DARK WONDERLAND

ABOUT

Dark Wonderland presented four sold-out weeks of music, dance, and multimedia that helped reposition Green-Wood Cemetery as a destination for contemporary arts and culture. Held on the 150th Anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, and inspired in part by “Invisible Child: Dasani's Homeless Life,” a series of articles by New York Times reporter Andrea Elliot, the festival commissioned 12 top creators to create performances that imagined New York City as the dark wonderland of legend, a place where disparate and unequal worlds coexist.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

The Fabled City holds a powerful place in our imagination. Especially popular during times of social upheaval, it can appear as a kind of Shangri-La, but its shadows are darker than our own. In some renderings it is our world turned on its head, while in others it suggests our inescapable future or past. Its inhabitants can seem to mirror us, or mock us, or want to replace us, but they are hungry for life.

In the hands of artists this place has taken many names: Alphaville, Oz, Metropolis, the City On the Edge of Forever. Sometimes it occupies a world parallel to ours but made different by the presence of totalitarian governments, humanlike machines, sentient apes, or the living dead. The tales spun from there may address impossibly tough social issues, but the city itself is captivating, a source of endless fascination and possibility.

“We know New York City as a deeply layered place, where children caught in poverty can live just moments from million-dollar condominiums, flood tides can engulf neighborhoods, and the prospect of a lethal disease can spur a panic.”

In the actual world, the place that may best fit that description is New York City. Other capitals vie for the crown, but people around the globe still call New York “the Center of Universe.” We know it as a deeply layered place, where a second world seems to exist just behind the first. Through this parallel lens, children caught in poverty can live just moments from million-dollar condominiums, flood tides can engulf neighborhoods, and the prospect of a lethal disease can spur a panic.

In 1865, during turmoil in Europe and America, Lewis Carroll’s depiction of another world, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, first saw publication. The book has become timeless, but its lawless universe and parody of meaning are reflective of its era. Other works of speculative fiction, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), depict places whose cultural tensions seem birthed of their respective times, yet also tied to our own.

On the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Carroll’s novel, a dozen of today’s most visionary performing artists will hold a modern-day looking glass to New York City and the world beyond. Given current events in areas of human rights, civil liberties, climate crisis and more, what skyline will be revealed once those artists pull back the veil?

- Brian Tate

PROGRAM

Masters of Ceremony:
Helga Davis and Alzo Slade

WEEK 1 
A solo guitar requiem for Eric Garner by fellow Staten Islander, Grammy Award-winning guitarist/activist Vernon Reid, founder of the band, Living Colour.

A solo performance on things unseen or untended in family mythology and queer/feminist history by performance artist/actor Sacha Yanow, as “the Little Vamp.”

Songs of bottomless love and loss by Vanitas, featuring alto-saxophonist/composer Andrew D’Angelo and keyboardist Pete Rende.

WEEK 2
Electronic pop band SLV, co-founded by multi-instrumentalists Sandra Lilia Velasquez and Sean Dixon, performs songs of courage and possibility.

Poet/performance art therapist Queen GodIs offers the coming-of-age story of an MC who examines her origins and reimagines what she is made of.

An electro-acoustic seascape of resplendent noise and dancing shadows by performance/installation artist Arturo Vidich, addressing illusions of duality.

WEEK 3 

Choreographer/performer Jill Sigman with DJ Joro Boro offers a movement ritual that explores how the surface world feels darker than its underbelly.

Choreographer/director/performer Vanessa Anspaugh and dancer/choreographer devynn emory apply the cut-up approach from literature to affirm a queer kinship.

Composer/vocal artist Samita Sinha and cornetist/trumpeter/composer Graham Haynes conduct a sonic exploration of the world inside a single tone.

WEEK 4

The improvisational big band Burnt Sugar, led by guitarist/cultural critic Greg Tate with bassist Jared Michael Nickerson, performs Brer Rabbit The Opera: A Funky Meditation On Gentrification.

Mezzo-soprano and Porgy and Bess star Alicia Hall Moran with guitarist Brandon Ross perform a haunting vignette on un-channeled wants and unfinished business.

The 2015 King and Queen of Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade, actor Mat Fraser and performance artist/dancer/burlesque star Julie Atlas Muz demonstrate their creed as radical artists.

PROJECT TEAM

Brian Tate, Curator/Executive Producer 
Bill Toles, Tech Director
Mingo Tull, Tech Production
Ed Marshall, Photography

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