Early Morning Opera: Abacus
Staged under the direction of Lars Jan, Early Morning Opera's large-scale multimedia work Abacus features a solo performer interacting with projected video and a chorus of choreographed Steadicams to explore R. Buckminster Fuller's vision of a Geoscope--a data visualization device that could almost perfectly model the future. From utopian to messianic, Abacus is a persuasive performance-cum-PowerPoint presentation that catapults data into metaphysical territory, where vision and fanaticism are equal parts in an equation of prophecy.

"Changing the world one multimedia performance at a time." Modern Painters

Sheetal Gandhi: Bahu-Beti-Biwi
With powerful dance, stirring vocalization and percussive text, Sheetal Gandhi's magnetically rhythmic Bahu-Beti-Biwi (Daughter-in-Law, Daughter, Wife) wraps North Indian music traditions and family characters into a contemporary tour de force that glides between humorous portraiture and active resistance. Gandhi mines the texts and subtexts of centuries-old women's songs to create an arresting vision of generational shifts that are reshaping our definitions of freedom and compromise, desire and longing, duty and love.

Ayana Hampton: The Ayana Hampton Show
Vibrant performer Ayana Hampton rocks a portrayal of stardom as she headlines her own wildly sexy and overtly subversive music-theater cabaret. Backed by The Lustrous Black Up Dancers and live music by Mark Mendelson and Brian Barrale, Hampton's song stylings range from raunchy to reverent as she testifies to the obsessions that fuel her iconic ambition--from prolific fornication to roiling heartbreak, from Michelle Obama's coiffure to Hampton's own celebrity social cause: Acute Diana Ross Disorder.

2009 NOW Festival
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