Photo by Elizabeth Proitsis, courtesy of Performa
Adult Party Games from the Leisure Planet
August 10 2013
Presumed by its author (the late composer Art Jarvinen) to be unperformable, Adult Party Games from the Leisure Planet is a collection of wild and hilarious performance pieces, text scores, and musical activities. The composer-performer collective Varispeed will attempt the impossible: to perform what was never meant to be performed; to make the conceptual concrete; to bring to life Jarvinen's "wordworks"—and, in the process, explore the musicality of text and action.
Perfect Lives
An opera by Robert Ashley
August 17 2013
Perfect Lives is a daylong, site-specific performance of Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera adapted by Varispeed. The performance consists of seven half-hour episodes staged throughout the Catskills.
As performers and audience members journey from place to place, participants imagine a folksy, Midwestern town where the bank tellers know the captain of the football team and everyone drinks together at the end of the night. Its seven episodes weave together stories of a mysterious crime, an elopement, and the mischief of two itinerant musicians. Both lofty and quotidian, Perfect Lives brings together musicians, performers, fans, and community members alike in a celebration of American opera.
About the Artists
Founded by Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Paul Pinto, Brian McCorkle, and Gelsey Bell, Varispeed is a collective of composer-performers that creates site-specific, sometimes-participatory, oftentimes-durational, forevermore-experimental events.
Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. First broadcast in Great Britain in 1984, Perfect Lives is widely considered to be the precursor of “music-television.”
Performance Program