What’s The Big (Arts & ) Ideas

Funk legend George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic will perform free on the Green. Some of a Thousand Words, a collaboration between New York City Ballet star Wendy Whalen and acclaimed choreographer Brian Brooks with music by Brooklyn Rider, will have its world premiere. Quintessential cosmopolitan Pico Iyer will make an appearance. Rock the Vote Officer Carolyn De Witt will discuss millennials in the 2016 election. Chinese puppeteer Maleonn Ma, journalist Paula Span, and researchers Dr. Mary Mittelman and Dr. Arash Saladini wil share a panel on the arts’ potential in the fight against Alzheimer’s. And New Zealand’s Trick of the Light Theatre will present The Bookbinder, a multimedia piece inspired by the works of Chris Van Allsburg and Neil Gaiman and featuring music, shadowplay, and puppetry.

These are just a fraction of the events at this year’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, which begins this weekend with a pop-up festival in Dixwell and runs through June 26. The festival’s full roster comes in the face of having its revenue from the state of Connecticut slashed, along with many other arts organizations.

At 21 years old, though, the festival is going strong. For the first time, its big shows on the Green include something other than music: Cirque Mechanics, a stunning acrobatic show, complete with cyclists and machines, will be accompanied by a mainstage performance by the New Haven Symphony.

“I’m not saying a conductor won’t fly,” Mary Lou Aleskie, the festival’s director, said with a laugh. ​“I do know the show will pull out all the stops” for the closing evening, June 25.

The Festival’s theater offerings are likewise as good as ever. The National Theater of Scotland’s Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour opens the festival’s first weekend and runs through its entirety. Adapted from Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos — not to be confused with the HBO show — by Lee Hall, who wrote the Broadway smash Billy Elliott, and directed by Vicky Featherstone, musical director of the very popular musical Once, Our Ladies is a musical with an all-female cast of vocalists and a four-piece band. According to Aleskie, the play about a national choir competition in Edinburgh that our heroines want to lose is “not your usual Catholic girls-gone-wild show,” but it is “a racy night of theater.”

The talk about funding and budget cuts suits The Money from Exeter, UK, conceived by Seth Honnor as a participatory, immersive piece that combines theater with reality TV and game shows. Generally staged in places of decision and debate —here, it will be performed at the Quinnipiac Club — The Money is completely ad lib and no two shows or outcomes are the same. Participants choose to be a benefactor or a silent witness in a 90-minute discussion of how to spend that performance’s earnings, with signatures. If a decision can’t be reached, the sum is added to the next performance. Silent witnesses can enter the discussion by making a donation and joining in. Some come back again and again. If your session of the show can’t spend its money, how could you resist coming back to find out what becomes of it? As theater it’s as real as the concept of money and as pressing as the concept of time — but it’s also a lesson in the dynamics of working together and forming plans, or losing it all.

A&I also will host the Dmitry Krymov Lab’s first English-language production, The Square Root of Three Sisters, which revisits themes from Chekhov familiar to most theatergoers, with a cast comprised of some of the best of the Yale School of Drama’s current graduating class: Shaunette Renée Wilson, Melanie Field, and Annelise Lawson, as the sisters, and Aubie Merrylees as male characters. This is a summer chance to see the kind of front-running theater that sometimes comes our way in the Rep’s No Boundaries series.

For theater as spectacle, this year features Air Play, a comic and surreal journey by a brother and sister — played by comedy duo Seth Bloom and Christina Gelsone — encountering flying objects of all kinds, including a massive snow globe, with music drawn from a wide range of international styles, from Balkan music to Appalachian ballads, boys’ choirs to symphony orchestras.

In further music offerings, the Maria Schneider Orchestra performs a piece co-commissioned by the Festival on June 15 at Morse Recital Hall. Schneider won Grammys in 2016 for her jazz ensemble album The Thompson Fields and Best Arrangement for a track on the late, lamented David Bowie’s final album. And don’t overlook Red Baraat’s horns, drums, guitars and, yes, sousaphone, bringing an eclectic musical mix to the Green on June 19.

In dance, there is Live Music Program, choreographed by MacArthur Fellow Kyle Abraham and his company Abraham.In.Motion, with live music by Rober Glasper, a Grammy winner who reimagines Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite and other works. Further exploration of the multi-arts approach can be found in Steel Hammer, a collaboration by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe, the seven-time Obie-winning SITI Company, and the popular New York-based ensemble Bang on a Can All-Stars that “weaves music and the spoken word together with movement, dance, and percussion on a variety of surfaces—including the performers’ bodies” to revisit the story of John Henry, the “steel-driving man” who challenged a machine and won, at the cost of his life.

That makes for a lot of ticketed events, but there’s plenty of free stuff going on. Apart from the many, many events on the Green, including lots of hands-on activities for children, there are bike tours and walking tours exploring various aspects of the Elm City, from its food to its parks to its history. And those who find the price of ticketed events a bit steep should look into the Festival Ticket Fund, where supporters donate to make free and discounted tickets available.

The state’s budget cuts didn’t affect this year’s planning, but they are a factor in what the festival could look like next year. For Arts & Ideas, its international focus is a small blessing, according to Aleskie. Many of the acts from abroad perform at A&I thanks to government subsidies from their own countries — a sign of the vast difference between arts funding elsewhere in the world compared to the United States. Who knows what tomorrow will bring in these uncertain times? So get out and help support the arts, while they’re still here.

The International Festival of Arts and Ideas runs June 4 to June 26. Visit its website for complete information.