2015

Its Eighth Annual Summer Festival not only showcased risk-taking work, but also fostered an environment where audiences and artists could come together to form a community that valued dialogue and experimentation. Inspired in part by the locavore movement, in small, subtle, but important ways, Mount Tremper Arts offered an alternative to the prevailing model, an antidote to spectacle. 
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The Mount Tremper Arts Summer Festival featured seven weeks of programming wherein art could be a radical adventure and audiences, along with artists, could nourish their shared curiosity. This year’s highlights included:
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The award-winning International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) returned for its fifth consecutive season with soprano Tony Arnold, performing composer David Lang’s Whisper Opera, a critically acclaimed chamber opera, written at Mount Tremper Arts, and designed for an intimate audience of 35 people. 
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A campfire performance under the stars of Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet, an acclaimed song cycle about love, death, and whiskey for four voices, cello, guitars, dulcimer, Celtic harp, erhu, autoharp, accordion, keyboards, and percussion. Ghost Quartet raises the spirits of murder ballads, doo-wop, angular bebop, Chinese folk, Islamic adhan, and the music of Bernard Herrmann and George Crumb. 
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camp, curated by AUNTS, was a weeklong experiment in choreography, art, and collective living that culminated in live performance. AUNTS is a roving platform for dance and performance guided by core principles of collectivity, cooperation, and sharing. 
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John Jahnke and Hotel Savant’s Alas, The Nymphs, the first section of Men Go Down, an ambitious trilogy combining the construction of Greek drama with fairy tale sensibility to examine the ramifications of antique guilt infesting our modern conscience.
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An evening of barbecue and experimental poetry with Tan Lin and Robert Fitterman, two of the most significant experimental writers of their generation. Both work extensively with found materials and with the language of the Internet.
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Performers, Artists, and Residents for 2015:

Season Brochure