Alive & Well Productions + Helen Wicks Works present

a shared program of contemporary dance accompanied by live music

May 2, 8:00 PM | May 4, 3:30 PM
Tickets: $12 – $25

Join us to celebrate the ancient intersection of live music and dance! Experience new choreographies by Alive & Well Productions and Helen Wicks Works that explore the relationship between cultural lineage and contemporary performance.

The Four Seasons of Hamadan is a duet for solo violin and dancer that interweaves Persian and Jewish music and dance traditions while reimagining that material through a contemporary lens. Composed by ongoing collaborators Iranian-American Kian Ravaei and Choreographed by Jewish-American Annie Kahane, The Four Seasons of Hamadan strives to express the potential for intercultural harmony through live art. The material in this project emerges from ongoing research the artists undertook into their own and each other’s cultural heritages through Iranian and Jewish folk dances as well as Persian and Klezmer music.

Radio Vision, a solo choreographed and performed by Helen Wicks, synthesizes a decade of ancestral research on Helen’s great-grandfather, Hollywood music supervisor Joe Gershenson, and a conversation she had with music composer/producer Quincy Jones in 2018. The piece includes a live rendition of a 1914 composition for cello and piano by Nadia Boulanger performed by Ami Nashimoto and Keisuke Nakagoshi and a recorded sound collage by Simon Linsteadt. Radio Vision weaves ancestral and cultural roots in Yiddish theater and Hollywood soundtracks. The dance is a movement mosaic that illuminates ancestral and popular culture’s origins while exploring technological advances that have led to music and entertainment on a mass scale.

Programmed together on a shared evening, these works share curiosity about lineage and how its relevance shapes the present. Both projects are manifestations of extensive research in music, performance, and culture over time.

About Alive & Well Productions / Annie Kahane & Kian Ravaei | Artist Website

Choreographer Annie Kahane works between performance poetry, dance, song, and theater. Her projects have been supported by the Hollywood Fringe Festival, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, New Music USA, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, ODC Theater and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. Her poetry has been featured on multiple NPR stations. She currently teaches at UCLA’s school of World Arts & Cultures/Dance, and in the Theatre Departments at Pepperdine University and CSU Northridge. Composer Kian Ravaei has received a Copland House CULTIVATE Fellowship, a Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Composer Teaching Artist Fellowship, a Chamber Music Northwest Protégé Project Residency Award, a New Music USA Creator Fund Award, and a Barlow Endowment Commission. He is a current C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at The Juilliard School.

About Helen Wicks Works / Helen Wicks Artist Website

Helen Wicks is an acclaimed choreographer, performing artist, aerialist and Artistic Director of Helen Wicks Works (HWW). Wicks Works creates circus-informed performance for multi-generational audiences that has been presented at Herbst Theater, SF Aerial Arts Festival’s Cowell Theater and Gateway Pavillion at Fort Mason, ODC, Triskelion Arts, SPACE 124, Z Space and more. HWW has been commissioned by Bay Area Discovery Museum and Jim Campbell Studios’ Salesforce Tower Top Art. Wicks has received grants from Foundation Contemporary Arts (FCA), Dancers’ Group, Theater Bay Area, CCI, and others. She currently works as the Arts Specialist at The Nueva School. Helen received a BA in Dance and a BA in Psychology from Bard College where she earned the Ana Itleman Prize for Choreography.