The support of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage has been instrumental in allowing The Crossing to dream deep, and wide. That partnership was again confirmed today with the announcement of a $200,000 grant supporting our upcoming project
Aniara. The Crossing will collaborate with composer Robert Maggio and Finland's Klockriketeatern and its artistic director Dan Henriksson to create a 90-minute, interdisciplinary choral theatre work based on the poem
Aniara by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson.
The last space ship to leave a dying earth veers off course and heads into eternity; her passengers are left to face the emptiness within and without. Martinson's epic novel contemplates science, the nature and necessity of art, governance, and society; sometimes cold and brutal, at other times touching, it is a ruthlessly honest view of human nature.
Aniara and its process will explore the relationship between disparate practices and genres of art, while asking questions about our relationship to one another, to Earth, and to the passage of time. The process will be part devised theatre, part composed music. We are excited to find out what we can achieve with the collective talents of singers, actors, a choreographer specializing in Peking Opera style, a director, a conductor, production designers and technical staff.
We will use new projection technology for long-distance rehearsing in real time.
Aniara
will premiere in June 2019 and there are plans to take it to Helsinki later that year.
Past Pew Center-funded projects have included Seven Responses, The Gulf (between you and me), and Seneca Sounds - all seminal adventures in our journey.
We are grateful to The Pew Center for nurturing artists and ideas in Philadelphia.
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