Spectral Scriabin, a collaboration of piano and lights performed by Eteri Andjaparidze and designed by Yale's own Jennifer Tipton, comes to the university's No Boundaries series in February. Photo by Chris Lee.

The series’ 2011-12 slate was announced last week. It represents a rare and longrunning collaboration between the undergraduate Yale Theater Studies program’s World Performance Project and the Yale School of Drama graduate program. No Boundaries presents three visiting theater or dance companies a year. Beyond the performances, there are usually related workshops and seminars. The series tends to go for artists that are pushing the bound…—let’s just say envelope this time—of language and established theatrical formats.
No Boundaries has offered an exhilarating range of good to bad, with indifference never an option.

Here they come, boundarying in:
• Nov. 3-5: The American premiere of Engagement Feminin: An Evening of West African Contemporary Dance with the Burkina Faso-based company Art’Dev/Compagnie Auguste-Bienvenue. Art’Dev is a truncation of Association Artistique Développement. The directors are Auguste Ouedraogo and Bienvenue Bazie, both of whom are in their early 30s; they founded Art’Dev in 2000. While Ouedraogo and Bazie are male, they are conscious of the lack of dances by and about women in West Africa. The hour-long Engagement Feminin piece, in which dancers “explore the everyday choices the women of their communities make,” is part of that outreach.

• Feb. 10-11: Spectral Scriabin, a solo piano concert by Eteri Andjaparidze enhanced by “illumination” of renowned stage lighting designer Jennifer Tipton.
The Russian-born but now New York-based, Andjaparidze was at Yale just last year, doing Schumann duets with Boris Berman for the School of Music’s Horowitz Piano Series. Jennifer Tipton is a leading light ‘round these parts: the 2008 MacArthur fellow teaches at the Yale School of Drama and her recent theater lighting designs include The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf and Autumn Sonata at Yale Rep.
Such “illuminated” concerts were a huge deal on the festival circuit a few years ago—lightshow enhancements for those who’d grown up on Pink Floyd laser shows and who’d learned to sit still for classical music. Tipton’s the top artist you could hope to get for such an endeavor, and compose Scriabin himself would likely have approved of the format: he experimented with various linkings of sound, light and color, and may have had the neurological condition synesthesia, which heightens one’s sensitivity to sound to the point where it’s similar to taste or vision. The hour-long event contains excerpts from the composer’s Poeme Languide in B Major, Feuillet d’Album in F Sharp Major and Opus Posthumous.
Spectral Scriabin was performed last October at New York’s Baryshknikov Arts Center and has a California gig shortly after this Yale one.

• March 23 & 24: Neva, written and directed by Chilean political theater artist Guillermo Calderón and performed by his ensemble Teatro en el Blanco.
The Yale Rep (Three Sisters) and the Yale School of Drama (The Seagull) are both checking into Chekhov, so why not No Boundaries? Guillermo Calderon’s Neva, performed in Spanish with supertitles, is an original work set in 1905, after Chekhov’s death. On a darkly lit rehearsal stage in 1905 , the playwright’s widow Olga Knipper laments his passing, and also the passing of a way of life and a way of performing.
I was in Los Angeles this past summer, where Neva was a hit attraction at the Radar L.A. festival. One of my esteemed colleagues at the Engine28 website project, Kerry Lengel, reviewed the show, here. Another Engine28er, Ben Waterhouse, posed a technical question to Calderon—how come he staged this ostensibly historical drama around a modern space-heater appliance? Answer here.

Guillermo Calderon's Neva. Photo by Pepe Murrieta.

For Boundaries details, go here, and don’t forget about all the related symposia, talkbacks and workshops. This is an especially interactive and multi-faceted series, befitting the fresh and sometimes challenging concepts No Boundaries brings to town.

An image from Dewey Dell's a elle vide. Photo by Paolo Rapalino.

Had a fun ‘phone chat the other day with several members of Dewey Dell. The brash young Italian movement troupe has been at Wesleyan University in Middletown for the past week leading student workshops and performing the U.S. premieres of two of their distinctively colorful, kinetic and techno-pulsed movement theater pieces. The 20-minute two-character work a elle vide was performed last weekend, while the grander Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti—the title has been translated as Furious Fifties, Roaring Forties, Shrieking Sixties—will be done TONIGHT (Friday, Sept. 16) at 8 p.m. in Wesleyan’s CFA Theater.

The company members are still college-age themselves. Dewey Dell formed just four years ago out of a school project, and one of the troupe’s goals at Wesleyan is to use the students in their workshops to begin devising larger ensemble works.

Here’s a 13-minute YouTube excerpt from Cinquanta Urlanti Quaranta Ruggenti Sessanta Stridenti:

Three of the four founders of Dewey Dell—Agata, Demetrio and Teodora Castellucci—are siblings, offspring of the renowned Italian director Romeo Castellucci, known here in Connecticut for the mindblowing, inner-throat examining adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which Castellucci’s Societas Raffaello Sanzio company brought to the Stamford Center for the Arts as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 2000. That Julius Caesar was one of the intellectually hippest art events happening that summer (I remember meeting Susan Sontag in the lobby), just as Dewey Dell’s appearance—the first U.S. appearance of a company that’s barely toured—is a real coup for Wesleyan.

While the troupe wants to maintain their independence from Castellucci and his work, there are strong connections. The Societas Raffaello Sanzio runs a school, Stoa, based on methods and philosophies about rhythm and movement developed by Claudia Castellucci—Romeo’s sister, the aunt of Teodora, Agata and Demetrio.

Dewey Dell has the precocity and open-minded ensemble sense of a rock band, with the sort of name a smart band might pick. Dewey Dell named themselves for a character in William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, explains Eugenia Resta, the sole Dewey Dell co-founder not surnamed Castellucci. “We wanted a female name for our company. And everybody had read this novel,” Resta said in halting English.

Touring, Resta says, “wasn’t the first idea. We did a little performance in a school, exposed some little works we prepared during the year.” Their work got noticed and won a choreography award, which led to “a lot of little festivals,” where their shorter, 25-minute pieces could play alongside other acts. Besides the two established works they’ve brought to Wesleyan, Dewey Dell is developing a new piece while on campus. “We decided to work with students from the workshop,” Resta says. We are thinking to continue this work, involving a group of ten people”—Dewey Dell’s grandest work yet.

The company develops its works communally, with attention paid to the sort of space in which they’ll ultimately be performed. According to Demetrio Castellucci, who provides the musical elements, “There isn’t anything that’s first or second in this process. Sometimes I create a musical skeleton, and the [dancers] build on that. Sometimes the percussion is adjusted for the movements. Sometimes the music is first, then at the last minute things change.” The composer—who does ultimately record his score and play it from the sound booth rather than play live—is always asking himself “How will the room sound? In our second work, we were in this neoclassical hall, in front of a very clear space, so I worked on a reverberating sound.” Currently he’s working on “very quiet sounds. The purpose is to make very low sounds that sound like loud sounds coming from a great distance. It’s a dramatic question. I’m very interested in moving the sound into the space.”

Castellucci speaks of creating an “onomatopoeia to movement,” and is fascinated with cultures where music and dance are inextricably linked. “The Swahili word for drum means both dance movement and music. I like how in Africa, music is just a part of the whole.” Demetrio calls Dewey Dell “a very linked union.”

“Working with family, of course, is a very special thing. Some aspects are good, and there are the other sides. It’s good because we don’t need to talk much because we understand what we mean.”