The International Festival of Arts & Ideas announced three of the “cornerstone” events of its 2013 season today. A&I has been intriguingly inconsistent over the years in how it ballyhoos its big events. This year, apparently, they’re going with press-release teasers. This one quotes the festival’s Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie as saying “We are so excited about these events that we just couldn’t wait until the spring to share them.” All right then .

One of the three, in any case, was leaked months ago by Frank Rizzo in the Hartford Courant, with confirmation from the festival. It’s a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream created by Handspring Puppet Company (the troupe that brought you the international hit stage version of The War Horse) in collaboration with The Bristol Old Vic theater, which premieres the show in February/March. Before it hits New Haven, the show (directed by War Horse co-director Tom Morris) will play another major American arts festival, Spoleto, in May. Arts & Ideas will have it for 12 performances, June 15-23, beginning on the opening weekend of the festival.

Arts & Ideas has commissioned a new piece from South Indian Kuychipudi dancer Shantala Shivalingappa. It’s in a great tradition of A&I offerings which mingle classical performance styles of other countries with American influences. According to the press release, “The piece will explore Shivalingappa’s wide-ranging influences as a classical Indian dancer working in the West, from her Kuchipudi traditions to experiences working with a wide range of contemporary artists.  The performance will include live music from four Indian musicians.” (That “wide range” of collaborators, by the way, included Pina Bausch.) The June 26-28 performances at Co-op High School will mark the U.S. premiere of this “new Kuchipudi solo.”

The third of the three early-announced events concerns one of the great gifts the festival provides every year: free high-class concerts on New Haven Green. One of the few ways A&I could outdo one of last year’s big outdoor shows, the Bang on a Can spin-off Asphalt Orchestra—not to mention Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project the year before— in terms of neo-classical street cred, is to book Kronos Quartet. Which they have, for the middle weekend of the festival. The quartet, celebrating its 40^th anniversary and as avant as ever, is bringing along Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man (who, as it happens, also frequently plays out with the Silk Road Project). The line-up of the Kronos Quartet has changed over the years but the current one—founding violinist David Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler—has been the same since 2005. (In 40 years, there have been only ten members of the Kronos Quartet, an excellent record.)

More Arts & Ideas announcements are due in springtime. If you’re wondering how the festival will overcome the state budget cuts which have already removed tens of thousands from A&I’s coffers (with more likely to come when the state legislature dickers about more cuts soon), well, that’s next year’s problem, on account of Arts & Ideas summer schedule and years of planning and development. These acts are coming this summer. Savor them.

Jill Abramson.

The award goes to Abramson this year, and was bestowed upon Women for Women International founder Zainab Salbi last year, but every year it honors the late Jean Handley, a cool and down-to-earth civic leader who served on a zillion boards and committees and was a founding director of Arts & Ideas. Money raised at the awards luncheon goes to the Jean M. Handley Fund for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which supports festival stuff which Handley would have especially appreciated.

Jean Handley.

PROMO VIDEO FOR DAVID T. LITTLE’S SOLDIER SONGS

The songs, I like. The soldier part I’m still wrestling with.

Since both shows have classical elements and war themes, it’s hard not to compare David T. Little’s Soldier Songs (which I saw in its final Arts & Ideas performance, 5 p.m. June 25) with Bill T. Jones’ luminous meditation on the American Civil War, Serenade/The Proposition (which I saw just 21 hours earlier, at its A&I debut).
Where Serenade/The Proposition is sprightly and purposefully sparse, Soldier Songs was heavy-handed and laden with overblown special effects. Where S/P avoids most of the clichés associated with war shows, SS embraces seemingly all of them.
Granted, the difference is inherent in the show’s very titles: one’s a serenade, the other’s a soldier song. But I felt deeply moved by Jones’ work while Little’s (as directed by Yuval Sharon and performed by David Adam Moore) was coarse and crass and obvious. In this multi-styled song cycle, war is depicted with blinding lights, splashes of blood, and loud, chaotic noises. Maybe this would be an effective technique if we hadn’t become immune to that sort of overkill through a century of garish war movies and video games.
Soldier Songs makes that exact point—that people join the army with false hopes of heroism and adventure, when the reality can be much different. At one point Moore screams “Someone yell ‘Cut’! Someone yell ‘Cut!” But Soldier Songs’ own staging isn’t far removed from Hollywood extremism, more sensationalistic than sensitive.

DAVID ADAM MOORE, NAKED AND BLOODSOAKED IN SOLDIER SONGS.

The other actor/singer in the show besides Moore is Sam Poon as “boy”—a child whose initial experience of war is imaginative playground games. Soldier Songs gets pretty imaginative itself—a seesaw, behind a shadow screen, looks like a cannon, and Moore undergoes some quick costume changes under cover of darkness—but these moments start to come off as gimmicky. Amid all the blood and craziness, attempts at satire (a veteran’s memorial wall which reads “What’sHisName, What’sHerName, What’sHisName, What’sHerName”) fall flat.

This small-seeming show has operatic ambitions, but that doesn’t excuse its overwrought imagery. Little’s score is propulsive and unsettling, veering from minimalism to a bass-heavy hard rock vibe to, well, vibes. It’s bracing to hear this complex composition played live by the adventurous eight-piece band Newspeak rather than pre-recorded. Stylistic changes are achieved through clever repurposing of instruments—violins are plucked, xylophones pinged, keyboards banged. I’d love to hear the score on its own. Its subtleties are washed out by the visual bombast of Moore’s unrestrained theatrics. Rather than a deep rumble of anti-war anguish, Soldier Songs is a simplistic shocker.

Soldier Songs had its final performance at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas on June 25. The piece was reorchestrated for this festival. No future performances are currently listed on David T. Little’s website.

PROMO VIDEO PRODUCED BY THE BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson this ain’t. Bill T. Jones’ 2008 choreographic musing on the Civil War puts an emphasis on civility.

Confrontation is not the choreographic goal here. Dancers slide past and around each other. They fuse and release. Communities are formed, then torn asunder through subtle, sensual movements. Instead of daggers, we get glares. Instead of victory yells, we get awkward handshakes. Bloodthirsty audience members will have to settle for the red sashes worn by the some of the dancers.

The decorum and composure is disarming, and more fraught with tension that the most acrobatically staged weapon-wielding battle might have been. Bill T. Jones isn’t concerned with surface violence. He understands the emotional core of what could bring a country—or its individuals—to self-destruction. Events are played out not on battlefields butin front of austere white pillars.

A RARE SOLO MOMENT FROM SERENADE/THE PROPOSITION. PHOTO BY PAUL B. GOODE.

Even the rousing recitations of writings by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Clement Sullivane are softened through being voiced primarily by the mezzo-soprano Lisa Komara, who also transforms “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” from the plodding doom-march cliché it’s become into a splendiferous operatic release. Komara composed sections of Serenade/Proposition’s widespread score, which also features compositions by Jerome Begin, Christopher Antonio and William Lancaster. Komara’s more mellifluous readings are balanced by the deeper tones of actor Jamyl Dobson. Since the vocal bits are delivered from podiums at each side of the wide Yale University Theater stage, they have the air of modern political speechmaking, though even the proclamations excerpted from actual speeches and lectures have a warmth and humanity to them.

The only overblown elements of Serenade/Proposition is the occasionally tacky video design by Janet Wong. Portraits of Civil War soldiers projected onto the stage’s imposing pillars are merely obvious; a tacky backdrop image in which the White House has flames erupting from every window is too much.

Yet you could have bullets flying in the auditorium and this would still be an austere and beautiful dance event. Bill T. Jones truly fits the Arts & Ideas ideal of big ideas made accessible to summer audiences. The esteemed choreographer/conceptualizer was a part of one of the first Arts & Ideas festivals in the mid-1990s and has made a grand return with an eye-opening discussion at last year’s festival and now the one-two, uh, not a punch of Body Against Body and Serenade/Proposition.

Whether it concerns death from AIDS, quarreling grown-up siblings, culture clashes or the Civil War, Jones’ work (which continues to produced under the combined names of Jones and his late partner Arnie Zane) uses dance not as a full-bodied bludgeon but as a fluid method of connecting music, oration, video, history and sociopolitical urges into a grand, understandable statement that shows us danger and devastation but also shows us how we can maintain our cool and persevere.

Serenade/The Proposition has one final performance at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, 5 p.m. June 25 at the Yale University Theater, 222 York St., New Haven. www.artidea.org.

New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas tried in vain for years to create an Edinburgh-esque “fringe” festival to surround it. Turns out you can’t just manufacture these things. But two fests which were in a sense inspired by A&I have endured.

One is the Audubon Arts on the Edge festival, as old as Arts & Ideas itself. The 2011 edition is Saturday June 4 from noon to 5 p.m. on Audubon Street, between Orange and Whitney in downtown New Haven.

The fest’s title overreaches all over the place, since neither the arts nor the location are in any way “on the edge.” Many of the performers come from local schools or mainstream arts organizations, the fest is overwhelming kid-friendly, and Audubon street is only a couple of blocks from New Haven Green, in the city’s designated arts district.

What it may lack in edginess, however, it delivers in comfort and cheeriness. Art on the Edge is a free and easy way to check up on some of the area’s reigning school-based performing arts groups, including ensembles from New Haven Ballet, the Educational Center for the Arts and Neighborhood Music School. There are interactive exhibits and demonstrations from local museums and other community organizations throughout the day. Most of the live performances are musical, but there are some dance and spoken word acts:

At noon and again at 1:40 p.m. on the Leeney stage: The Peruvian Folk Dance Group doing Tusuykusin Peru

At 1 p.m. and again at 2 p.m. on the Park of the Arts stage: Storytellers sponsored by New Haven Free Public Library

At 1:30 p.m.: Stiltwalker Lady Blaze.

At 2:10 p.m. on the Leeney stage: New Haven Ballet.

At 3 p.m.: Don Wunderlee doing a Punch & Judy show.

At 3:55 p.m. on the Leeney stage: Neighborhood in Motion—An Interactive Dance Experience.

A complete sched is here (in PDF form).

The other A&I-adjacent New Haven arts festival is of course Ideat Village, which began as openly antagonistic towards A&I but has long since settled into its own independent groove. This is Ideat Village’s tenth anniversary, a landmark it reached despite some organizational waffling a few years ago (the founders almost stopped doing it, then happily changed their minds) and despite some serious obstacles placed in its way by certain downtown civic and business interests.

Ideat Village is entirely dependent on a volunteer staff, community donations and city park permits. This year I’m told they’ve been stymied by sudden alterations in the hours when outdoor events can be held in downtown park areas. We trust the nonsense will be overcome and the Ideats can take over the asylum once again. Meantime, there’s an Ideat Village fundraiser June 4 at 9 p.m. at café nine with seven bands for a mere six-buck cover.

Had fun last night fooling around with the brand new app fashioned for New Haven’s impending 2011 International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Like the fest itself, it’s classy and community-oriented at the same time.

The app (available as a free download for both iPhone and Droid) offers frequent friendly postings counting down the days to the festival and alerting fans to preview events, discount opportunities. Besides those updates, there’s a slightly more verbose blog to pore over. There’s also a slew of videos, though unfortunately most of them are touting previous festivals. That should change as more material about this year’s featured performers—Yo Yo Ma, Druid Theatre Company, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Susan Marshall  & Co. et al.—gets disseminated.

For the here and now (and the soon-enough), there’s a calendar and a venue map which will come in handy when you’re downtown rushing from show to show once the festival’s actually happening (and not just virtually here), June 11-25.

At which this invaluable Arts & Ideas app is doubtless going to loudly interrupt an Arts & Ideas concert because some patron forgot to turn off their ‘phone.