additional design by

Amy Rubin, Mark Stewart & Josh Higgason written for

the Brooklyn Youth Chorus

AGING MAGICIAN

with conductor

Diane Berkun-Menaker

co-created by composer

Paola Prestiniwriter and performer

Rinde Eckertdirector and designer

Julian Crouch

In development at the Watermill Center

Park Avenue Armory and Mass MoCA

A new music-theatre work, AGING MAGICIAN is a composite of sonic and visual elements that paints an allegory on time, youth, and the peculiar magic of ordinary life, and, perhaps, the ordinary magic of a peculiar life. Accompanied by a string quartet and a choir of young people, Aging Magician moves us along from the surgical repair of a timepiece to the magic show of time itself, lives and deaths, appearances and disappearances. The man’s vibrant last adventure is brought to life by a team of multidisciplinary artists who combine music, theatre, puppetry, instrument making, and scenic design to create an enduring work for the stage.

The story follows Harold, an amateur clockmaker who excitedly tries and yet struggles to complete the story of his alter-ego, a magician. As the youth guide Harold through his final adventure along the F train to Coney Island, they deal with notions of time, our relation to the material world, nostalgia, illusion, faith, and identity. We are inside Harold’s small clock shop, where the world is exceedingly large, a magic trick in itself.

This work features vocalist Rinde Eckert, a musical set by Mark Stewart, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and string quartet.

THE STORY

The aging magician is lost in the wheels and gears of the train, the rhythm of the wheels and gears, the rhythm of his days, his years.  And his time is now, this heaven,

a kind of Coney Island, a trick of light, misdirection, mirrors and illusion.  He is sound.  He is light.  He is weight and color, or simply the way something warms in the

hand.  Watch him vanish, Harold, into the heart of the clock, into time.

BROOKLYN YOUTH CHORUS Combining the talents of composer Prestini’s sonic world, Crouch’s visuals and puppetry skills, with Eckert’s writing and multi-faceted performance practice, a children’s youth chorus is woven into set and story. They begin as spectators in the operating theatre, tending to the transformation of the room into the Coney Island of the protagonist’s mind. They then follow him on the F train to Coney Island. By using traditional Greek chorus techniques of consoling, chiding and commenting on the protagonist's journey, the chorus heightens the overall experience; additionally, they add to the interdisciplinary fabric by interacting with the various set pieces, film, and puppetry.

Inspired by RINDE ECKERT, the composer Paola Prestini, created a work to specifically illuminate his multi-disciplinary talent. And, as the artist can brilliantly depict the own work he wrote, this Doris Duke Artist Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist also takes on the role as the Aging Magician.

AGING MAGICIAN features a string quartet from the new music ensemble ACME.

THE MUSICIANS

DESIGNERS Stewart  and  Crouch/Rubin’s  set  is  an  immersive  installation  that  can  be  played  like  an  instrument—blown,  struck,  whistled, plucked, and bowed. The scenery’s surfaces come alive through the kids interplay who help it become the canvas for projection design, installation and puppetry. The set will slowly illuminate throughout the arc of the story to reveal Coney Island: a city in full glory  that will carry the magician into the afterlife, all the while as elements of his fantastic dream remain in the real world. 

PARTNERS Beth  Morrison  Projects  (BMP)  and VisionIntoArt  (VIA)  are  developing  and  producing Aging Magician for the eventual world  premiere  in  2016.  Work-In-Progress  showings  have  taken  place  at  the  21C  Liederabend,  op.2  in  2011 (produced by BMP, VIA, and Opera On Tap) at The Kitchen, at PROTOTYPE Festival (produced by BMP and HERE) in January 2013, and in subsequent workshop performances at the Watermill Center, Park Avenue Armory and MASS MoCA. Aging Magician was a recipient of a NEFA Touring grant and will premiere at the Walker Art Center, the Krannert Center, and at Arizona State University.

THE TEAM

"The Aging Magician is grandly, even venerably, operatic...[from the composer] who wrote the acclaimed Oceanic Verses." WQXR

The entire stage will be a living breathing instrument, with the Magician’s head-sculpture as the centerpiece. Flanked by Brooklyn Youth Chorus’ 40 singers judging, playing and consoling, Harold will be surrounded by his own thoughts transposed into song and text. This journey will bring the audience into Harold’s uncertain world as he grasps to find meaning in a mind-scape of imagination while living in a world of constraint.

FINAL EVENT

Model of AGING MAGICIAN designed by Julian Crouch and Amy Rubin

Visit bethmorrisonprojects.org/agingmagician for audio, video, and other media from this project.

LISTEN & WATCH

Aging Magician is Commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, VisionIntoArt, the Walker Art Center,  and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Aging Magician has been developed with support from National Endowment for the Arts, and Repertoire Development Grant support from Opera America, and the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, with additional funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Opera America Opera Fund.

Aging Magician has received residency support from Mass MoCA, Park Avenue Armory and The Watermill Center’s Artist Residency Program.

LEAD ARTISTS

Prestini"an intoxicatingprofusion of seeminglyunrelated impressions...Straightforward melodicismaugmented with electronicresonance - a happy adaptation of minimalism's more sensual effects."-Steve Smith

"...Prestini’s emotional landscapes share a mournful, dreamlike quality with expansive harmonies that still gravitate to a tonal center. These pieces reward careful listening."-Casual Listening Blog

“Spellbinding Music”-The Washington Post

PAOLA PRESTINI is “the enterprising composer and impresario” (New York Times) whose interdisciplinary vision is helping to shape the future of new music. Named one of the “Top 100 Composers in the World under 40” (NPR), her music has been commissioned by and been performed at Carnegie Hall, by the Chicago Symphony (Music Now), the New York Philharmonic (Biennale), New York City Opera, and the Kronos Quartet. Her compositions have been performed worldwide, from the Kennedy Center, BAM, and the Park Avenue Armory, to London’s Barbican Centre. Prestini serves as “visionary-in-chief” (Time Out New York) of VisionIntoArt (VIA), the non-profit multimedia production company she co-founded as a student in 1999. Last fall Prestini presided over the launch of VIA Records, hailed as “an essential new voice in the future of American classical music” (Q2 Music). She is also the Creative and Executive Director of National Sawdust, a nonprofit Brooklyn-based space for arts incubation, performance, and recording, where VIA is in residence. Frequent collaborators include Helga Davis, Beth Morrison, Hila Plitmann, Ian Rosenbaum, Royce Vavrek, Julian Wachner and Jeffrey Zeigler.

Incorporating powerful visual and dramatic components, Prestini’s multimedia creations address such extra-musical issues as conservation, astrophysics, and politics. Her current and recent projects include works for Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 21c Liederabend concert; Epiphany, a choral installation for BAM’s 2015 Next Wave Festival with the Young People’s Chorus; The Hubble Cantata, an evening-length collaboration with astrophysicist Mario Livio, soprano Jessica Rivera and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Hubble telescope; The Colorado, a new eco-cantata for Roomful of Teeth, with film by Murat Eyuboglu and text by conservationist William deBuys, developed at MASS MoCA and to premiere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Houston’s Da Camera series; Aging Magician, written for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Rinde Eckert, with direction and design by Julian Crouch, which will premiere at the Walker Arts Center and the Krannert Center; Labyrinth, a cello and violin installation concerto to premiere at the Isabella Gardner Museum and National Sawdust in 2016; and a reprise of her multimedia opera Oceanic Verses (premiered in 2013 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at London’s Barbican Hall), which will return for Watermill Center’s 10th anniversary with Choir of Trinity Wall Street conducted by Julian Wachner in 2016. Works in development include The Ribbon Project for Mass Re-Imaginings commissioned by Choir of Trinity Wall Street with text by Brenda Shaughnessy and visuals by Anne Patterson; a new opera, Gilgamesh, (commissioned by Friends of Madam Whitesnake) directed by Michael Counts with libretto by Cerise Jacobs, which begins development at the New England Conservatory and Boston University in 2015 and premieres in Boston in 2016 at the Cutler Majestic Theatre; and Two Oars, a new work with Robert Wilson (based on Old Man and the Sea) recently workshopped at the Watermill Center for Opera Australia’s participation in the Commonwealth Games.and Carnegie Hall, and the Sundance Institute.

“gives a dazzling performance that includes not only brilliantly original acting, but also brilliantly original singing” in Eckert’s original AND GOD CREATED GREAT WHALES-LA Times

“Every element of Eckert’s play is masterly – his performances as a grown man becoming a child is poignant, his music varied and lovely, his dancing divine, his musings profound.”       -The New Yorker

RINDE ECKERT is a writer, composer, librettist, musician, performer and director. His Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout America and to major theater festivals in Europe and Asia. With a virtuosic command of gesture, language, and song, the total theatre artist moves beyond the boundaries of what a 'play,' a 'dance piece,' an 'opera' or 'musical' might be, in the service of grappling with complex issues. Eckert describes many of his characters as "little men with big ideas whose consequences of their hubris are often disastrous." Sometimes tragic and austere, sometimes broadly comedic, entirely grounded by presence, his work is alchemical: moving from rumination and distillation to hard-won illumination, or its lack.

In April 2012 The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation named Rinde Eckert as one of 21 inaugural Doris Duke Artists.  Each performing artist in the first class will receive an unrestricted, multi-year cash grant of $225,000. Rinde was the 2009 recipient of The Alpert Award in the Arts for his contributions to Theatre and was the finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Rinde Eckert began his career as a writer/performer in the 1980’s, writing librettos for Paul Dresher (Pioneer, Power Failure, Slow Fire, Ravenshead).  He subsequently composed dance scores for choreographers Sarah Shelton Mann and Margaret Jenkins, including the evening-length Woman, Window, Square for The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. In 1992 Rinde began composing and performing his own music/theater pieces with The Gardening of Thomas D, an homage to Dante which toured the United States and to France.  His staged works for solo performer include An Idiot Divine - two one-act plays, Romeo Sierra Tango and Quit This House. Shoot the Moving Things and Four Songs Lost in a Wall are written for radio.

Theatrical writing credits and awards include Highway Ulysses and Four Songs Lost in a Wall (The American Academy of Arts and Letters 2005 Marc Blitzstein Award); Horizon (2007-2008 Drama Desk Nominations: Best Play, Best Director; Lucille Lortel Award: "Unique Theatrical Experience"); Orpheus X (2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama); And God Created Great Whales (OBIE Award: Best Performance, Drama Desk Nomination: "Unique Theatrical Experience").  Three of Rinde Eckert’s plays - And God Created Great Whales, Horizon and Orpheus X - have had successful off-Broadway runs.

Eckert’s theatrical work has been produced in New York City by The Foundry Theatre, Culture Project, Theater for a New Audience and the New York Theatre Workshop. Outside of New York, American Repertory Theatre, Center Stage in Baltimore, Dobama Theatre Company, REDCAT at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles, and Berkeley Repertory Theater have produced his work, which has been directed by Robert Woodruff, David Schweizer, Richard ET White, Tony Taccone and Ellen McLaughlin. Eckert has directed his own and others’ plays and operas for The Asia Society, Juggernaut Theater, Opera Piccola and the Paul Dresher Ensemble.

JULIAN CROUCH was a founding member of Improbable Theatre and was co-director and co-designer of the international and West End phenomenon SHOCKHEADED PETER. Other shows for Improbable include SATYAGRAHA in a co-production with the English National Opera and The Metropolitan Opera, SPIRIT, which Julian directed, and which was a co-production with The Royal Court, COMA, which he co-devised and co-designed, STICKY, THE HANGING MAN, COMA and 70 HILL LANE. He designed and was associate director on the multi award-winning JERRY SPRINGER: THE OPERA at the National Theatre, West End and UK tour. 

Other recent productions include CINDERELLA for The Dutch National Ballet, DR ATOMIC for The Met / ENO, THE MAGIC FLUTE for Welsh National Opera, THE ADDAMS FAMILY for Broadway, and THE ENCHANTED ISLAND for The Met. His most recent production was THE DEVIL AND MISTER PUNCH which he devised, directed and designed, for the Philadelphia Arts Festival and the Barbican. London, He is currently designing BIG FISH for Broadway, THE MERRY WIDOW for the Met, and JEDERMANN for the Salzburg Festival.

“a dazzling production” for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of THE ENCHANTED ISLAND-NY Times

Joshua Higgason has designed video, lights, and sets, in different combinations, for four productions with Jay Scheib (Bellona: Destroyer of Cities; World of Wires; Platonov, Or the Disinherited; Powder Her Face). He has also worked with The Builders Association, Big Dance Theater, Sufjan Stevens, Radiolab, Julian Crouch, Jim Findlay, Salzburg Festival, BAM, and others. He has taught video design and interactive workshops at MIT, NYU, Bennington College, LIU, Duke, and Princeton. He also designs interactive technology and concerts. www.joshuahiggason.net

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER, V I S I O N I N TO A RT is “always intriguing and frequently beguiling”, is a multimedia production company that “facilitates flamboyant, confounding and enticing collaborations” (New York Times).

With the belief that collaboration sustains artistic innovation, VIA creates and commissions works that involve various disciplines, presented around the world for the general audience, and forged from the most exciting emerging

and established artists living today as well as interdisciplinary experts including scientists and conservationists. We are a one-stop-shop for artists in many disciplines – we incubate, produce, and disseminate. Since Paola Prestini co-founded the company in 1999 at the Juilliard School, VIA has created and performed over seventy original works as well as produces through their self titled record label.

Support for VIA comes from the National Endowment of the Arts, Cary Trust for New Music, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, ASCAP, the BMI Fund, the Kenan Institute, Nathan Cummings Foundation, National Video Resources, the Council on Foundations, the Amphion Foundation, Morgan Stanley Foundation and individual donors.

VIA is a proud to be an Opera America Professional Member and participant in DeVos Institute of Arts Management Professional Development Program with The Kennedy Center and Brooklyn Academy of Music. We have received support from the New Music USA Cary’s New Music Performance Fund for the 2014-15 season. VIA is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

MEET THE PRODUCERSCREATIVE & TOUR PRODUCER  BETH MORRISON PROJECTS  identifies and supports the work of emerging and established composers and their collaborators through the commission, development, and production of their work, taking the form of opera-theatre, music-theatre, and multi-media concert works.  Relying on the core values of collaboration, exploration, experimentation, artistry, and excellence, BMP provides a nurturing structure

that allows artists to push the  boundaries of their art form. Founded in 2006, BMP rapidly developed a reputation for “envisioning new possibilities and finding ways to facilitate their realization” (New York Times). In 6 years, BMP has commissioned, developed, and produced more than 24 operas and music-theatre pieces that have premiered or been performed in New York, across the country, and around the globe. The Wall Street Journal said, “Ms. Morrison may be immortalized one day as a 21st-century Diaghilev, known for her ability to assemble memorable collaborations among artists.” BMP’s ability to recognize emerging talent, invest in the vision of living composers and their collaborators, and partner with presenters to bring new work to life has allowed it to become vital in the landscape of new music and opera. The New York Times recently said, "The production of new [opera] works  in the city still falls mostly to the tireless  Beth Morrison and her Beth Morrison Projects...” BMP is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Department of Cultural Affairs of New York City, Meet the Composer, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the ART NY/ JP Morgan Chase Fund for Small Theaters, and The Map Fund, a program of creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  

BETH MORRISON PROJECTS 666 Ocean Ave, #D1 Brooklyn, NY 11226

(646) 682-7181 info@bethmorrisonprojects.org www.bethmorrisonprojects.org

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