You couldn’t ask for a more creatively adventurous, inclusive and progressive performing arts schedule than what the Contemporary Arts Center has planned for its 2015-2016 season. Its mix of dance and movement, conceptual music projects, theater and spoken-word well represents where important new art is going today.
Perhaps the most anticipated show — by me, at least — is the Cincinnati debut of Tanya Tagaq, an Inuit throat singer who combines her indigenous traditions with an avant-garde vocal style that borrows from both Yoko Ono and Meredith Monk.
On stage, she can work herself into a trance — with musical support from her violinist and drummer — that can find her collapsing, writhing, rolling and tumbling.
The CAC is bringing her to the Woodward Theater on Jan. 30, 2016 for a seated show in which she will provide accompaniment to a screening of the 1922 semi-documentary about an Inuk family’s life, Nanook of the North.
“I consider her almost like body art,” says Drew Klein, the CAC’s performance curator. “It’s much more performance art than it is a traditional concert. I think the tenacity and energy she puts into a performance is just breathtaking.”
Here are the other shows, which will be at CAC’s Black Box Theater unless otherwise noted. Tickets and detailed information are available at contemporaryartscenter.org.
Vicky Chow and Tristan Perich, Surface Image, Sept. 10 at University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music’s Cohen Theater:
Chow, a Canadian pianist, pairs with Perich, best known for his works involving low-fi 1-bit electronics (the lowest possible digital representation of audio, according to his website).
Helado Negro, No Love Can Cut Our Knife in Two, Oct. 9:
The composer-performer Roberto Carlos Lange, whose stage name is “Helado Negro,” combines his own wide-ranging musical influences with the Latin music he heard growing up in Florida. This presentation will feature imaginative costuming, plus choreographed movement performed by local volunteers.
Eddy Kwon, VIOLENCE + archipelago, Oct. 16 and 18:
The Cincinnati violinist/composer premieres his newest work, VIOLENCE, which is a meditation on that topic and how radical thinkers have approached it.
Jens Lekman, Ghostwriting, Nov. 16-20:
This gifted and idiosyncratically romantic Swedish singer-songwriter is generally heralded as one of the most distinctive on the contemporary scene. For this special project, the CAC will select people to tell Lekman detailed personal stories. He’ll then shape their stories into Pop songs that he’ll record and post online within an hour of the meeting.
On Nov. 20, he will give a concert at Woodward Theater consisting of his own best-known material with the MYCincinnati Ambassador Ensemble string quartet.
Dana Michel, Yellow Towel, Feb. 18-19, 2016:
In a dance/movement show the CAC says is “strongly influenced by the aesthetics of fashion, music videos, queer culture and comedy,” this Montreal-based black artist revisits the reasons she once wore a yellow towel on her head to emulate blonde schoolgirls.
Okwui Okpokwasili, Bronx Gothic, March 2-4, 2016:
Combining theater, performance and dance/movement, this New York-based artist conjures the world of 1980s-era outer-borough New York City to relate her story of two girls approaching adolescence and sexual self-discovery.
Tetsuya Umeda, It Was Moving at First, April 15-16, 2016:
This Japanese sound and visual artist uses his workspace as an unpredictable setting for his art, which draws on the energy of that place to form a sound installation/performance.
Saul Williams and Mivos Quartet, No One Ever Does, April 28, 2016:
Williams, the poet/performer who starred in the Sundance Film Festival’s award-winning movie Slam, will be working with this New Music string quartet in a show that includes the premiere of “NGH WHT,” their collaboration with composer Thomas Kessler.
CAMPO/Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido, Still Standing You, May 18-20, 2016.
This Belgian/Portuguese dance/movement duo has an international reputation for its intensely physical work, which traverses from choreographed movement to gymnastics and wrestling.
CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2015.