‘Gorky’s Dream Garden’ to Hold Preview on September 7 at Newark Museum of Art

For the September 7 preview, Ekizian and her team have staged a portable production that will make full use of not only the post-modern architecture of the museum’s Billy Johnson Theater designed by the late Michael Graves, but its gallery space by Gorky’s murals.

Conceived as a spectacle of sight and sound, the presentation includes a pre-concert dance ritual, tableaux vivants, a procession of light and a pop-up “wishing-tree” installation conjuring East/West – ancient/modern, immigration, otherness, innovation, resilience and endurance.

The internationally represented visual artist Vahakn Arslanian has created the show’s panoply of indigenous birds harkening from Gorky’s lost Armenian lands for the production’s projections and its pop-up interactive “wishing tree.” His collaboration with Julian Schnabel, “The Ones You Didn’t Write – The Maybach Car,” was displayed on the Grand Canal during the Venice Biennale.

Deaf from birth, Arslanian is fascinated by aviation, birds, candle flames and the chaotic beauty of shattered glass. Through these miracles symbolizing some of life’s essential promises of hope, Arslanian, like the artist Gorky in his overcoming the immediate trauma of the Genocide, found in his art both a route for his imaginative vision and a means of exploring the equilibrium between destruction and creation.

In keeping with Ekizian’s layering of real, unreal and surreal through her opulent music score and fast paced time traveling story line, the Dream Garden’s visuals are multifaceted. Throughout, panoramic backdrops guided by Arslanian’s birds in flight offer vistas to fragmented and montaged abstraction and nature captured respectively by Corbett McCarthy and Armenia’s foremost photo-journalist of its evocative landscapes, Hrair Hawk Khatcherian. McCarthy, a Spring Lake, New Jersey art collector and gallery owner, has recently acquired a collection of lost works pointing to Gorky’s early and private art suggestive of his exile flight to America and assimilation that is now under critical examination among the art world. For the opera’s turning point scene, a riveting Dream Dance will be accompanied with the screening of the composer’s private music video educating on the Armenian Genocide featuring the voice of the late Woodstock/”Freedom” legend, Richie Havens in the opera’s role of its enigmatic Black Monk. Here, Ekizian’s setting for the singer’s raspy wail in her orchestration of a sublime ancient Armenian spiritual hymn is set against devastating flames and brutal historic photos of the Genocide’s death marches into the desert as a timeless and worldly plea to rise above.

Brent Barrett, the venerable Broadway leading man, performs the role of Gorky. The actor and bari-tenor is the winner of the Los Angeles Music Critics Award, and a frequent star in international and Broadway productions of “Phantom of the Opera,” “Chicago” and “Kiss Me Kate” as well as in musicals and in concerts with theaters, symphony orchestras, opera houses, and concert halls around the world. He is the lead of the popular “Broadway Tenors.”

Joining Barrett, the line-up of performers includes Hasmik Mekenejian, the Yerevan born contralto and principal soloist of the St. Vartan’s Armenian Cathedral Choir in New York City as Gorky’s martyred mother, Shushan. Soprano Karen Lubeck as Gorky’s American ingenue wife, Agnes, attracts attention as a promising artist with a beautiful voice, intelligent musicianship, and thoughtful interpretation and made her Carnegie Hall debut sharing the stage with trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.

Actors performing in quick-cutting voice overs as the show’s “Art Whisperers” in tandem with Ekizian’s luscious score will include Adela Maria Bolet, also doubling as the artist’s eccentric sister, Vartoosh). The Cuban-born actor of film, TV and theatre and winner of the Best Actress Latin America Theater Festival and Revelacion ACE Entertainment Critics Association Awards. Bolet will be joined by John Sannuto, New York theater veteran singer, dancer, director, and choreographer and Professor of Theatre and the Chair of the Performing Arts Department at Long Island University´s Brooklyn Campus.

The Art of Motion Dance Theatre, directed by dancer/choreographer Lynn Needle, will cover the show’s extensive dance sections portraying the physical and mental “fantasy of flight” evoked by Gorky’s Aviation. Needle, a disciple of the legendary American choreographer Alwin Nikolais, performed last winter to critical acclaim the dance of “The Exiled Heart” from the Gorky Opera on the celebrated Appel Room stage at Jazz at Lincoln Center before the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) through the JKA Booking Dance Festival.

With her dance captain, Janette Dishuk, Needle and Dishuk — both on the dance faculty of Bergen Community College — will be joined by a trio of cutting-edge male dancers who are as well, equally at home in classical ballet, modern dance, hip-hop and Broadway. Needle’s and Dishuk’s portrayal of female icons representing “Mother Armenia” and “Holy Breath” of Ekizian’s script will be joined by the men performing the opera’s intriguing Chekovian “Black Monk” (Michael Crawford), “The Artist as a Young Man” (Marcos Valasquez) and a cross-over, transgender “World” deity (M.A. Taylor).

The Palisades Virtuosi will function as the Dream Garden Lite Orchestra of piano, alto flute and clarinet. A mainstay on New Jersey’s cultural landscape and beyond, the ensemble featuring pianist Ron Levy, flutist Margaret Swinchoski and clarinetist Don Morkrynski has been hailed by Fanfare Magazine: “In terms of intonation, articulation, and musical insight, Palisades Virtuosi represent the best of our current world-class standards.”