Atwood Pit Lift Party

The official ribbon cutting ceremony to unveil the new Atwood Pit Lift!

Last Monday (August 1, 2011), many came to celebrate the unveiling of the new pit lift on the Atwood Concert Hall Stage.  Many thanks to the following people who helped make this dream a reality:

• Kurt Steinert - MOA Capital Projects
• Debra Fitzgerald - MOA Contract Manager
• Jeff Muckey - Bales Construction
• Dylan Bales - Bales Construction
• Larry Lander - GDM Architect
• Raj Bhargava - RBA Engineering & ACPA Board Member
• Jenny Herzog - Coffman Engineers
• Will Veelman - Coffman Engineers
• Daniel St. Germain - GalaSystems
• Dave Dorlan - 3-Way Electric
• Martin Hebert - GalaSystems
• Matt Lund - RBA Engineering 

The pit lift installation project began in late May, was completed a couple weeks earlier than planned.  As a result, the Atwood Concert Hall has been put back into inventory for our clients and users to utilize for the 2011-2012 performance season and beyond!  In addition to the pit lift, new stage flooring was also installed.

Check out the video below where you'll see ACPA Board Members, ACPA Staff and the group of folks mentioned above who helped bring the pit lift installation into fruition taking a ride on the new pit lift!

 

Want to see more from the pit lift party?  Visit the Center's Facebook page to see photographs from the evening.  

Anchorage Arts Pioneer: Ruth Hart

ACPA President Nancy Harbour & ACPA donor, Ruth Hart

Part of what makes the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts so special is our family of donors.  Today, I had the privilege of meeting with Center donor, Ruth Hart and was joined by ACPA President, Nancy Harbour.

Ruth has been invested in the local arts community for many years and shared with us some wonderful stories about her involvement both past and present.  We plan on sharing her stories through short video vignettes on our website and through the Center's Facebook this fall, so stay tuned!


-Amanda Hutchins, Development & Communications Associate
 

Working on a New Look!

The Center is working on recreating the look and functionality of http://www.myalaskacenter.com/! We hope you will check back mid-August to see our new, improved website!

The Ultimate Dance Party

by Cazoshay Ward - University of Alaska Anchorage

As reviewers, we are supposed to remain neutral in relaying the details of performances and avoid extreme vocabulary such as “awesome,” “incredible,” and “edge-of-your-seat-fantastic!”However, this review is going to be the exception.

According to the event’s program, “longtime friends Chris Wink, Philip Stanton and Matt Goldman founded Blue Man Group as a way to celebrate the human spirit through music, science, art, and theater.” The show that took place on the night of May 10^th certainly embodied that celebration to the fullest. The show was created, written and directed by Wink, Stanton, and Goldman, however it took a host of musicians, designers, and production staff to make the show the success that is was.

After a brief video narrating the evolution of art (complete with English accent) displayed on the screen, an audience member was selected and brought up to the stage at which point he was assisted by the Blue Men in putting on a protective suit with a helmet. He was then escorted backstage where he became a “human paintbrush” as the narrator called it where he was suspended from his feet, covered in paint, and thrust against a giant canvas; thereby creating a unique, one-of-a-kind piece of artwork.

And as if that wasn’t “awesome” enough. Blue Man Group’s performance also included an explanation, demonstration, and subsequent audience participation of the seven quintessential “Rock Concert Movements,” including the “fist pump,” “raising the roof,” and the “behind the head leg stretch.” During the show the group also created “The Ultimate Dance Party” where we, the audience, were instructed to shake our “rumps” our “moneymakers,” our “Elvis Aaron Presleys” (the list continued for approximately four minutes) to the techno beat while passing giant colored air balls through the auditorium and being sprayed with long streams of paper confetti.

To say that Blue Man Group thoroughly rocked the Atwood Concert Hall for an audience that spanned several generations (I won’t give too much away, but the song “Free Bird” was involved) would be an understatement. They took us on a visual and auditory journey unlike anything that could be fully described, only experienced. I would thoroughly recommend taking the opportunity to see the show and find out for yourself, or viewing the production of a new IMAX 3-D film due to be released in 2011.

Blue Man Group

Anchorage Concert Association

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Atwood Concert Hall

Mute Men Speak Volumes

by Charlotte Titus - University of Alaska Anchorage

The statement displayed on the giant stage screen at the beginning of The Blue Man Group's show, set the tone for the theatrics the audience was about to witness. The statement from the Diplomacy handbook was about how to make a connection with a group of people by using shared experience to bridge cultures and differences. BMG took this page from the handbook to heart and shared the experience of the show by blurring the lines between performers and audience members throughout the evening.

Blue Man Group created this shared experience through various means throughout the evening. The audience participation began with reading 'instructions' for watching the show which scrolled across the top of the stage. Written with a funny conversational tone, intending to create laughter, the audience last Tuesday night gamely played along. The late arrival of two audience members brought more laughter to the theater as it was pointed out loudly with horns and video and the three blue men stared out at them from the stage as they made their way to their seats. In another skit, the blue men created artworks with spit paint, seeking approval through clapping and then gave the artworks away to people in the audience.

There were opportunities for a couple of audience members to get on stage and really take part in the action by becoming part of the group. The first audience member played along with her skit as she sat at a table with the three blue men while they served themselves Twinkies, eating their own, each other's and eventually all eating the yellow goo that gushed out of a hole in their shirt fronts. The second audience member was taken on stage, dressed in a white coverall, initiated into the group with a blue thumb print on his cheek. Then a helmet was put on his head and he was lead backstage and used to imitate a version of Yves Klein's anthropometries, or body paintings. To do this, they rolled blue paint on his coveralls, suspended him upside down and 'swung' his body at a canvas, creating an impression which was then further outlined with a contrasting color of paint. All of this was shown on the giant stage screen for the audience to 'witness.'

Although the show conveyed its message quite clearly, the entire show was performed mutely by the blue men, with an occasional announcer's voice that gave instructions for the audience to follow, or electronic devices that displayed words. There appeared to be a message even in the muteness of the blue men: sometimes you don't have to say a word to get your point across. And the blue men proved they are masters at it.

Blue Man Group

Anchorage Concert Association

Atwood Concert Hall

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 @ 7:30pm

Bridgman/Packer Dance: Sleight of Dance

by Lisa Maloney

It’s hard to imagine the intimacy that goes into a single dance, any dance, until you’ve experienced it. Bodies move, hips tilt, torsos sway and sometimes touch--and that’s only the physical dimension.

Imagine, then the connection that comes from collaborating and choreographing together for more than 30 years. Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer have been doing just that since 1978.

Do the math and you’ll realize that both of them must be at least 50 years old. It might seem kind to say that you can’t see their age when they dance but you can, and they’re the better for it. Anything that isn’t dance has long since shriveled and fallen away from their limber, athletic bodies, leaving the married Guggenheim Fellows with nothing but naked movement and emotion.

Dance doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and on Friday night Bridgman/Packer performed two pieces, 2005’s Under the Skin and 2010’s Double Expose, to clever jazz soundtracks. The sometimes syncopated, unpredictable yet undeniably rhythmic music built a framework for the duet’s well-tensioned, sensual movement style.

Live cameras projected front, back or overhead views of the dancers onto their bodies, clothing and a screen behind them: A man marveling at suddenly possessing a woman’s legs or the woman sprouting four arms. Pulling this off requires such precise timing and positioning, catching and interacting with projections and partner just so, that there’s really no way to describe it. All you can do is hold your breath, marvel, and wonder.

Bridgman/Packer are as much illusionists as dancers, chasing each other, each others’ projections, and their own recorded images both in front of and behind the projection screen, which played equal parts doorway, cityscape and bedroom.

After so many years together, it makes sense for Bridgman/Packer to blend together into a single name, right up there with the Brangelinas and Tomkats of the world. But despite the enduring partnership these dancers seem to have retained their individuality, and it’s the blending of those two beings, and the illusion that leaves you unsure of exactly when the dancers become ghosts in their own work, that made their Friday evening performance such a pleasure.

Bridgman/Packer Dance

Out North

Friday, April 29, 2011 at 8:00pm

Discovery Theatre

"Pointe"ing in the Right Direction

by Lisa Maloney

Gillmer Duran’s “Tyranny of the Senses,” the first of four dances in Alaska Dance Theater/Eugene Ballet Company’s Intersections, was meant to explore how we interact with our senses, and they in turn respond to us. The dancers explored each of the five conventional senses in turn, plus kinesthetic, pain, temperature and balance-acceleration-direction lumped together.

Yet as much as Duran set out to explore the interplay of the senses, the edgy, modern dance style turned this piece into an exploration of gravity. The dancers combined unlikely hip gyrations and isolations that merged into full-body movement, seemingly exempt from the rules that bind the rest of us into a sensible cause-and-effect chain of movement.

During the after-show question and answer session, Duran sheepishly confessed that he doesn’t consider himself much of a costume designer. But the costumes for the first dance, an eclectic blend of quirky, asymmetrical black ensembles, from placing men in skirts to a woman in the customary men’s tights, or a man with one leg in trousers and the other in shorts, went perfectly with the “new edge” soundtrack, backed by a continuous projection of sometimes-related images, to create an off-beat-yet-in-sync feel to the entire piece.

Susan Perry’s costuming for the next dance, “Faces of Eve,” was equally brilliant, placing the three ADT dancers in equal parts flannel nightgowns and flamenco skirts. Toni Pimble’s choreography explored the shifting relationships between women, observing two young girls moving from childhood to adulthood then fleeing, leaving their mother behind... for the moment. But the “mother” could, just as easily, be seen as a younger sister.

The second half of the show reflected more traditional ballet choreography and costuming, including some lovely pointe work. In “A Solo in Nine Parts,” the company swooped across the stage, occasionally depositing a soloist or small group of them, then swooping back to collect the abandoned members again.

The concluding piece, “Without the Cover” -- again choreographed by Duran -- combined elements inspired by Venezuelan folk dancing with a set of hanging curtains that represented how we hide from each other and, perhaps, ourselves. Anybody that’s ever been in a relationship can identify with the way the dancers bobbed and weaved in and out of the curtains, staying together even when one or both was partially hidden behind the covers, or giving merry chase round the barrier but never quite managing to end up on the same side of it at the same time.

Given the extremely short rehearsal time both the ADT and Eugene dancers turned in admirable performances, showcasing how the intersections of two very different groups can bring out the best in our local dancers, and put a new inflection on the visiting artists’ work.

Intersections

Alaska Dance Theater

Friday, April 15, 2011 at 7:30pm

Discovery Theater