UCLA series’ new leader picks big names, restores plays to mix

While they adjust to a new name for the long-running performance series anchored at UCLA’s Royce Hall, audiences may be reassured by the selection of major names that Kristy Edmunds, the new director who tweaked the title, has included in her first season of picks.

The 2012-13 season announced Tuesday for the re-branded Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (formerly UCLA Live) has some top stars of avant-garde or genre-blending performance in Laurie Anderson, Hal Willner, Meredith Monk, guitarist Bill Frisell and the Trisha BrownDance Company.

A roster of American roots music, jazz and art-pop talent features Allen Toussaint and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (Feb. 12, 2013), Emmylou Harris (Oct. 2), the Ron Carter Quartet with the Robert Glasper Trio (Oct. 27), the Brad Mehldau Trio and the Bad Plus with Joshua Redman (May 4, 2013), Steve Earle and his country-singer wife, Allison Moorer, with the Living Sisters (Jan. 12, 2013), and twin bills of the David Grisman Sextet with David Lindley (Nov. 2) and Michelle Ndegeocello with James “Blood” Ulmer supported by former Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid (Dec. 7).

Siblings Rufus and Martha Wainwright will preside over two Christmas shows (Dec. 21-22), keeping up a family tradition begun by their late mother, Kate McGarrigle, when she teamed with her sister, Anna. David Sedaris, a series regular, will continue to spin stories under the new CAP-UCLA banner (May 1).

Anderson will offer “Dirtday!” (Oct. 26), a new piece consisting of songs and stories that she has begun to tour. It’s a prelude to offerings that will be forthcoming in future seasons under a recently announced three-year fellowship sponsored by CAP-UCLA, in which Anderson will visit the campus periodically to incubate and present new work. The other CAP-UCLA fellow, stage director Robert Wilson, is expected to contribute to series programming starting next season.

Monk and her vocal ensemble will premiere a new work, “On Behalf of Nature” (Jan. 18-20 at Freud Playhouse), described as a Buddhist-influenced “evening-length … poetic meditation on the environment.”

The Trisha Brown Dance Company (April 4-7) will offer a retrospective of its leader’s choreography in several venues. Two separate main programs will be performed at Royce Hall: “I am going to toss my arms – if you catch them they will be yours,” “Set and Reset” (with score by Laurie Anderson and costumes and sets by Robert Rauschenberg) and the solo piece “Watermotor” will be seen April 5, and “Les Yeux et L’ame,” “Foray Foret,” “Spanish Dance” and “Newark” on April 7.

Also on tap are a ticketed performance of Brown’s “Astral Converted” April 4 at UCLA’s Sunset Canyon Amphitheatre, and free performances of several other works that dancers from her company will teach to the UCLA students who will perform them. They include “Roof Piece” on April 6 and “Floor of the Forest,” which calls for erecting a sculptural set piece in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum.

Other dance offerings are the Akram Khan Company’s “Vertical Road,” based on mystic poetry by Rumi and Sufi authors (Oct. 5-6) and Belgian company Ultima Vez and choreographer Wim Vandekeybus’ revival of the 1987 piece “What the Body Does Not Remember” (March 15-16).

The theatrical peformances that had stopped the last two seasons because money was short will resume, led by a staging of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist classic “Rhinoceros,” performed in the original French, with supertitles, by Theatre de la Ville-Paris (Sept. 21-22 at Royce Hall).

Britain’s Cheek by Jowl company, which performed “Othello” in the 2004 UCLA season, will be back with another Elizabethan classic, John Ford’s blood-soaked “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (Jan. 9-11 at Freud Playhouse).

Australia’s Back to Back Theatre, an ensemble composed mainly of actors with mental disabilities, will perform its company-generated touring production, “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich,” in which the elephant-headed Hindu god goes on a quest through Nazi Germany to reclaim the swastika, the sacred symbol from ancient India purloined by Hitler and his minions (Jan. 24-27 at Freud Playhouse).

Another Australian import is Melbourne’s Circus Oz (Feb. 7-10, 2013) whose acrobats and onstage band dress in neo-Victorian steampunk fashion.

Edmunds’ first season at UCLA bears some traces of her own past as an impresario. In addition to the two Australian acts, which underscore her mid-2000s tenure as director of the Melbourne Internatinoal Arts Festival, the season will include a performance by actress-writer-filmmaker Miranda July, who sprang from the Portland scene that Edmunds fostered in the 1990s, when she founded the city’s Institute for Contemporary Art. July’s piece, “The Auction” (Oct. 18 at Freud Playhouse), includes her own stories and interviews with volunteers from the audience who will put up personal items to be sold over the course of the show.

More recently, Edmunds has served as consulting artistic director in charge of programming at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, and her first UCLA season includes a new work that premiered there in February – Willner’s staging of “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956),” Allen Ginsburg’s poem about his mother’s madness and death. Willner and actress Chloe Webb will perform the poem (April 17, 2013), with a score written and conducted by Frisell, and projections of paintings by artist Ralph Steadman.

Frisell’s gig with Willner will be his second of the UCLA season. He’ll also present “The Great Flood” (Oct. 13), a collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison, in which Frisell wrote and performs the score to accompany the on-screen portrayal of the devastating 1927 flooding along the Mississippi River. “The Great Flood” is part of the multi-venue Angel City Jazz Festival, as is the Oct. 14 Royce Hall concert by pianist Vijay Iyer, who’ll perform in trio, quartet and sextet combinations, with saxophonist Steve Coleman sitting in with the trio. Also on the jazz list are the Robert Glasper Experiment (Oct. 25), saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (March 2) and Medski Martin & Wood (April 26).

Poet, playwright and novelist Carl Hancock Rux will read from his book “The Exalted,” with piano accompaniment (March 9 at the Glorya Kafuman Theater).

Departing from a basic tenet of showbiz theory, Edmunds has decided to sell only half of Royce Hall’s seats for the classical vocal group Anonymous 4’s performance of “love fail,” composer David Lang’s setting of the story of Tristan and Isolde and modern love stories (Dec. 1). She thinks it will resonate more deeply with audiences – and that the acoustics will be more suited to the material – if listeners occupy every other seat.

“The more bodies, the more absorptive it is acoustically, and there’s something about having a generosity of acoustical air around you that is worth exploring,” Edmunds said. “I’m trying to leave seats in between everyone so they can have this little world that’s just theirs.” As for couples who simply can’t bear to be a seat’s width apart, she said, “if they want to scoot over, they can.” Anonymous 4 will give a free performance of “love fails” Nov. 30 in the rotunda of UCLA’s Powell Library, where space will be limited.

Classical violinist Hahn-Bin performs “Till Dawn Sunday” (Jan. 10), an episodic program drawing on various composers. The rest of the classical programming comes from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Instead of presenting seven Royce Hall performances independently, as it has in the past, the orchestra will move them under the CAP-UCLA umbrella. Benjamin Wallfisch is guest conductor Nov. 11 for a program including Elgar, Beethoven and the world premiere of his own violin concerto; music director Jeffrey Kahane conducts Oct. 7, Dec. 9, Jan. 27, March 24, April 21 and May 19.

Global music headliners are Bebel Gilberto (Sept. 28), Bajofondo (Oct. 12), Grupo Fantasma and Chicha Libre (Nov. 9), Yemen Blues (Nov. 15) and Vieux Farka Toure’s tribute to his father, Ali Farka Toure (Feb. 1, 2013). Soul singer Charles Bradley performs Nov. 29, and and Robert Randolph leads an evening of blues and gospel pedal steel guitar (Feb. 23, 2013).

The number of ticketed performances for the season rises to 51 (not counting the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concerts) after having fallen to 43 and 36 during the two seasons in which theater was dropped.

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