FLOODESIGN

Planning a PEAK season is a juggler's dream (or nightmare). As a nod to this challenge, I added the U.S. premiere of one of Europe's most exciting "acts" — Gandini Juggling — and its acclaimed event, Smashed, in which Sean Gandini pays homage to the post-modern choreographer, Pina Bausch. That is just one example of how circus has evolved far beyond the Barnum & Bailey tradition. Raphaëlle Boitel provides another example of its evolution. In When Angels Fall, she deploys circus techniques in unexpected contexts, with rapturous results. Ann Carlson is an American artist and choreographer whose sense of whimsy, fueled by wow, is simply incomparable. Elizabeth, the dance is Ann's tribute to the numerous dance styles that inspired her formative years. PEAK has a long history with Romeo Castellucci, having presented the American premieres of his works over many years. His work is seen at all the major European opera houses and festivals, including Rome, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Brussels, Venice, and Milan. It is humbling to know that he is vastly comfortable here at PEAK. So, what to expect next from the world's most iconoclastic theater artist? The truly unprecedented. Castellucci read Alexis de Tocqueville's seminal travelogue, Democracy in America, and has rendered in both verbal and visual terms a poetic reenactment of the relationship between those pilgrims and First Americans. A visual theater genius, he bores into the deepest agony of what gave America its democratic values. Not surprisingly, he finds that subjugation in the face of enlightenment goes hand-in-hand with freedom of faith, thought, and action. This PEAK season seeks to provide a diversion and perhaps at the same time to soothe bruised spirits; to entertain and to nurture the soul. All the while scaling the heights of human imagination … Onward, JEDEDIAH WHEELER Executive Director D R . S U S A N A . C O L E , P R E S I D E N T 3 | PEAKPERFS.ORG Programs in this season are made possible in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. T H E 2 0 1 8 / 1 9 P E A K S E A S O N

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