David Lang’s love fail, written for the vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, had its world premiere at the 2012 International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Where are they now? Some of the key acts from the International Festival of Arts & Ideas are still in the country, making other stops on the culture-fest circuit.
TheNational Theatre of Scotland’s pub-set Prudentia Hart is in Chicago.
The Carolina Chocolate Drops played Fairfield University last week. Another of the big Green attractions, Roseanne Cash, is playing the Johnny Cash Music Festival, named for her father, in Jonesboro Arizona on October 5. The triple-headliner Sing the Truth! tour ended with the Arts & Ideas gig in June—Dianne Reeves, Angelique Kidjo and Lizz Wright have fanned out solo around the world, with only Wright touching down anywhere near the East Coast in the next many months, performing a free outdoor Sept. 29 show in Boston backed by Sing the Truth bandleader Terri Lyne Carrington’s Mosaic Project.
David Lang’s love fail, which had its world premiere at Arts & Ideas, will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Dec. 6-8. love fail was one of the true marvels of A&I 2012, ideally suited to the unique environment of the Yale Repertory Theatre, an old church building which morphed into a modernist performance space. Not that you can ever recapture the thrill of a world premiere, but if you happened to miss love fail at A&I, you owe it to your heart to catch this work of cutting-edge emotional ethereality in Brooklyn.
Some Arts & Ideas shows have not resurfaced. One of the culminating events of A&I 2012, the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s downsizing of King Lear to one actor, a few musicians and a bunch of gigantic boulders, has vanished in the cheek-cracking winds. (CLT’s King Lear already had its big U.S. showcase five years ago, at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival.)
As for Arts & Ideas itself, the 2013 schedule will be officially announced in the springtime. But there’s been a slew of other info about the festival in recent days.
At the end of September, the latest Arts & Ideas podcast was put up on iTunes. It’s a taping of a lecture from last summer, British Council Director of Arts Graham Sheffield holding forth on “From Soft Power to Global Connectivity—The International Birds-Eye View of Arts & Culture.” Arts & Ideas posts a podcast every couple of months. There are about 30 of them on their iTunes menu.
On October 1, Arts & Ideas announced that it would present its third annual Visionary Leadership Award to Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the journalist and documentarian who’s been a foreign correspondent for NPR, CNN and PBS. The award luncheon will be held November 14 at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale.
On October 2, A&I told its email list that “we met the challenge!,” namely a matching-grant fundraising push, and had amassed “$100,000 in 100 days.” The challenge was mentioned frequently in introductory and closing speeches at June’s A&I events. The festival was actually matching two separate grants: $25,000 from the Newman’s Own Foundation and a similar amount from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters/MetLife Foundation All-In Grant Program.
Then Frank Rizzo at the Hartford Courant broke the news that a key event of A&I 2013 will be a adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream created by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, the folks who brought you the international stage sensation War Horse. New Haven is one of only two places the show will play in the United States in 2013. The other is the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina.