Choreographer Wally Cardona Experiments with new work at MASS MoCA
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - Choreographer and performer Wally Cardona has been recognized nationally and internationally for creating vast yet intimate works that use the performance setting itself as an integral partner in the creation of movement. Brooklyn Magazine hailed Cardona as "one of the most adventurous choreographers of his generation, a master of passionate abstract dances." After a six-day creative residency at MASS MoCA, Cardona will present a work-in-progress showing of his new piece Really Real on Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:00 pm.
Really Real is a work about people, relationships and feeling in a complex world. With just a bare stage, dancers, and light and dark, it is simultaneously abstract and about nearly everything -- youth, beauty, love, death, sex and power. Created in collaboration with composer Phil Kline and lighting designer Roderick Murray, the complete work will feature a movement ensemble of a troupe of local people led by the Wally Cardona Quartet. Really Real is commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.
At WCV, Inc, the umbrella organization for Cardona's projects, the primary goal is to introduce new forms and ways of viewing and experiencing movement to a large community. Led by Cardona's distinctive vision, WCV emphasizes the creation and performance of new work. Known for creating vast yet personal works that address venues in transformative ways, Cardona uses dance to expose the beautiful and often times perplexing phenomena present in humans in action.
Phil Kline appeared at MASS MoCA in July 2004, performing Zippo Songs: Airs of War and Lunacy a song cycle drawn from Donald Rumsfeld's speeches and the poems that GIs inscribed on their cigarette lighters during the Vietnam War, among other unusual sources. Kline's score for Really Real operates on two levels. Underlying everything is a flow of text, whispers, intoned pitches combined to make chords, wordless wails, moans, whoops and glissandi. Then, at crucial junctures, remnants of urgent anthems from the late 1960's appear, reconstructed as if the singers had absorbed them via a slightly hazy collective memory.
Raised in California and New Mexico, Cardona was a competitive gymnast and clarinetist before moving to New York City in 1986 to study dance at The Juilliard School (B.F.A.). The following summer, invited by Benjamin Harkarvy, he attended the Ballet Project at Jacob's Pillow, met Ralph Lemon and subsequently danced with his company until 1995. Cardona's first work premiered in 1992 at the Festival International de Danse a Cannes. His next work, Made In Voyage (1995), was performed in seven countries, and his first large-scale project took place in 1996 when French choreographer Hervé Robbe/Le Marietta Secret invited him to create a double purpose/a double emploi for a cast of four French and four American dancers. The following year, Wally Cardona Quartet (WC4) was founded, and WCV, Inc was formed. The recipient of a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in choreography and a 2006 New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Award for the creation of Everywhere, Cardona resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Tickets for Wally Cardona: Really Real are $10. MASS MoCA members receive a 10% discount. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA Box Office located off Marshall Street in North Adams, open from 11 A.M. until 5 P.M., closed Tuesdays. Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413-662-2111 during Box Office hours or purchased on line at www.massmoca.org.
