TheaterWorksUSA’s production of Peter Pan is based on John Caird and Trevor Nunn’s 1982 adaptation, which was originally developed for London’s Royal Shakespeare Company. In the spirit of the original tale, this production tells the story through the eyes of six children living in Edwardian England. Together, they transform the Darling family’s nursery into Neverland, turning pillows into clouds, long-johns into shadows, an ironing board into a ship’s plank, and antique snowshoes into a crocodile’s snapping jaws. This enchanting production celebrates childhood and captures the magic of the imagination.
Approximate Running Time: 60 Minutes
Recommended Ages: 3 and up
Concurrently primitive and futuristic, The Earth Harp incorporates sculpting, architecture and sound design, standing at the crossroads of music and art. The Earth Harp was built and developed by William Close, a New York native and alumni at the Art Institute of Chicago. William performs as part of The Earth Harp Collective – a team of musicians, dancers, aerialists and artists.
While studying at the Institute, Close realized in order to succeed he had to do something that no one else had done. An avid musician who played in garage bands as a teenager, he started concocting then building his own instruments. His background as a sailor served as inspiration for the use of natural sounds – the wind whipping the sails, the sound of the rigs flapping and being pulled tight.
“I’ve always seen and heard the world as an instrument,” says Close. “Just hearing nature’s tones inspires me.”
The body of The Earth Harp rests on the stage, while the strings travel over the audience, attaching to the back of the theatre, concert hall and/or festival ground, turning every space into an instrument. By using violin rosin covered gloves along the strings, the Earth Harp’s bowed tones and overlapping ripple effect offers a dramatic cathedral-like sound effect.
Close’s celebrated Earth Harp earned him a finalist slot on NBC’s America’s Got Talent and was recently named by the World Record Academy as creating and holding the record for the world’s largest stringed instrument. Close has designed at least two permanent Earth Harp installations, one as part of Cirque du Soleil’s show KA at the MGM Las Vegas, the other as part of a 1,300-seat theater aboard the Royal Caribbean International’s newest ship, Quantum of the Seas. He has brought his Earth Harp to iconic venues like Rome’s Coliseum, Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center, New York’s Lincoln Center, Seattle’s Space Needle, Shanghai’s Grand Theater, Sao Paulo’s Theatro Muncipal, Qatar’s Dhow Harbour, as well as major U.S. festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bumbershoot, Burning Man and Lighting in a Bottle. With an interest in soundtrack work, Close has also recorded music for Game Of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi for Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim.
“I love the idea of these expansive, grand-scale, but still user-friendly experiences,” he says.
For Close and his Earth Harp, the sky is literally no limit
Strange Radio, Live! is an immersive lecture-performance in story and sound, part of an ongoing series of experimental radio narrowcasts and broadcasts about the stranger, nearness and distance, forced migration, displacement, home, and the intergenerational transmission of memory. Strange Radio’s point of departure is Holocaust postmemory in Vienna, Austria, a sonic portal for sensing experiences of strangers and strangeness in multiple unfolding contexts across the globe. Strange Radio, Live! weaves together personal documentary; disembodied voices and sounds separated from points of origin; fragile signals transmitted through radios and embodied reflections on memory, place, time, and radio—itself a strange medium. Postmemories bounce against histories, sometimes buried and inaudible, in new locations. Tuned into both utopian longings and wounds, Strange Radio is a fragile signal, a love song to radio as a medium, metaphor, and method of deep listening together.
Karen Werner is an award-winning radio artist, audio storyteller, and sociologist. Her audio pieces have been broadcast on community and public radio stations across Europe, North America, Australia, and Israel. They have also been part of numerous live events and art exhibitions. In 2017-2018, Werner created a series of public sound installations at Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, including “Covenant of the Tongue” and “Zirkus,” which are sonic autoethnographies about Holocaust postmemory in Vienna. Her recent work is in live performance: sound installation meets documentary storytelling meets narrowcast radio transmission. Werner is a 2019 invited artist at the Kone Foundation’s Saari Residence in Finland and was a 2017-2018 Fellow of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She received a Tending Space Fellowship from the Hemera Foundation from 2014-2016 for artists with a Buddhist practice. She is on the faculty of the BFA in Socially Engaged Art Program at Goddard College in Vermont.
Elizabeth Demaray is an artist who focuses on the interface between the built and the natural environment. In this vein, she builds listening stations for birds that play human music, cultures lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City, and designs alternative forms of housing for land hermit crabs. These artworks often involve the concept of a biotope, which is a small environment where human and non-human populations overlap.
While in residence at Monmouth University, Demaray will present these projects and will lead a workshop on non-anthropocentric design. She will also be pairing with the campus to create a community-based project that embraces the idea of “trans-species giving.” According to Demaray, the concept of trans-species giving asserts that the commonalities between life forms are such that we may actually be able to give other organisms a “hand up,” notwithstanding our own cultural or species-specific assumptions about the natural world.
Demaray is the recipient of the National Studio Award from the New York Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, and was the featured artist at the 2014 Association of Environmental Science Studies symposium, Welcome to the Anthropocene. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is an associate professor of fine arts and head of the sculpture concentration at Rutgers University, Camden. On the Rutgers, New Brunswick, campus, she is a work group advisor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and an advisor at The Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University, in the Department of Computer Science, which is dedicated to supporting artistic practice in the fields of computer vision and machine learning.
Franco Zeffirelli’s spectacular production returns to cinemas with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, conducting his first Puccini opera with the company. Powerhouse soprano Christine Goerke takes on the icy title princess, alongside tenor Roberto Aronica as the unknown prince vying for her love.
Franco Zeffirelli’s spectacular production returns to cinemas with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, conducting his first Puccini opera with the company. Powerhouse soprano Christine Goerke takes on the icy title princess, alongside tenor Roberto Aronica as the unknown prince vying for her love.
Massenet’s tale of passion, excess, and their consequences stars rising soprano Lisette Oropesa in the effervescent title role. Tenor Michael Fabiano is her ardent admirer, Chevalier des Grieux, with Maurizio Benini conducting Laurent Pelly’s enchanting production.
Massenet’s tale of passion, excess, and their consequences stars rising soprano Lisette Oropesa in the effervescent title role. Tenor Michael Fabiano is her ardent admirer, Chevalier des Grieux, with Maurizio Benini conducting Laurent Pelly’s enchanting production.
Anthony Minghella’s vividly cinematic staging returns to cinemas, featuring soprano Hui He in the devastating title role. Pier Giorgio Morandi conducts one of opera’s most beautiful and heartbreaking scores, with a cast that also includes tenor Piero Pretti as Pinkerton, baritone Paulo Szot as Sharpless, and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as Suzuki.
Anthony Minghella’s vividly cinematic staging returns to cinemas, featuring soprano Hui He in the devastating title role. Pier Giorgio Morandi conducts one of opera’s most beautiful and heartbreaking scores, with a cast that also includes tenor Piero Pretti as Pinkerton, baritone Paulo Szot as Sharpless, and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as Suzuki.
