Christian Bardin

Nighttime Aspirations

Drums: Toby Ramaswamy

Bass: Khary Jackson

Choreography: Margaret Johnson, Maggie Zepp, and Kara Motta

Including interviews with Gradylee Shapiro-Zimmer, A.P. Looze, Jay Owen Eisenberg, Charlene Holm, and Lisa Marie Brimmer

Scenic, video, and sound design support: Peter Morrow

Tell me about the last dream you had. Nighttime Aspirations welcomes you into a place of ordinary loneliness, sweetness, grief, and love, where birthday cards from people who care about you float up into the sky. Featuring a live score of drums, bass, and interviews with friends; witnessed by your houseplants; created through a process of reaching out over and over. Can you sleep through the night? 

Christian Bardin is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher originally from Houston, Texas, whose favorite work in any discipline tends to come at the intersection of great risk, great craft, and great love. They recently composed and directed the short opera YR GOD MY GOD under Minnesota Opera’s MNiatures commission. She co-directed The Nature Crown (Theatre Forever/Guthrie Theater), and has assisted for Ten Thousand Things, Theater Mu, Jungle Theater, and others. A professional actor since 2009, they have had a long relationship with CornerHouse, a Children's Advocacy Center, assisting in forensic interview training. Other performance credits include work with the Jungle Theater, Minnesota Opera, Guthrie Theater, and Sandbox Theatre, among others. Later this year Christian is releasing her first full-length album of original music, entitled Shorts, which uses musique concrète and imaginative versus real sonic space to explore themes of personal upheaval and rebirth. ig: @c_bard

Maddie Granlund

In the form of "well-lit room"

Objects and bodies disappear into a green screen and affect each other in invisible ways; things are held without being held, present yet withdrawn, experienced only through something else. Mediating live performance through digital technology, this work experiments with how to aesthetically articulate the experience of dissociation. The performer tries to embody this disjunction itself to understand why it hurts so much to be a part of something.

Maddie Granlund is an interdisciplinary live artist. Maddie’s work is choreographic, meshing organic and digital materials together into layered live-images. Maddie’s work expands directly from ontological theory (the study of being) to critically question liveness as a medium and explore what is present/what lies beyond presence. Maddie has a degree in Contemporary Performance Practice from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Maddie has been an associate artist with both the Moving Company and Ultimate Dancer, presented installation work at Jupiter Artland and North East Sculpture, and devised contemporary performance works through residence in elementary schools. www.maddiegranlundart.com

Atlese Robinson

Queen Mother

Dancer/intercessor: Leanna Browne 

Costume consultant: Trevor Bowen

Musician: Dameun Strange

Queen Mother is a reflection on the life and legend of Queen Nanny of the Maroons and the racial turmoil of Minnesota. In this work, the artists process the trauma related to the prevalence of police brutality out of their own bodies and spirits. This work will continue to grow and become a reclamation of collective inner peace, rooted in community. 

 Atlese Robinson is a writer, performer, director, producer, and the founding artistic director of Ambiance Theatre Company. Committed to the Black aesthetic and investigative theatre, Atlese creates work that asks the challenging questions of self and the world at large. Atlese is a 2021-22 Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Mentee and a member of Red Eye Theater’s 2022 Works-in-Progress cohort. Atlese’s past credits are 2020 Pillsbury House + Theatre’s Naked Stages Fellow, Springboard for the Arts 20/20 Artist Fellow, ensemble in The Dutchman (Penumbra Theatre Company, ensemble in The Garden (Ambiance Theatre Company), director for Naked I : Self Defined (20% Theatre Company), The Spectrum of Blackness (Ambiance Theatre Company), Waiting in Vain (Ambiance Theatre Company), and The Place (Lyric Opera of North). Upcoming Atlese will be performing her original work Queen Mother for Red Eye’s Works-in-Progress, completing her new play Who’s a Child?, and assistant directing SWEAT at the Guthrie Theater.

J H Shuǐ Xiān 

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 Performance: Shayna Allen, Lazer, and J H Shuǐ Xiān

Live sound: Sophiaaaahjkl;8901

Tapping on a (rough?) wooden door and rattling through your key ring and trying every one in the lock; giving up before you find the one that fits but still learning what’s on the other side. Asking yourself the same question over and over and having a new answer each time and (nearly?) all of them being right. Meeting G-d and being told that the (knowledge?) they’re sharing with you was passed from another, and there’s so many more layers yet to keep pulling back. This work is an ask about the Who and the What of altar and ritual through lenses of (spiritual?) phenomenon and object research. We hope for you.

J H Shuǐ Xiān is an interdisciplinary choreographer, improviser, and sound artist. Her work prioritizes and centers the experiences of QTIPOC, and stands in allyship to those of other marginalized identities. She has presented works at venues including Fresh Oysters Performance Research, Walker Art Center, Bryant Lake Bowl, Tek Box, The Southern Theater, Intermedia Arts (Minneapolis, MN), Rochester Art Center, and 9 Herkimer Place (Brooklyn, NY) and has recently enjoyed collaborating with others including Dua Saleh, Emily Gastineau, Rosy Simas, HIJACK/Galia Eibenschutz, Valerie Oliveiro, Leila Awadallah, Judith Howard, Pramila Vasudevan, Megan Meyer, and Erin Drummond. She is a 2017 Q-Stage: New Works and 2019 Momentum: New Dance Works recipient.

Anat Spiegel

Di rayze aheym/The journey home

Voice, composition: Anat Spiegel

Cello: Christa Rübsam

Trumpet: Isaac Mayhew

Electronics, trombone: Thomas Myrmel

How does one learn from the past? How does ancestral knowledge apply to the present, especially a knowledge which was systematically denied and methodically erased? Irena Klepfisz's poem “Di rayze aheym/The journey home” offers a meditation on these questions through the prism of the poet's primary identities as an activist, a feminist, a Holocaust survivor, a lesbian, and an immigrant. The bilingual English/Yiddish poem echoes the sound of Jewish histories and geographies, and manifests as a guiding form in Spiegel's musical composition. Following the poem's path, performers and audience are led into the substratum conceptions of home, language, and memory.

 Anat Spiegel (IL/NL/USA) is a composer and vocalist specializing in cross-platform performance. Her work stems from a vocal perspective and focuses on the endless expressions of the human voice. In the juxtaposition of jazz, theater and contemporary classical music, Spiegel's compositions consider the cultural gravity of singing itself and the connection between written language and its sounding expression. Spiegel is a member of the composer’s collective Monotak and the spoken word duo Noon and Ain. Her recent works includes the opera Medulla (La Monnaie), the electronic opera Before Present (National Dutch Opera and ADE), the online opera The Transmigration of Morton F (Holland Festival) and the chamber quartet My Four Mothers (Cedar Commissions.) Spiegel is a recipient of the 2020 McKnight composers fellowship. https://anatspiegel.com/

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