Walker Art Center's Out There 2020 First Two Shows Tina Satter / Half Straddle and Miguel Gutierrez Sold Out, Select Tickets Available as Series Continues with Ligia Lewis and Back to Back Theatre
Out There is back with 20/20 vision. Through a range of theatrical aesthetics, this year’s slate of international artists engage us with revelatory works by turns playful and dark, political and personal, gothic and supernatural. They interrogate labels and preconceptions, the artificial and the organic. This year, two artists new to the Walker and two returning favorites push back and look forward, reframe and reposition. Their concerns are ours: identity, race, sexuality, and the meaning of intelligence.
Out There 2020
January 9, 2020–February 1, 2020
Purchase a season package of four or more shows and save 25%. If you’re a member, save 30% off the regular ticket price. Visit walkerart.org/tickets for more info.
SCHEDULE OF PERFORMANCES
All events take place in the Walker’s William and Nadine McGuire Theater.
Tickets to each event are $26 ($20.80 Walker members).
Ligia Lewis: Water Will (In Melody)
January 23–25, 2020, 8pm
Walker Commission
Ligia Lewis: Water Will (In Melody). Photo: Katja Illner.
“Like the best science fiction, Lewis’s work is most successful in its insistence that the spare can be made spectacular.” —Artforum
Four performers delve into a deconstructed landscape of water in this dark, theatrical meditation on showbiz, the surreal, sensuality, and the end of times. Created by Berlin-based/US choreographer Ligia Lewis, a rising star in Europe’s world of performance, the work quickly departs from gothic melodrama to poetically wrestle with the concept of “will.” Deploying an ingenious movement vocabulary with song, text, and a string of pearls, the performers unpack gender and race, hopelessness and potential, alienation and belonging. Contains mature content. Program length: 60 minutes.
About Ligia Lewis
Ligia Lewis is a choreographer and dancer. Described by The New Yorker as “an American experimentalist,” Lewis gives form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Her experientially rich works slide between the familiar to the unfamiliar, while being held together by the logics of interdependence, disorder, and play. Her work is shaped by meticulously crafted forms of embodiment. When these meet sonic and visual metaphors, they create space for the emergent and the indeterminate, while simultaneously tending toward the mundane. In considering the social inscriptions of the body, the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant are materialized in her work.
Read More
Bomb magazine interview
The Stranger review
Artforum on Ligia Lewis
The Brooklyn Rail review
Meet the Artists
Thursday, January 23: Post-show reception with the artists in Cityview Bar
Friday, January 24: Post-show Q&A with the artists onstage
Back to Back Theatre: The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes
January 30–February 1, 2020 8pm
Back to Back Theatre: The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes. Photo: Jeff Busby.
“[Back to Back Theatre] have never let the fact that their performers have a range of physical and intellectual disabilities define, or indeed, confine them from pushing and transforming our expectations of what theatre can be. Long may they continue to do shows.” —Time Out Melbourne
Interrogating the parameters of traditional theater and their own perceived disabilities, the five performers in Back to Back Theatre challenge contemporary presumptions about artificial intelligence and the human mind. With this unapologetic and piercingly fresh new work, Australia’s leading independent theater company returns to the Walker for the third time. Miscommunication, mistakes, and misunderstandings abound as a group of activists holds a public meeting for a frank discussion about a history we would prefer not to know and a future that is ambivalent. Storytelling, design, light, and sound thread through the mayhem, until clarity emerges amid community. Contains mature content. Program length: 70 minutes.
Accessibility
The performance on Saturday, February 1, will have ASL interpretation and audio description. All shows presented with English surtitles.
About Back to Back Theatre
Over the last 30 years, Back to Back Theatre has made a body of work that questions the assumptions of what is possible in theatre, but also the assumptions we hold about ourselves and others. As an ongoing dialogue with the audience, each new project is an investigation seeking answers to questions raised in previous works. Their attention lies with design, light, and sound. The stories they pursue weave the personal, the political and the cosmic. Back to Back Theatre works to curiosity and interest in the live moment, to what sits within and between. Back to Back Theatre is based in Geelong, Australia.
Read More
New York Stage Review
Vulture review
The Conversation review
The Age review
Meet the Artists
Thursday, January 30: Post-show reception in Cityview Bar
Friday, January 31: Post-show Q&A with the artist onstage