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featuring John Carpenter's surrealistic jazz pantomime
and Claude Debussy's rediscovered homage to childhood
Table's Clear by Paul Lansky and
Krazy Kat (Tone Poem in Slow Rhythm) by Bix Beiderbeck.
The highlight of this project is a staging of the French composer Claude Debussy's final masterpiece, the ballet The Toy-Box (La boîte à joujoux). Conceived for his daughter Emma, The Toy-Box offers a poignant look back at the composer's favorite musical things. The work dates from 1913, and it was left partially unorchestrated at the time of Debussy's death in 1919. A manuscript of the score survives in Moscow, where it was used as the basis of a little-known staging of the ballet in 1918 by the Moscow Chamber Theater under the direction of Alexander Tairov. The Moscow archival sources include an unknown jazz-overture to the ballet, which will be performed at Princeton for the first time outside of Russia. The music for the ballet will be conducted by Princeton's Tony Branker and performed by an expanded version of our student jazz ensemble (the score includes many references to ragtime) with new choreography by Rebecca Lazier.
The Toy-Box will appear on the second half of a program featuring another short jazz-age ballet, Krazy Kat, to be staged by Tracey Bersley. This work was performed in Chicago and New York City in the 1920s and 1930s before dropping out of the repertoire. Krazy Kat is based on the famous comic strip by George Herriman and features music by the iconoclastic American composer John Carpenter. The novelty of the comic strip resided in its surrealism, which was as much verbal as visual: the characters speak a combination of James Joyce, fake Yiddish, highborn English, and American slang. This mélange is used to support a pantomime freighted with political, religious, and sexual symbolism. Carpenter's score also parodies one of Debussy's masterworks, the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.
Featuring two forgotten, misconstrued masterworks, the project will provide Princeton students an invaluable education in modernism, specifically the impact of jazz on ballet, and the polemics that distinguished Debussy and Carpenter from their German and Russian contemporaries. The premiere is set for April 10, and performances will run for three days.
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So, don't be surprised when images of Krazy Kat and French toys start appearing on the Princeton Campus this winter!
Cheers,
Darwin