VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects: AGING MAGICIAN

The Watermill Center is pleased to present Director/Designer Julian Crouch, Librettist/Performer Rinde Eckert and Composer, Paola Prestini who will read sections from the libretto of their new work AGING MAGICIAN, play a film, and create a scene based on the work created during their residency at Watermill with students from the Park Avenue Armory Youth Corps. It is the artists’ goal to use this workshop / performance as a way to illuminate how the themes of legacy and death relate to the age group at hand.

ABOUT AGING MAGICIAN

A new music-theatre work, AGING MAGICIAN uses a composite of sonic and visual elements to guide a man entering his final stages of life to the fantastical world of Coney Island. Composed by Paola Prestini with libretto by Rinde Eckert, design and direction by Julian Crouch, instrument designer Mark Stewart, and projection designer, S. Katy Tucker, AGING MAGICIAN’S creative team combines music, theatre, puppetry, instrument making, and scenic design to create an enduring work for the stage. This project is co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects (Executive Producer) and VisionIntoArt and is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

ABOUT THE ARMORY YOUTH CORPS

The Armory Youth Corps is designed to engage high school students in the Armory’s operations, and foster their interest in the arts, architecture, and historic preservation. Students in this program have the opportunity to gain experience working behind the scenes at an arts organization, which will strengthen students’ artistic, career, and life skills through project-based learning, career readiness training, and leadership development.

AGING MAGICIAN is part of our new partnership with Park Avenue Armory’s Artist-in-Residence Program.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Julian Crouch is a director, designer, writer, and teacher whose career has spanned theatre, opera, film, and television. Initially a mask and puppet maker, Crouch co-designed CHARIVARI for Trickster Theatre. In 1992, he began a creative partnership with Phelim McDermott for whom he designed DR. FAUSTUS, IMPROBABLE TALES, THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS, and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (Theatrical Management Association (TMA) Nomination, Best Designer of the Year). They co-directed and designed THE QUEST FOR DON QUIXOTE, which received a Best Design nomination (London Fringe Awards), and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM for English Shakespeare Company (TMA Award, Best Touring Production). Crouch and McDermott’s most enduring collaboration to date is SHOCKHEADED PETER, created for Cultural Industry (Olivier Award, Best Entertainment; Olivier Nominations, Best Direction and Best Design; TMA Award, Best Director; Critics Society Award, Best Designer; and South Bank Show Theatre Award nomination). Recent credits include designs for the multi-award winning JERRY SPRINGER: THE OPERA for which he also served as associate director (National Theatre, West End, and United Kingdom tour), THE MAGIC FLUTE (Welsh National Opera), and A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (National Theatre). Crouch also designed and co-directed THE ADDAMS FAMILY MUSICAL (Broadway, National Tour). His design work may currently be seen on Broadway in BIG FISH, directed by Susan Stroman.

Crouch is a founding member of London’s Improbably Theatre, where he continues to serve as Artistic Director. With Improbable, he served as associate director and designer for Philip Glass’ SATYAGRAHA, a co-production with ENO and the Metropolitan Opera; directed SPIRIT in a co-production with The Royal Court; and co-devised and co-designed STICKY, THE HANGING MAN, COMA, and 70 HILL LANE. Crouch is an Artist-in-Residence at the Park Avenue Armory where he is developing DEVIL AND MR. PUNCH, a new adventure in puppetry and art commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, and the Barbican.

A finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and one of the twenty-one inaugural Doris Duke Award recipients (2012), Rinde Eckert is a writer, composer, performer and director. His opera/music-theatre productions have toured through the U.S. and to major festivals in Europe and Asia. He started as a writer/performer in the 1980s, writing libretti for composer Paul Drescher. Working with chorographers Margaret Jenkins and Sarah Shelton Mann, Eckert began composing dance scores, including the evening-length WOMAN, WINDOW, SQUARE. With the 1992 creation of his homage to Dante, THE GARDENING OF THOMAS D, which toured the U.S. and France, Eckert began composing his own music-theatre pieces

Work includes HIGHWAY ULYSSES; FOUR SONGS LOST IN A WALL (The American Academy of Arts and Letters 2005 Marc Blitzstein Award); HORIZON (2007-08 Drama Desk Nominations: Best Play, Best Director; Lucille Lortel Award for Unique Theatrical Experience); ORPHEUS X (2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama); AND GOD CREATED GREAT WHALES (OBIE Award: Best Performance; Drama Desk Nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience). Eckert’s plays have been produced in New York by The Foundry Theatre, Culture Project, Theatre for a New Audience, and New York Theatre Workshop. Three of Eckert’s plays—AND GOD CREATED GREAT WHALES, HORIZON, and ORPHEUS X—have also enjoyed successful Off-Broadway runs. His work has also been produced at American Repertory Theatre (Boston), Center Stage (Baltimore), Dobama Theatre Company (Cleveland), The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Los Angeles), and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Following his success teaching a creativity course at Princeton University, Eckert began a six-year residency in 2009. He was the 2008 Granada Artist-in-Residence at University of California, Davis and held a 2012 Creative Residency at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Eckert is the 2009 recipient of The Alpert Award in the Arts for his contributions to theatre and is a current Lecturer in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Composer Paola Prestini was appointed Creative Director of Original Music Workshop “OMW” in January 2012. She is known as the co-founder and “visionary-in-chief” (TimeOut NY) of VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary production company that has created over 70 multimedia productions seen worldwide. The New Yorker has called her a “composer-impresario” and The New York Times has said that she is “a human resources alchemist…[and] an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished…[her music is] radiant, and amorously evocative.”

Her works have been performed worldwide, from the Kennedy Center and BAM’s Next Wave Festival in the US, to BEMUS in Serbia, Etnafest in Italy, and the Barbican Centre in London. Named by NPR as one of the “Top 100 composers in the World under 40,” she has been commissioned and performed by Carnegie Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York City Opera, and the Kronos Quartet in venues and festivals worldwide.

Her current projects include works for the New York Philharmonic’s 2014 Biennale, an installation concerto commissioned by the Krannert Center for Maya Beiser and Cornelius Dufallo; the Hubble Cantata commissioned by Bay Chamber Concerts for soprano Jessica Rivera, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and astrophysicist Mario Livio; Oceanic Verses at the Barbican Centre with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; an evening length dance with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company; and Aging Magician, an opera-theater collaboration with Rinde Eckert, Julian Crouch and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus that is in residence at the Watermill Center and the Park Avenue Armory. She is known for her collaborations, which have been lauded by TimeOut NY as “Ingeniously staged concert pieces that gracefully walk the line between opera and performance art”, and has enjoyed years of fruitful collaborations with muses, visual artists, writers and filmmakers. Her residencies include MASS MoCA, the Hermitage Retreat, Sound Res, Ucross Foundation, Sundance Institute, and LMCC Governor’s Island, and she has worked in colleges and in residencies in Italy, Africa, Mexico and Venezuela. She was a 2012 Musical Exchange Fellow for Carnegie Hall as a featured artist, and was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She is passionate about education, having taught from inner city schools in New York, to El Sistema in Venezuela. She is the editor of the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composer book, and her music is released on Tzadik Records; her writing is published in the Arcana series, by Hips Road. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School, and has studied with Samuel Adler, Robert Beaser and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) identifies and supports the work of emerging and established composers and their multi-media collaborators through the commission, development, production and touring of their works, which take the form of music-theatre, opera-theatre, multi-media concert works and new forms waiting to be discovered.

Founded in 2006 to identify and support the work of emerging and established composers and their multi-media collaborators, Beth Morrison Projects encourages risk-taking, creating a structure for developing new work that is unique to the artist and where artists feel safe to experiment and push boundaries. Noted as a composers’ producer, “Beth Morrison, of Beth Morrison Projects, has been gathering strength for several years, producing some of the most exciting music-theatre projects in the city (The New Yorker).” To date the company has commissioned, developed, and produced more than thirty premiere opera and other music-theatre works that have been performed around the globe. The New York Times recently said, “The production of new [opera] works in the city still falls mostly to the tireless Beth Morrison and her Beth Morrison Projects…” The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Ms. Morrison may be immortalized one day as a 21st-century Diaghilev, known for her ability to assemble memorable collaborations among artists.” Current and upcoming projects include works by composers Darcy James Argue, Jonathan Berger, Philip Glass, Ted Hearne, David Lang, David T. Little, Zhou Long, Keeril Makan, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Paola Prestini, Kamala Sankaram, Scott Wheeler and more, with directors Rachel Dickstein, Daniel Fish, Yuval Sharon and Robert Woodruff. Projects have been performed in numerous premier venues around the world including Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Kitchen, Performance Space 122, Lincoln Center, The Walker Art center, The Barbican, The Holland Festival, The Beijing Music Festival, The New York Musical Theater Festival, and more.

BMP has garnered support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Map Fund a program of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, JP Morgan Chase fund, New England Foundation for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Mid-Atlantic Foundation, and Puffin Foundation.

VisionIntoArt, co-founded by composer Paola Prestini, is a multimedia production company that creates interdisciplinary works stemming from new music. With the belief that collaboration sustains artistic innovation, VIA creates and commissions works that involve various disciplines, presented around the world for the general audience amd forged from the most exciting emerging and established artists living today. Founded in 1999 when Prestini was a student at the Julliard School, VIA has created and performed over seventy original works. VIA’s works have been seen at Lincoln Center, Joe’s Pub, Symphony Space, and the Whitney Museum. VIA’s works have toured to colleges and universities in the US, and to international festivals such as Apertif in Concerto at Teatro Manzoni, Etna Fest in Italy, BEMUS in Belgrade, Serbia and HIFA in Harare, Zimbabwe. Support for VIA comes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cary Trust for New Music, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, American Music Center, ASCAP, the BMI Fund, the Kenan Institute, Nathan Cummings Foundation, National Video Resources, Amphion Foundation, Morgan Stanley Foundation, the Council on Foundations and individual donors.