Galileo in America 2012

press materials for Galileo in America

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Press Release 3

Feb. 8, 2012. The University of California, Irvine, website has published a feature article on the Galileo in America project. For the story, follow this link.

Press Release 2

Nov. 21, 2011. The Drama and Studio Art departments at UC Irvine have teamed up to present "By & About Brecht" a mini festival of works created and inspired by the seminal German playwright and theorist Bretolt Brecht. Leading off in late February is Galileo in America by writer-artist Antoinette LaFarge and director Robert Allen. This piece is a surreal epic about Brecht’s exile years in California during the Second World War, when he was working on a new production about the life of Galileo. Following it in April is director Ryanne Laratonda’s production of Brecht’s powerful play Mother Courage and Her Children, which dissects the brutal business of war and its effects on society. The “By & About Brecht” mini festival is a timely theatrical confrontation with our national disquiet over the realities of war, the price of success, and the erosion of civil liberties.

Tickets for the two “By & About Brecht” productions (Galileo in America and Mother Courage & Her Children) will be available at a discount when purchased as a package.

Press Release 1

Nov. 10, 2011. Galileo in America is an original theatrical work in which clowns and inquisitors share the stage. Equally cabaret and courtroom, it focuses on the period in the 1940s when German playwright Bertolt Brecht fled to Santa Monica to escape the Nazis.

During his exile in California, Brecht worked on a new production of his play about Galileo's struggle with the Catholic Church, The Life of Galileo, with the noted film actor Charles Laughton. Suspected of being Communists, Brecht and his friends were kept under constant surveillance by the FBI. At the very end of this period, Brecht had his own reckoning with authority when he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. An expansive meditation on the recurrent efforts of governments to repress freedom of speech, Galileo in America revisits a pivotal period in American history when civil liberties were threatened by blacklists and demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Galileo in America will have its U.S. premiere in the new Experimental Media Performance Lab in the Contemporary Art Center at the University of California, Irvine, in February-March 2012. It has been supported by the Goethe Institute, Los Angeles; the Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades; the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles; the University of California, Irvine; and contributions from individual donors.

Created by University of California, Irvine, faculty member Antoinette LaFarge and director Robert Allen, Galileo in America is structured as a surreal epic in which these stories are twined into a single braid, bringing Galileo and his daughter Virginia face to face with the FBI agents who shadowed Brecht. It is partly inspired by German cabaret and boasts original music by composer Philip White.

In considering how we mythologize history for political ends, LaFarge and Allen draw on a great deal of historical source material, including Brecht's own journals and poems and the testimony of various witnesses before HUAC including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the singer Pete Seeger. They have also mined the records that the FBI kept on Brecht during the war years, which have become available through the Freedom of Information Act.

Galileo in America began in a workshop organized by graduates of the Columbia University Theater Program who wanted to create a piece that spoke to their reality as working artists in Hollywood as well as Americans living in doubtful times. The development process included staged readings of the work-in-progress in 2004 at the Goethe Institute, Los Angeles, and the Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades.

Allen and LaFarge have created a number of well-received performance works, including Hangmen Also Die (2010), The Roman Forum Project (2003), Demotic (2006), and Playing the Rapture (2008).

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