Segerstrom Center for the Arts announces its fourth annual Off Center Festival January 21 – 31, 2015 – featuring eight exciting artists and companies performing at the Center for the first time. This year’s festival includes the West Coast premieres of Spain’s Agrupación Señor Serrano’s Brickman Brando Bubble Boom and the Mehr Theatre Group’s Timeloss.
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| Segerstrom Center - Brickman Brando Bubble Boom - Photo by Alfred Mauve |
Co-produced by Festival TNT – Terrassa Noves Tendències
Performed in English and Spanish with English supertitles
January 21 – 24, 2015 in Samueli Theater
**The creation of the mortgage system. A shantytown on fire. Funky music blaring. Tahitian paradises. 150,000 foreclosures in Spain in 2012. Marlon Brando portraying the role of Victorian builder John Brickman. Using live feed video, rhythmic music and minimalist choreography, Agrupación Señor Serrano creates a searing indictment of rampant consumerism and the speculative bubble. Brickman Brando Bubble Boom is an exuberant manifesto on the right to housing and the search for a home. Agrupación Señor Serrano is a Barcelona-based performing arts company that combines theatre, dance, video-art and interactive technologies into riveting theatre to explore human aspirations and the abuse of power.
Performed in Farsi with English supertitles
January 21 & 22, 2015 -Founders Hall
**This Iranian-based theater company makes its West Coast premiere in the Center’s Off Center Festival. 2004: The young Iranian theatermaker Amir Reza Koohestani makes his international debut with Dance on Glasses, a subtle and candid portrayal of the end of young love. 2014: Koohestani creates a fictionalized reunion of the actors from Dance on Glasses. Having separated in the intervening years, they confront the distance between their personal biographies and collective histories in this intimate portrait of Iranian life. Amir Reza Koohestani is one of Iran’s most successful and prolific playwright-directors. Dance on Glasses won international acclaim and toured for four years. He is the first director to win two consecutive awards for the “Best Theatre Production of the Year” in Iran (Ivanov, 2011 and The Fourth Wall, 2012).
Making Southern California debuts are Marga Gomez performing Lovebirds and Amy O’Neal in her Opposing Forces.
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| Segerstrom Center - Marga Gomez in Lovebirds - Photo by Patti Meyer |
Directed by David Schweizer
January 23 & 24, 2015 – Studio Performance Space
**In her tenth solo play, GLAAD award-winning comic performer Marga Gomez portrays a cast of incurable romantics as they chase their hearts’ desires – into the night, through decades and to insane lengths. Orestes, a macho maitre d' is infatuated with a tin-eared singer who is married to an academic who never sleeps and is never awake. On the other side of town, Orestes' daughter cuts off her hair, joins a coven and starts dating the captain of a women's football team. Throughout, they are observed and documented by Polaroid Phillie, an ageless nightclub photographer and fixture at gay bars, Spanish restaurants and wherever passion happens.
Amy O’Neal: Opposing Forces
January 29 – 31, 2015 – Founders Hall
**Choreographer Amy O’Neal examines the paradoxical nature of B-Boy culture as it relates to femininity and the value systems of dance battling, commercial dance, stage performances and freestyle cyphers. How do these different environments affect expression? Where are stereotypes changing and where do they remain the same? O’Neal pries open these topics via conversation, collaboration and transfixing dance moves. Performed to original music by DK Waylon Dugan, aka WD4D.
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| Segerstrom Center - Amy O'Neal - Opposing Forces - Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki |
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| Segerstrom Center - Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox |
January 23, 2015 – Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall
Special price: $25, $35 & $45
**Don vintage threads and dance, dance, dance. Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox perform present day music à la pop hits of the past: Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” assayed as a doo-wop number; Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” tricked out in flapper jazz; Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” rendered a 1940s big-band standard. Bradlee uses music itself to inform audiences about 20th century song styles, demonstrate the remarkable elasticity of the pop form, confound cultural context and unite generations.
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| Segerstrom Center - Roger Guenveur Smith - Photo by Patti McGuire |
January 27 – 30, 2015 – in Founders Hall
**History, poetry and tragedy collide as Roger Guenveur Smith tackles the thorny odyssey of Rodney King – from his first shocking appearance in the national spotlight as the victim of police brutality to his involuntary martyrdom that ignited the L.A. riots to his lonely death at the bottom of a swimming pool. In light of current events that beg comparison, Smith’s work will resonate with a new immediacy. Smith seamlessly fuses facts and friction, motion and emotion into a gripping narrative that poses impossible questions while illuminating his subject with grace and empathy.
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Directed by Emily Mendelsohn
January 29 & 30, 2015 – Studio Performance Space
**Kristina Wong’s self-skewering new masterpiece relates how a not-so-whitesavior becomes a hip hop legend in Northern Uganda. A solo performer, writer, actor, educator, filmmaker and “culture jammer,” she was named “One of the Seven Funniest EcoComedians” by Mother Nature Network. Her most notable touring show – Wong Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – looked at the high rates of depression and suicide among Asian American women, toured to more than 40 venues and was made into a film.
Nick Waterhouse
January 24, 2015 – Arts Plaza
FREE
**The Nick Waterhouse concert on the Arts Plaza is free, and will also offer an array of good and meal selections from some of Orange County’s most popular food trucks. Huntington Beach native Nick Waterhouse believes everybody wants to be somebody else. One of his heroes, Van Morrison, got his start covering Bobby Bland, whose own musical idol was Nat “King” Cole. In Waterhouse’s view, emulation is a journey; you never truly succeed, but as the singer, guitarist and songwriter puts it, “You become something on the way there.”
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| Segerstrom Center - Nick Waterhouse Photo by Meredith Moran |
Single tickets: $25 at SCFTA.org
*Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox $25, $35 & $45
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