Arts & Ideas has the funk. Not to mention the Polish jazz, the political documentaries, “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour,” and dozens of other cultural happenings.
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas announced its full 2016 line-up Tuesday night during a reception at The Study at Yale Hotel in New Haven.
Some key events of the 21st annual festivities, which will take place June 10-25 in and around downtown New Haven, had already been announced: the U.S. premiere of the National Theatre of Scotland’s musical play “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour” (by “Billy Elliot” scribe Lee Hall); the SITI Company’s staging of Julie Wolfe’s folkloric neoclassical song cycle “Steel Hammer”; an A&I-commissioned collaboration among dancer Wendy Whelan, choreographer Brian Brooks and the chamber ensemble Brooklyn Rider, titled “Some of a Thousand Words”; the return of Kyle Abraham’s Abraham.In.Motion dance company; the U.S. premiere of the Kaleider company’s reality-based financial-negotiation performance piece “The Money”; and the clown troupe Acrobuffos’ wind-and-music-powered creation “Air Play.”
The new revelations included a list of who’s playing free concerts on the New Haven Green: George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic (on June 11), world-music innovator Lila Downs (June 12), a danceable double bill of the Arab band 47Soul (in its U.S. debut) and the New York-based Colombian rock act M.A.K.U SoundSystem (June 18), the return of the modern North Indian-styled rock fusion ensemble Red Baraat (June 19) and the fest-closing spectacle of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra accompanying acrobatics and other circus acts staged by Cirque Mechanics (June 25).
Previously unannounced theater events include “The Square Root of Three Sisters,” an investigation of “Chekhovian themes” by celebrated Russian director Dmitry Krymov and performers from the Yale School of Drama, the U.S. premiere of Trick of the Light Theatre’s “The Bookbinder” (inspired by the work of maverick children’s book authors Chris Van Allsburg and Neil Gaiman) and a one-man memoir-based bout of storytelling from New Yorker writer (and The Moth regular) Adam Gopnik. Arts & Ideas will once again host public “open rehearsal readings” of new musicals being developed at the Yale Institute for Music Theatre.
Besides the Wendy Whelan/Brian Brooks/Brooklyn Rider dance piece, the festival has commissioned new work from the eclectic Maria Schneider Orchestra (known these days for its work with David Bowie), to be performed June 15.
Yang Hao’s dance/movement meditation on Eastern and Western culture, “Pied a terre,” will receive its U.S. premiere at the festival June 21-22. The Bang on a Can All-Stars (colleagues of the aforementioned Julia Wolfe, who co-founded the Bang on a Can collective) join forces with progressive jazz acts from Poland for two concerts on June 19.
Recent A&I festivals have featured film series devoted to Mike Leigh, Spike Lee and others, with the filmmakers in attendance. This year’s cinematic celebrity is documentarian Alex Gibney, who’ll have six of his films (including “Taxi to the Darkside” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) screened June 10-12 and will take part in a question and answer session on June 11.
Among the nearly 20 topics on the “Ideas” side of the festival are discussions of “Youth Activism and Social Change,” “Music and Intellectual Property in the Digital Age,” “Narratives of Place and Displacement in the Americas” (with a panel of Latin American writers), “The Care Economy” (explained by “Unfinished Business” author Anne-Marie Slaughter), “Millennials and the Presidential Election,” “The Shift to Renewable Energy in Connecticut” and “Alzheimer’s, Aging and the Arts” (where scientific researchers share a stage with journalist Paul Span and Chinese puppeteer Maleonn Ma).
Free events on New Haven Green again take the form of local band concerts (from the Hartford Hot Several Brass Band on June 11 and The Afro-Semitic Experience on June 18, among many others) and family activities (such as the ever-popular, creative urban-planning enterprise Box City). Free walking tours explore the Pardee Rose Garden, the Peabody Museum, Massaro Farm, Grove Street Cemetery and elsewhere. There are more than a dozen separate “Bike Tour” excursions, some of them geographically themed (the East Coast Greenway) and others more historical or spiritual (“Climate Change Threats and Opportunities,” “Juneteenth: Celebrating the End of Slavery”). There are restaurant tours (not free; costs range from $20-$50) of Thimble Island Brewing Company and the restaurants of Grand Avenue, plus other foodie events. Some of the festival’s artists — SITI, Kyle Abraham and others — will lead free “master classes” in their chosen art forms.
Festival performance venues this year range from the Yale Rep (“Our Ladies…”) to the Shubert (“Some of a Thousand Words”) to Yale’s Iseman Theater (“Square Root of Three Sisters”) to the Quinnipiack Club (“The Money”) to the newly reopened Yale Center for British Art (“The Bookbinder”) to Sprague Hall; (Maria Schneider) to the Yale University Theatre (both Abraham.In.Motion and Acrobuffos), the Whitney Theater on Wall Street and, furthest afield, Long Wharf Theatre (“Steel Hammer,” Adam Gopnik). “Ideas” events take place at Artspace, the Yale School of Art’s Holcombe Greene Hall, Yale Art Gallery and the Whitney Humanities Center.
During the announcement, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp praised the International Festival of Arts & Ideas as a major tourism draw that has “brought the whole world to New Haven.” As part of the reception, the National Theatre of Scotland performed excerpts from the show they brought to the festival in 2011, “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart”; the close-quarters, pub-friendly theater piece is having a return engagement this week at Yale’s GPSCY Bar, sponsored by the festival.
For details on the 2016 International Festival of Arts & Ideas, visit artidea.org.
