HARTFORD, Conn. - Fräulein Maria, an insanely entertaining deconstruction of The Sound of Music, choreographed by Doug Elkins and directed by Barbara Karger and Michael Preston, will be presented on Sat., Oct. 3 at 8:30 p.m. at the Austin Arts Center at Trinity College.
Energetic, hilarious, and gender-bending, this 70-minute romp and re-imagining of Rodgers and Hammerstein's movie musical draws upon break dance, hip hop, vaudeville, voguing, ballet, and modern dance.
Elkins originally conceived Fräulein Maria in 2006 as a suite of dances intended as “a love letter” to his two young children. This early version was performed in New York City at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater in 2006 and 2007.
Enlisting Karger and Preston as co-directors (the couple are also associate professors of Theater and Dance at Trinity), Elkins and his collaborators revisited the concept and together created Fräulein Maria as a fully realized work of dance theater. It was this staging, performed before a giddy and rapturous crowd at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in August 2008, that won Elkins his a second New York Dance and Performance Award.
"Each dance is a jewel of choreographic invention and comic subtlety," says The New Yorker, which also declared Fräulein Maria as one of the 10 best dance performances of 2008.
This summer, Doug Elkins and Friends performed the work at the American Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. After the Trinity College date, Fräulein Maria tours to Philadelphia’s Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (November 12-14), Cleveland’s PlayhouseSquare (November 20-21), and returns to New York for a holiday engagement at Dance Theater Workshop (December 10-12 and 17-19).
Elkins began his career as a B-boy, touring the world with break dance groups New York Dance Express and Magnificent Force, and led his own dance company from 1988 to 2003.
He has created original work for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company: The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Pennsylvania Ballet, and others. His theater work includes collaborations with Joanne Akalaitis and Philip Glass, Robert Woodruff, Molly Smith, and David Henry Hwang. More recently he worked at American Repertory Theater on Cardenio and The Communist Dracula Pageant.
Barbara Karger was born and raised in Vienna, Austria, and received her M.F.A. in Physical Theater at the renowned Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany. As a performer she toured the world with the Swiss mask-theater troupe Mummenschanz. Since the 1990s she has directed in the United States and abroad.
Michael Preston toured the world as one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, collaborating on and performing in nine productions, and directed their last show, Life: A Guide for the Perplexed. He has also worked with the Shaliko Company, John Sayles, David Cale, and Theodora Skipitares.
Fräulein Maria will be performed in the Goodwin Theater at the Austin Arts Center at Trinity College. Admission is $15, $10 for seniors and students, free with Trinity ID.
For information about tickets, directions, and parking, please call the Austin Arts Center Box Office at 860-297-2199 or visit www.trinity.edu/artsattrinity.
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