With the generous support of donors to our Commissions and Programming Fund, Stanford Live presented a series of unique and compelling premieres in our 2023–24 season, spanning music, dance, theater, and multimedia. Aligning with our season theme of Reflection and Reinvention, many of the commissions viewed stories, histories, and past works of art through a contemporary lens, transforming them into powerful stories for our present moment.
As we have increased the presence of dance in our series in recent years, we have made a custom of bringing a major international dance company to campus each fall. We linked this approach with our commissioning efforts in presenting Akram Kahn’s Jungle Book Reimagined in December. Khan’s rethinking of Kipling’s tale reinvents the beloved story through the eyes of Mowgli, who is now a refugee moving among tribes of animals in a world ravaged by climate change.
As with other Khan works, the movement brought together elements of modern and Kathak dance languages and broadened to embody the story’s animals. The ten-member company dazzled audiences with their ensemble precision and ability to evoke the physique and movement of the animal characters. The work was also a technological marvel; Khan has spoken of wanting to avoid the environmental cost of shipping huge sets around the world, and Jungle Book Reimagined instead projected a digitally-conjured set onto the stage, portraying urban desolation, lush jungle settings, and animated animals interacting with the dancers. This thought-provoking work received extended ovations in its two performances at Memorial Auditorium, in which over 1,700 audience members experienced the work.
Fall also brought Gregory Maqoma’s Broken Chord, a hybrid music, theater, and storytelling work by the South African dancer and choreographer. The work revisits the true story of a South African choir’s tour of England in the late 1800s to raise funds to build a school, and the racism and misunderstandings they encountered. Revisiting this nearly lost history, Maqoma incorporated both traditional Xhosa and contemporary dance styles into the piece, with stirring singing and dancing from the cast and his own virtuosic movement at the center.
Like many of our commissions, Broken Chord helped us build relationships with campus and community scholars and artists. As with two of last season’s commissions, Circa’s Leviathan and Joyce DiDonato’s Eden, Broken Chord included the participation of campus and community performers. Stanford voice faculty member Marie-Louise Catsalis recruited and led guest singers to form a chorus representing the English hosts who first welcome, then disparage the South Africans. The performance was followed by an illuminating conversation between Maqoma and Musical Director Thuthuka Sibisi led by Karishma Bhagani, a PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies who is one of our Stanford Live Curatorial Fellows. Karishma is also the organizer of the Stanford Humanities Center’s “Producing Knowledge in and of Africa” workshop, and her involvement brought a cross-section of the university’s African cultural scholars to join in the post-show conversation and make a fuller connection to our organization.
Our fall dance programs also lent support to our educational mission. Both Gregory Maqoma and members of Akram Khan’s company led master classes for Stanford dance students. These were part of a yearlong series of dance master classes that strengthened our collaboration with Stanford’s Dance Division and enriched their offerings to students, providing instruction on a variety of global dance idioms.
Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett returned to the Bing Studio with Wonderful Joe. Both poignant and outrageous, often at the same time, the work follows an older gay man’s musings as he wanders through his changing neighborhood with his dog, encountering old friends and reminders of turning points in his life. Burkett’s marionettes came to life through the humor and sharp characterization of his writing and his portrayal of multiple characters with his brilliant vocal and puppeteering skills. The play was a moving, funny, and bittersweet depiction of how cities can help communities form and sometimes pull them apart, and of an individual accepting loss and the inevitability of change while still wanting to leave something behind.
The Los Angeles Master Chorale (LAMC) joined us in March to present Music to Accompany a Departure, co-created by director Peter Sellars and LAMC Artistic Director Grant Gershon. The work, conceived as a response to the pandemic, adapts German baroque composer Heinrich Schütz’s masterwork Musikalische Exequien (Funeral Music) in a simple but utterly moving staging. As they performed this austerely beautiful music, the singers sat in rows, as if at a funeral, and slowly began to add gestures of mourning—bowing their heads, reaching upward, hugging each other—simple movements that gathered emotional force as they accumulated over the course of the work. At points when the music was scored for only a pair of singers, individual chorus members laid down on a table at the front of the stage to sing duets with another singer facing them, as if one was comforting another before dying.
The piece resonated with our season theme of Reflection and Reinvention, imagining this centuries-old work as if it had sprung directly from our era. Sellars and Gershon spoke at length about the work’s gestation during a pre-concert talk moderated by Stanford Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life Tiffany Steinwert, sharing how the singers brought their own experiences of the pandemic into the project’s development. Sellars in particular emphasized our unmet need to engage in public mourning while not being allowed to gather, and the work’s cathartic process addressed this powerfully.
Two of our concerts in winter/spring 2024 contributed to ambitious commissioning projects by leading figures in the new music world. The commissioning support we provided for the Kronos Quartet’s visit was another addition to our multifaceted relationship with the ensemble, one of our longest and most significant artistic partnerships. Kronos has been part of our performance series almost every year since the 1980s, with each season bringing an individually curated program for our community. In the case of this year’s performance, we were proud to be among the commissioners for their Five Decades project, which celebrates the ensemble’s 50th year with 10 new commissions.
We supported a new work by Gabriella Smith, a Bay Area native who is a rising star among young American composers. Much of her music is informed by her dual commitment to art and environmentalism, and her piece for Kronos, Keep Going, was very much in this mold. Smith inventively mixed recordings of interviews with individuals working to counter climate change, such as the founder of a community garden, with the live playing of Kronos, setting inventively shifting instrumental textures in dialogue with the spoken testimonials. We were pleased to not only support this worthwhile work, but to be part of Kronos’s latest initiative to expand the string quartet repertoire.
Our commissioning program helped support an even larger endeavor, flutist Claire Chase’s Density 2036. This 24-year initiative to create a new flute repertoire for the 21st Century is timed to culminate on the centennial of Edgard Varese’s modernist solo flute landmark, Density 21.5, in 2036. We contributed to the project by serving as co-commissioner of The Holy Liftoff by iconic California composer Terry Riley, written for Chase with JACK Quartet. In Riley’s typical fashion, this kaleidoscopic evening-length piece drew from multiple musical sources and honored the performers’ creativity with an open-ended approach. The score includes fully notated material along with drawings and text meant to be interpreted as the performers see fit. Chase, working with composer Samuel Clay Birmaher, created a realization of the score for live flute, seven prerecorded flute tracks, and string quartet. The memorably imaginative and immersive work was among our musical highlights for the season, and Riley promises he will even continue to add new music, making its co-creation with Chase a living process.
Looking Ahead
We are excited to begin a new era for our organization with the arrival of Iris Nemani as McMurtry Family Director of Stanford Live in April 2024. Through her leadership, Stanford Live will continue its commitment to commissioning, including several new works we will present in our 2024–25 season.
A highlight will be the world premiere of David Lang’s before and after nature, for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Los Angeles Master Chorale, a reflection on climate change and humanity’s place in the world created in collaboration with Stanford’s new Doerr School of Sustainability and Environmental Justice Working Group. Choreographer Yang Liping’s Rite of Spring, performed by her Peacock Contemporary Dance company, reimagines Stravinsky’s masterwork in a Chinese cultural context. Other commissions include a new Percussion Quartet for Third Coast Percussion by Jessie Montgomery; a new work by kora player Sona Jobarteh that she’ll perform with jazz harpist Brandee Younger in their first-ever collaboration; and Carnival of the Animals, a collaboration between legendary dancer Wendy Whelan, spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and choreographer Francesca Harper.
Interested in learning more about how you can support Stanford Live’s commissioning efforts? Please reach out to Director of Development, Laurel Skehen at lskehen@stanford.edu or 650.498.9365 to discuss.