This Weekend, Vesalii Icones

Opera Cabal's one-time showing of Peter Maxwell Davies' Vesalii Icones is this weekend only. In fact, it's Saturday only. But it's in the afternoon! So you have all the time in the world to catch the most insanely interesting dance piece Opera Cabal will ever produce (until we do it next year with the full orchestra: stay tuned).

The following poster for the Praxes of Theory Conference of which this is a part (you can tell the conference is happening at the U of C because of the substitution of an exciting, difficult word, Praxes, for a boring one, Practice) is illegible at this resolution, but the levitating guy at the bottom, he's in the show. So come :)

Vesalii Icones: Theory & Practice at the University of Chicago

David Levin makes a plug for Opera Cabal's Vesalii Icones!

(Click on the second video under "All Videos")

The Buzz about Vesalii Icones

Many of you will remember Opera Cabal's partial staging of Peter Maxwell Davies' Vesalii Icones which I directed last summer in a workshop version at High Concept Laboratories. Please join me for a single, preview showing of the full version Saturday, May 22 in Fulton Hall on the University of Chicago campus. The performance is part of a conference, "Praxes of Theory," organized by David J. Levin and sponsored by the Franke Institute.

VESALII ICONES
Directed by Majel Connery, with choreography by Adrian Jevicki (Movementpants Dance, NYC). Sam Goodman & John Rich, dancers. The show runs 45 minutes and is followed by a discussion with the audience moderated by David J. Levin.

Saturday, May 22
4:30p - 6p
Fulton Hall
4th fl., Goodspeed Hall
Dept of Music
University of Chicago
5845 S. Ellis Ave

Details on the show & the conference.

Map the venue.

About Vesalii Icones:

Conceived at the height of his career in experimental stage music, Peter Maxwell Davies’ Vesalii Icones (1969) is based on the unlikely superimposition of 16th-century anatomical diagrams (Andreas Vesalius's *De fabrica corporis humani* or *On the fabric of the human body*) with the fourteen Stations of the Cross. As one of Davies’ only choreographed works, Vesalii Icones permitted experimentation on a new level with two of the composer’s perennial preoccupations: excessive embodiment, and the slippery division between sacred and profane.

It is the task of the current production intelligibly to engage two systems of representation very much at odds with one another: art (religious iconography) and science (the medicalized representation of bodies in decay). As part of a conference that explores the intersection of practice & theory, the production foregrounds the interpretive and intellectual work that precedes the creation of a stage work, and the ways in which stage works can in turn reflect or reject intellectual craft.

Photo by Lara Kastner.