Season Announcement

It's straight to the top for 8 Dallas arts groups in ATTPAC's Elevator Project

Eight small and emerging performing arts groups are once again getting a leg up, thanks to the AT&T Performing Arts Center's Elevator Project.

Now in its fifth year, the Elevator Project provides a stage at either the Studio Theatre (on the sixth floor of the Wyly Theatre) or Hamon Hall at the Winspear Opera House, as well as access to ATTPAC's operations teams, marketing, ticketing, and mentoring support.

"The Elevator Project is a tremendous passion for us here at the AT&T Performing Arts Center," says Debbie Storey, ATTPAC president and CEO. "We spotlight some of the best new and emerging arts organizations on our stages here in the Dallas Arts District. And our audiences get to meet some of the city's freshest and brightest talent performing in a range of exciting art forms. It is a powerful collaboration on all levels."

All shows are $29 general admission, and are presented in both weekend and multi-week engagements. This season is produced by Dallas theater veteran and the project's creator, David Denson.

Elevator Project veteran Jake Nice is producing the first show of the season, a new play written by former local playwright Thomas Ward. Called Slide By, it takes place the week after the Columbine shootings and follows Chad Squier, a substitute teacher who's working at his former high school amid threats of a copycat attack. Once the state wrestling champ and big man on campus, Chad is now adrift in his twenties, living at home, and carrying the guilt of a suicide that happened his senior year. After learning that most of the teachers have stayed home and the rest of them might be armed (the result of a "hush-hush" district meeting), Chad tries to make it through the day unscathed. It has 10 performances in the Studio Theatre, January 16-26.

Three performances of The Elements is next, presented by American Baroque Opera Company in Hamon Hall, February 13-15. Done in partnership with Ballet Dallas, the new work will combine rarely heard instrumental and vocal music of the baroque with modern ballet.

Verdigris Ensemble's previously announced Dust Bowl will also have three performances at Hamon Hall, February 27-29. Setting texts exclusively from newspaper articles, diaries, and first-hand oral accounts of survivors, the new work pieces together nearly a decade of human struggle, hopefulness, and perseverance in the face of constant catastrophe (libretto is by Ron Witzke and Sam Brukhman). In collaboration with a bluegrass band (music by Anthony J. Maglione), video projection by Ariana Zhang, and choreographed movement, Verdigris Ensemble premieres stories of that time period through previously unexplored mediums and asks the question: how did this happen, and have we learned from our mistakes?

Janielle Kastner and Brigham Mosley spent dozens of hours shadowing Dallas Morning News journalists to produce Playwrights in the Newsroom. The frequent collaborators have invented such Dallas cult-classics as Movies That Should be Musicals and co-founded arts incubation group The Tribe. Kastner has a new play commission from Dallas Theater Center and Mosley was a semifinalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference in 2016 and 2017. The 10 performances in the Studio Theatre run March 5-15.

Flamenco Fever from Memorias Flamencas is next, with three performances at the Wyly Theatre. Since 2016, Julia Alcantara has been co-producing with various companies in an effort to expand and educate the flamenco fan base in DFW. Now she is introducing us to the father of flamenco jazz, Jorge Pardo, as part of Ida y Vuelta's Flamenco Fusion Series. There are three performances, April 23-25.

Das Blümelein Project is producing a musical production that highlights and celebrates the universality of women finding solidarity and strength by taking back their narrative. Titled Try Me, each musical cycle portrays how females throughout history have and are currently being marginalized. DB Project will collaborate with a variety of local artists to combine music, poetry, dance, and spoken monologue in three performances at Hamon Hall, from May 21-23.

Satyam | Bias is an exploration of the progression of biases in each of us, in our relationships, and in society as a whole from Indique Dance Company. It will have three performances in Hamon Hall, June 25-27.

The season closes with a "soulquarian dance concert" that reviews the music and songs of legendary recording star Donny Hathaway. Called The Neglected Heart of Soul: An Ode to Donny Hathaway and produced by B. Moore Dance, in collaboration with Kevin Hamilton of SW Soul Circuit and dramaturg Rod Ambrose, the show is styled in the format of a symphony with four movements. Audiences will be taken on a journey of dance accompanied by live, riveting gospel, blues, jazz, and R&B that depict and reflect identity, growing up, evolving, and ceremonial practices, all rooted in black oral traditions. It plays three performances at Hamon Hall, July 16-18.

Individual tickets for each Elevator Project production are currently available online at www.attpac.org, by telephone at 214-880-0202, or in person at the AT&T Performing Arts Center Winspear Opera House box office at 2403 Flora St.

If you purchase four or more shows, the ticket price drops to $22.75 each, and you can buy discounted parking for $5 each show.

The 2020 Elevator Project advisory review panel included Albert Drake (former Bruce Wood Dance dancer and professor, artist-in-residence at Southern Methodist University), Richard McKay, (artistic director and conductor at Dallas Chamber Symphony), Anyika McMillan-Herod (co-founder and managing director of Soul Rep Theatre Company), Mara Richards Bim (founder and artistic director of Cry Havoc Theatre Co.), and Estela Tejeda (dancer, choreographer, and teacher at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts).

The recommendations of the advisory review panel were reviewed and approved by John Paul Batiste (chair of the Cultural Affairs Commission), Jennifer Scripps (director of the Office of Cultural Affairs), and Debbie Storey (president and CEO of AT&T Performing Arts Center).

Satyam | Bias from Indique Dance Company has three performances in Hamon Hall, June 25-27.

Photo courtesy of Indique Dance Company

Satyam | Bias from Indique Dance Company has three performances in Hamon Hall, June 25-27.

music dance theater concerts

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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