The Contemporary Arts Center's (CAC) "This Time Tomorrow" festival is back for another year and is adding an extra day. The performance festival will span five days, April 22-26.
The interactive performance pieces will be spread among venues around town. This year's festival includes four pieces commissioned by the CAC and two North American premieres.
The center describes the event as "a five-day fever dream of imagination, experimentation, urgency and connectivity. The artists' works serve as proposals of hope, or perhaps alarm, for our collective future, while also mining the past to acknowledge the pathway to this moment."
Performing Arts Director Drew Klein says audiences are encouraged to take risks and embed themselves in the experience.
"We want audiences to feel like they're taking a leap here; they're trying to hear new voices - conversations that are happening around the world - to better understand our city, our region and also the world that we're a part of," he explains.
Klein expects some people may find performance art scary or intimidating but he says the CAC works with the artists to make sure the works are accessible as well as challenging.
"Audiences will be able to find their own space, hopefully, to imagine what doesn't exist, to reorganize our way of understanding the world and find new forms to share that information."
This year's festival includes 14 performance opportunities. Some include:
- Regional premiere of the CAC-commissioned immersive performance "This is a Formation," the latest in American choreographer duo jumatatu m. poe and Jermone "Donte" Beacham's "Let 'im Move You" series, which draws from J-Sette dance performance to confront conceived notions of black queered bodies in public assembly
- North American premiere of "Collection of Artists," the CAC-commissioned third movement of Portuguese artist Raquel André's "Collection of People" series, in which she tells the stories she's collected from real interactions with artists around the world
- North American premiere of Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll's "aCORdo," a movement-based, interactive rumination on social stratification and police violence performed by Cia REC, a group of four black dancers from Brazil's favelas
- South African artist Gabrielle Goliath's powerful performance project "Elegy," an iterative commemoration of female and LGBTQI+ individuals subjected to fatal acts of violence in Goliath's home nation, led by a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning
- CAC commissions by Cincinnati-based artists Britni Bicknaver and Jay Bolotin
