PEAK HD kicks off with SITI Company and STREB Extreme Action’s Falling & Loving (photo courtesy PEAK Performances)
Who: SITI Company, STREB Extreme Action
What: Online premiere of dance-theater collaboration
Where: Peak HD
When: Sunday, October 11, free, 8:00
Why: In September 2019, SITI Company and STREB Extreme Action joined forces for Falling & Loving, an adaptation of love sonnets and plays by Charles L. Mee, who has written such works for SITI as bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Under Construction, and American Document. The piece, codirected by SITI’s Anne Bogart and STREB’s Elizabeth Streb at PEAK Performances’ Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey, featured six actors from SITI and six dancers from STREB, along with a Guck Machine providing color, humor, and danger. (SITI recently announced a legacy plan that will follow its thirtieth and final season, 2020-22.) The collaboration was Mee’s idea, bringing together Bogart’s Viewpoints and Suzuki Method and Streb’s PopAction technique. Falling & Loving will have its online premiere October 11 at 8:00, kicking off PEAK HD’s inaugural digital season, in conjunction with WNET’s All Arts.
“The obstacles we’re facing today are catastrophic and coated in painful loss, but this is not new for the performing arts,” PEAK executive director Jedediah Wheeler said in a statement. “The performing arts in America are filled with the most tough-minded, forward-thinking, get-it-done people I have ever experienced in the world. So PEAK HD comes as a celebration of the deep, purposeful, important creativity that exists not just in the U.S. but worldwide, and it’s an intense creative process with multiple experienced minds focused on it. The day we can open the Kasser’s doors to 465 people (and simultaneously capture these performances for broadcast) — that will be another celebration. But the doors that are open are the doors of our ideas. Everybody is welcome. All seats are available. There is no social distancing to the imagination.” The lineup continues November 8 with the Martha Graham Dance Company and the International Contemporary Ensemble’s Appalachian Spring and The Auditions from November 2019, December 13 with Gandini Juggling and Alexander Whitley’s Spring from December 2019, January 10 with Grand Band (Kate Moore’s Sensitive Spot, Julia Wolfe’s my lips from speaking, Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla, and Three Fragile Systems by Missy Mazzoli with Joshua Frankel’s Emergent System and Faye Driscoll) from February 2020, and February 14 with the Richard Alston Dance Company’s Detour, Shine On, and Brahms Hungarian also from February 2020.