Performing Arts Series
A gorgeous new space. Join in the excitement on our twenty-fifth anniversary as we inaugurate the newly renovated Goodhart Hall! In 2010, experience three stellar performances in our updated Lower Merion Conservancy “Hall of Fame” building, now one of the area’s most beautiful settings for music, dance, and theater.
Tickets and Subscriptions: Tickets to individual events in the Performing Arts Series are $18 for the general public, $15 for senior citizens, free for Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore students, faculty and staff, $10 for students of other schools, and $5 for children 12 and under. Subscription packages offer discounts, mix-and-match ticket flexibility. Priority seating is available for $80 subscription packages ($65 packages for senior citizens). For tickets, call the Office for the Arts at 610-526-5210.
2009-10 Schedule
Photo by Jeff Busby
Lucy Guerin Inc.
Corridor
Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26
Thomas Great Hall, 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.
The Performing Arts Series partners with New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center to present the first Philadelphia performances by Australian dance group Lucy Guerin Inc. The company is internationally renowned for its innovative choreographic concepts and exceptional dancers. In Corridor, set on a long, narrow strip of space, performers explore movement generated from language and respond to ordinary and extraordinary commands transmitted via MP3 players, speakers and cellphones.
"A must-see for anyone interested in contemporary dance."
—Sydney Morning Herald
Corridor is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts.
Photo by Lenny Cohen
New Century Saxophone Quartet
The Art of the Fugue
Friday, Dec. 4
Thomas Great Hall, 8 p.m.
When the cellist of the Julliard String Quartet encouraged the New Century Saxophone Quartet to play J.S. Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue,” imagining it would be a perfect fit with the group’s sound, he was right! The group’s extraordinary sonority resembles a pipe organ with exquisitely modulated tones. Selections from Bach’s masterwork form the first half of the evening, with contemporary counterparts including commissions by Lenny Pickett and David Lang on the second half.
"A revelation. … This is no ordinary recording but a devotedly virtuoso traversal of some of the most mind-bogglingly ingenious and inspired counterpoint ever committed to manuscript."
— International Record Review
Photo by Antoine Temple
Urban Bush Women
with Germaine Acogny and Pape Ibrahima Ndiaya
Excerpts from Les écailles de la mémoire
Saturday, Feb. 13, Goodhart Hall, 8 p.m.
Resistance, memory, and love drive Les écailles de la mémoire (The scales of memory), a penetrating movement treatise exploring the convergence of African and U.S. history. Bryn Mawr is honored to present the women’s section from this collaboration between Germaine Acogny, a legend in her native Senegal, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s all-female, Brooklyn-based Urban Bush Women. In addition, Acogny will dance her new solo “Songook Yakaar” and Pape Ibrahima Ndiaya (Kaolack), her star male dancer, will present “J’Accuse,” which took first prize at the 2008 Danse Afrique Danse Concours.
Urban Bush Women are committed, triple-threat performers who dance, sing, and act with a sometimes searing sense of truthfulness.
—The New York Times
The Urban Bush Women performance is made possible by a grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance.
Photo by Austin Young
Niyaz
Saturday, Feb. 27
Goodhart Hall, 8 p.m.
Azam Ali is the spellbinding voice of Niyaz, the Persian-Indian music group whose newest album Nine Heavens blends modern electronica with 300-year old Persian folk songs and the poetry of Sufi mystic Rumi. Seen on tour worldwide and featured on NPR, the group transcends religious and cultural differences through their darkly beautiful music. Founded by Ali with multi-instrumentalist Loga Torkian, Niyaz is produced by Carmen Rizzo, a multiple Grammy nominee who has worked with Coldplay, Seal, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, among others.
" Ali’s vocals are wholly evocative of another world and another time, which creates a wonderful tension with Torkian and Rizzo’s inspired instrumental textures"
—Billboard
Photo by Greg Gorman
An Evening with John Waters:
This Filthy World
Friday, March 26,
Goodhart Hall, 8 p.m
John Waters is famed the world over for his trash epics including Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Hairspray. This Filthy World is Waters’s rapid-fire one-man spoken word “vaudeville” act that celebrates the film career and joyously appalling taste of the man William Burroughs once called “The Pope of Trash.” Updated and expanded from the original film version, This Filthy World focuses on Waters’s early negative artistic influences, his fascination with true crime, exploitation films, fashion lunacy, the extremes of the art world, Catholicism, sexual deviancy and a love of reading.
"Life is nothing if you’re not obsessed."
—John Waters