It is hard to believe that Norte Maar’s original ballet The Brodmann Areas has finished its final run at the Center For Performance Research. With a cross-genre, multi-media collaborative approach to developing the original ballet – and its accompanying visual and audio components – the countdown to opening was highlighted in the advance press:
Bushwick Daily featured a preview that included a conversation with choreographer Julia Gleich, which can be found here. Joined by director Jason Andrew, as well as the Brodmann‘s crew of dancers, Gleich also spoke with WNYU’s CityWide arts and culture program. CityWide stopped by during the last day of rehearsal to get the details on what host Lucas Green calls “a particularly visceral collaborative product.” For audio, please click here.
Norte Maar thanks all who attended, and appreciates the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the project. As ARTINFO‘s Benjamin Sutton commented after attending opening night, “the resulting brain (and eye) candy forms a wildly varied but consistently nourishing whole that manages to integrate contemporary ballet, classical and modern (and postmodern) music, visual and performing art wonderfully.”
Critic James Panero of The New Criterion also found plenty to ponder in this brainy performance. His review of Brodmann Areas in the May Issue of the publication offers a comparison with last years ballet:
“With visual artists, sound artists, and dancers all coming together, last year was something of a celebratory free-for-all, a sprawling jam session with one guitar hero after the next compounding the awesomeness until your thoughts turned to the line at the Porta-John. “Brodmann,” in contrast, took on the subject of cognition and didn’t dance around the big thoughts. Tight, far more spare than a year before, the performance brought the dance up front while still collaborating with Bushwick artists such as Paul D’Agostino, who created rapid projections out of his triptych cardboard collages. This time Ryan Anthony Francis, as musical director, also arranged a score to link the various parts into a coherent theme.”
Panero ends with a nod to the collaboration between director/choreographer Julia Gleich and neural scientist Denis Pelli on peripheral vision. Panero’s complete review can be found here. For Panero’s review from last year’s production, In the Use of Others for the Change click here.
The Brodmann Areas‘ complete program, including more information about the artists and performers involved, can be found here.
