity to see Camille on TV can say they saw her live. Others say ‘I can’t believe I missed that.'”
Herzog is a co-executive director of the festival alongside Director of Development Tom Griggs and Managing Director Elizabeth Fisher. The new three-sided management arrangement began as an interim solution after the departure of longtime Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie last year, but became the official new leadership model in November.
The complete schedule, and tickets to the events, can be found at the festival’s website, artidea.org.
