PAGES Program Overview 2017-2018Т 

Performing Arts Experience

Cindy Sherman Resources Т (click on link for learning resources)

“I’ve always wanted the string quartet to be vital, and energetic, and alive, and cool, and not afraid to kick ass and be absolutely beautiful and ugly if it has to be. But it has to be expressive of life. To tell the story with grace and humor and depth. And to tell the whole story, if possible.” –David Harrington, Kronos Quartet

A Thousand Thoughts, conceptualized and directed by filmmaker Sam Green, is a live cinema documentary featuring the hip and inventive Kronos Quartet. This performative work will take on an expansive exploration of form as it tells the story of Kronos’ history through live narration, archival footage, and interviews, footage and narration all interwoven with live music performed by Kronos. Now widely acclaimed artists and trailblazers of the vibrant indie chamber music scene, A Thousand Thoughts will highlight Kronos’ early rise in the world of classical music. The work will allow audiences to reflect on the nature of liveness, presence, and the collective experience of art, while also deepening their understanding of Kronos’ music, story, and legacy. At its heart, A Thousand Thoughts asks questions about the power of art, music, and beauty to change the world.

Themes and ideas include: music/sound, narrative, classical, contemporary, innovation, creative process

Visual Arts Experience

Baldwin ResourcesТ (click on link for learning resources)

“When I first started this series, I thought ‘God, this is the last time I do this.’ I’m so sick of using myself, how much more can I try to change myself?” – Cindy Sherman, Visual Artist

Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life is an expansive survey of Sherman’s photographs, made over a career spanning four decades. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by Sherman, from her widely known Untitled Film Stills series through successive bodies of work that slyly play off entrenched notions of female identity, including an untitled series of works made just last year depicting invented (yet convincing) portraits of glamorous, aging former film stars. Sherman helped to craft the show’s title,Т which is a reference to director Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama dealing with highly emotional struggles of identity, as a reflection of the role of cinema in her image making.

Themes and ideas include: identity, creative process, portraiture, image, cinema,

Media Arts Experience

Kronos + Sam Green Resources

[Baldwin’s] “prose is laser sharp. His onslaught is massive and leaves no room for response. Every sentence is an immediate cocked grenade. You pick it up, then realize that it is too late. It just blows up in your face. And yet he still managed to stay human, tender, accessible.” – Raoul Peck, Director, I Am Not Your Negro

In the center of this vital and pressing film, is a poignant text by James Baldwin, words and images that ring as relevant and urgent today, as they were at the height of The Civil Rights Movement. I Am Not Your NegroТ takes 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript and uses them to create a bracing and powerful film essay. Under the sharp eye of Haitian director Raoul Peck, this film uses a critical and complex lens to explore an American narrative around race, social justice, and persistence of humanity, through the ever-present words of James Baldwin. The text, as it unfolds, highlighting the lives of and assassinations of Baldwin’s friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., is read thoughtfully, beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson. Baldwin’s words and expressions are astute, making connections between past and present injustices, his insights just as necessary, dynamic, and revealing as ever.

Themes and ideas include: social justice, race, identity, community, history, narrative, memory, friendship, civics