CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Krannert Center for the Performing Arts starts its 2017-18 season with three days of guitar performances at ELLNORA: The Guitar Festival. The shows that follow will include a 15th anniversary celebration of Jupiter String Quartet, dance traditions from around the world, joint programming with Japan House, classical and chamber music artists, and a concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. They will also include several ELLNORA Reverb concerts featuring guitarists throughout the season.
For its 15th anniversary celebration, the Jupiter String Quartet will play the 15th string quartets of Mozart and Beethoven. While the chamber music group plays at major music venues and festivals around the world, the musicians are artists-in-residence at the University of Illinois and are featured at Krannert Center each year. In addition to its 15th anniversary concert, the Jupiter String Quartet also will perform this season with pianist Michael Brown.
Jason Moran and the Big Bandwagon will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thelonious Monk with a concert at Krannert Center in November.
One of the first performances this fall will be Madeleine Peyroux, a French-American singer who performs jazz, blues and pop standards and whose voice is compared to Billie Holiday. Also early in the season, the Afro-Caribbean group Tiempo Libre – a three-time Grammy Award nominee – will perform its Latin jazz.
Tango Buenos Aires: “The Spirit of Argentina” is the first of many dance performances showcasing a variety of world dance traditions. Dublin Irish Dance will perform “Stepping Out” later in the season.
The Festival of South African Dance will present two dance forms when it comes to Krannert Center. The Gumboots perform in wellies, or rainboots – the style of dance was developed by miners as a form of resistance. Real Actions Pantsula will perform pantsula, a form of urban street dance used as an expression of opposition against apartheid.
The Mark Morris Dance Group, which makes its Midwest home at Krannert Center, will present “Layla and Majnun” with Silk Road Ensemble, a music collective founded by Yo-Yo Ma. The evening-length work was co-commissioned by Krannert Center and is based on a classic Persian love poem that was made into the first Middle Eastern opera in 1908.
Choreographer Jonah Bokaer and visual artist Daniel Arsham will present a new work, “Rules of the Game,” also co-commissioned by Krannert Center. It will feature music by Grammy Award-winning artist Pharrell Williams. The program includes two other dances, one of which involves 10,000 pingpong balls.
The Moscow Festival Ballet will present three performances in January: “Swan Lake,” “Don Quixote” and “Cinderella.”
Zakir Hussain, an internationally renowned tabla player and a major influence in world music, will play a concert of Indian classical music.
A collaboration with Japan House will celebrate the art of ikebana, or Japanese flower arrangement, with an exhibition and demonstration in October.
The Takacs Quartet opens the classical music series with its eighth appearance at Krannert Center. Other classical music performances include the Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg, Russia, featuring Denis Matsuev on piano; violinist Joshua Bell in his fourth appearance at Krannert Center; the Calidore String Quartet, winners of a new prize competition in chamber music at the University of Michigan that includes Krannert Center as a collaborator; Staatskapelle Weimar, one of the oldest orchestras in the world, with conductor Kirill Karabits; and tenor Lawrence Brownlee.
Krannert Center will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Monk’s birth in November with a concert featuring Jason Moran and the Big Bandwagon. The concert will include live music, spoken word, audio recordings, video and photographs.
Cahoots NI, a children’s theater company from Northern Ireland, will use puppetry in a tale about characters trying to capture a bird.
The season also will include Indian classical music by Zakir Hussain on the tabla and Rakesh Chaurasia on the bansuri; illusionist Scott Silven in four shows in a club-style setting in the Studio Theatre; the Imago Theatre presenting “La Belle, Lost in the World of the Automaton,” a version of the “Beauty and the Beast” story set on a cruise ship in the 1920s and featuring analog effects done with clockwork mechanics; Cahoots NI, a children’s theater group from Northern Ireland performing a nonverbal tale of magic, music and puppetry; the Japanese drumming group TAO; and Songs of Freedom, celebrating the impact of the music of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell during the 1960s.
Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. July 8. For information on the entire season, go to https://krannertcenter.com/.
Editor’s note: For more information, contact Bridget Lee-Calfas at bklee@illinois.edu.
