Season Announcement

ATTPAC's Elevator Project 2021-22 season is multi-genre and mega-local

Soul Rep Theatre Company presents Do No Harm

Soul Rep Theatre Company's Do No Harm, recorded at Dallas Heritage Village last year, will be performed live in March 2022.

Photo by Malcolm Herod

The 2021-2022 season of the Elevator Project, a program from the AT&T Performing Arts Center that features the work of small and emerging arts groups throughout the center’s campus, has been released.

Produced by David Denson, the season encompasses new productions from eight Dallas-based performing arts companies, as well as one local company rescheduled from the 2019-20 season (thanks, COVID-19).

Of the dance, theater, music, multi-genre, and a spoken word performances, six productions will be staged in the Studio Theatre, located on the sixth floor of the Wyly Theatre; two will be outdoors in Strauss Square; and one will be in Hamon Hall in the Winspear Opera House.

It begins October 28-30, 2021, in the Studio Theatre with Sangeet Millennium and Art Nomadic's Clear Light of the Void, a multidisciplinary, multi-media, multi-linguistic performance installation exploring the notion of a journey through a metaphysical world. Three distinct but related mystical traditions are enacted through music, movement, spoken word recitation, light installations, and video projections.

Soul Rep Theatre Company's production of Do No Harm is next, March 10-19, 2022, in the Studio Theatre. Written by Soul Rep's co-founder Anyika McMillan-Herod and commissioned by theologian Dr. Evelyn Parker and the Association of Practical Theology, the play explores the story of three enslaved women — Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy — who were experimented on without anesthesia by Dr. J. Marion Sims, credited as "the father of modern gynecology."

Do No Harm was filmed in November 2020 in a slave cabin at Dallas Heritage Village and made its world premiere as a hybrid play/film for Soul Rep’s recent 25th anniversary season. This will be a traditional play for the stage, with a live audience — as the company first intended it.

Janelle Gray's Rage is a one-act play that explores the stories of "Black U.S.-ian women" throughout the history of the United States. Ten women take their place onstage to share their stories of strength, resilience, perseverance, and struggle, from the 1842 Cherokee Revolt to the Streetcar Boycotts of 1900-1906, and the continuing injustices of today. It runs March 31-April 9, 2022, in the Studio Theatre.

Rescheduled from the 2019-20 season, Indique Dance Company will use pure dance and storytelling to explore the different ways in which perspective shapes our relationships in Maya: The Illusion We Live. It is human nature to allow our personal biases and assumptions to become a pair of tinted glasses that color everything we see, but what happens when we remove the filters? Find out April 14-16, 2022, in the Studio Theatre.

Urban Arts Collective takes us outside to Strauss Square June 2-4, 2022, with Love You Madly: Celebrating the Music of Duke Ellington. Get transported back to 1920s New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, celebrating the big band era through music, dance and spoken word. The entire band is comprised of Dallas musicians under the direction of Dallas’ premiere jazz band director, Dean Hilland, and the show is choreographed by JuNene K. and directed by Obie Award winner Ed Smith.

Also in Strauss Square is Bandan Koro African Drum and Dance Ensemble's Griots: Celebrating a Compilation of Dallas’ Cultural Storytellers of the African Diaspora. "Griot" is a French word that originated in the 13th century from the Mande empire of Mali, West Africa, and for centuries they have told and retold the history of the empire, keeping their stories and traditions alive. Pay homage to an array of Dallas' key artistic and cultural storytellers, such as Erykah Badu, Vicki Meek, Michelle Gibson, Baba Hassan, the late Afiah Bey, Bandon Koro’s own Tony Browne and Nana Kweku, plus many, many more. It runs June 17-18, 2022.

Rhythm and Rhapsody from Verb Kulture is an artistic fusion of storytelling and poetic expression that shares stories that reflect social challenges in the African-American community. The stories presented are inspired by news headlines, Dallas community interviews, and personal experiences. It runs July 14-16, 2022, in Hamon Hall.

Justin Locklear is deconstructing Shakespeare's The Tempest with Enter Several Strange Shapes, Bringing in a Banquet, a genre-bending work that plays with elements of dance, theater, performance art, and multi-media. Utilizing none of the characters from the original work, the play instead builds a world from the themes and metaphors of The Tempest, creating a new myth altogether. It runs August 4-13, 2022, in the Studio Theatre.

Bombshell Dance Project finishes out the season with In the Conservatory with the Knife, an immersive dance experience loosely inspired by the game of Clue. With a unique, free-form nature, audiences will choose for themselves how and when to move throughout the Studio Theatre, guaranteeing a different experience for each person. It runs August 26-28, 2022.

All shows are $29.50 general admission, and tickets are available to purchase now at www.attpac.org or by calling 214-880-0202.

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

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