One of the Region’s Earliest Arts Organizations to Offer a Safe New Model for Live Performance

March 3, 2021 – Sarasota

The Hermitage’s busy season continues with a variety of in-person and virtual programs featuring Hermitage artists-in-residence who present performances and conversations about their works-in-progress and offer insight into their creative process. Registration is required for each event—and is now available on the Hermitage website at HermitageArtistRetreat.org.

Here’s a quick preview of upcoming events, including new and previously announced programs:

• NEW!Friday, March 26, 5:30 p.m.:  “Future Tradition: An Evening with Du Yun.” A talk and demonstration with Pulitzer Prize winner and Grammy Award nominee Du Yun. On the Hermitage Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood.
  • Born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, Du Yun works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theater, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world. Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera Angel’s Bone won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize; in 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; and in 2019, she was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. As an avid performer and bandleader (Ok Miss), her onstage persona has been described by The New York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge.” Yun founded Future Tradition, a global initiative that illuminates the lineages of folk art and uses these structures to build cross-regional collaborations from the ground up.  Yun has collaborated with artists and musicians of United Arab Emirates, Istanbul, Central Asia, and China. She led a team of performing artists, scholars, documentary filmmakers, and visual artists, working closely together with local regional opera troupes, as well as masters and amateurs of traditional art forms, to create new works. In addition to fostering new art, this platform illuminates existing traditional repertoires from different cultures by setting them side by side. At its heart, Future Tradition focuses on developing new works through cultural dialogue by looking at an art form’s DNA. Yun is professor of composition at the Peabody Institute, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. A community champion, she was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble; served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival; and conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (National Sawdust). In 2018, Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation, and the Beijing Music Festival named her “Artist of the Year.” Hear Du Yun’s music and see her images here: ChannelDuYun.com. 

Du Yun’s Hermitage artist residencies are generously sponsored by Sondra & Gerald Biller, Robyn and Charles Citrin, and Tina and Dan Napoli.

• NEW!Wednesday, March 31, 5:30 p.m.: “Storied Stories of the Creative Process” with Michael Riedel and Robert Plunket. Longtime columnist for the New York Post, host of “Theatre Talk” on PBS, and celebrated author Michael Riedel, along with Sarasota’s own “Mr. Chatterbox,” Robert Plunket, will share candid and colorful stories of famed artistic projects in early development. Moderated by Hermitage Artistic Director and CEO Andy Sandberg. On the Hermitage Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood; also available via Live-Stream.
  • Michael Riedel has been the theater columnist for the New York Post since 1998. New York magazine has called his column a “must-read” for the theater world. Riedel began his radio career as regular on the Imus in the Morning show in 2011. In 2017 WOR, New York’s oldest and highest-rated station, asked him to cohost its morning show with well-known sportscaster Len Berman. The Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning show is the highest-rated morning radio program in the New York City area. Riedel’s book Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway won the Marfield Prize for arts writing in 2015 and is widely considered to be the successor to William Goldman’s celebrated 1967 book about Broadway, The Season. A graduate of Columbia University, Riedel lives in Manhattan. Robert Plunket is the author of My Search for Warren Harding, which was listed on the Guardian’s “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read,” and Love Junkie. 

• LIVE PERFORMANCE SOLD OUT! TICKETS FOR VIRTUAL ACCESS STILL AVAILABLE.  Wednesday, March 3, evening: “Hermitage Sunsets @ Selby Gardens” continues with cellist Dorothy Lawson (in collaboration with Selby Gardens “Performances at the Point”). Acclaimed cellist, member of ETHEL, and Hermitage Fellow Dorothy Lawson will share her music as part of this special “Performances at the Point” evening. Lawson is a founding member and artistic director of ETHEL, one of America’s most adventurous string quartets.

• REMINDER! Friday, March 5, 4 p.m.: Writing Under the Banyan Tree: “Voicing Empathy” with Sam Max & “Slush Pile to Publication” with Sarah Gorham & Jeffrey Skinner. Hermitage Fellows Sam Max (playwright), Sarah Gorham (poet and essayist), and Jeffrey Skinner (poet) will offer an afternoon writing workshop beside the Hermitage’s banyan tree. Sam Max will offer a workshop for writers and non-writers using brief exercises, guided prompts, and approachable free-writing techniques to give voice to unlikely subjects. The objective is to tap into our innate storytelling potential as human beings and expand the possibilities of our empathy. Sarah Gorham and Jeffrey Skinner, co-founders of independent literary press Sarabande Books, will offer a behind-the-scenes look into what it takes to get a literary work published. Gorham and Skinner will take questions about how a book makes its way from the “slush pile” to publication. On the Great Lawn at the Hermitage, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood.
  • Sam Max is a writer and director and a resident playwright of New Dramatists. Max’s play Coop was selected for the 2020-21 Theatertreffen-Stückemarkt in Berlin and premiered at the Paradise Factory. Max is an alum of The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group and Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab, and, in 2018, they were named one of Hollywood’s “Top 100 New Writers.” 
  • Sarah Gorham is a poet and essayist, and most recently the author of Alpine Apprentice and Study in Perfect, the latter selected by Bernard Cooper for the 2013 AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. Gorham is also the author of four collections of poetry. Other honors include grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three state arts councils. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief at Sarabande Books, an independent, nonprofit, literary publisher. 
  • Jeffrey Skinner is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. His most recent book of poems, Chance Divine, won the Field Prize and was published in 2017. In 2015, Skinner was given one of eight American Academy of Arts & Letters Awards, for exceptional accomplishment in writing. In 2006, he was awarded his second Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published six previous full collections of poems, and his full-length play, Down Range, has had successful limited runs in New York City, Chicago, and Harrisburg, PA. He is co-founder of Sarabande Books. 

• REMINDER! Friday, March 12, 5:30 p.m.: “Between Two Worlds” with Hermitage Fellows Gowri Savoor and Monica Youn. Visual artist Gowri Savoor discusses the importance of mapping systems within her work, and will facilitate an interactive, communal mapping experience that aims to connect us in this challenging time of physical distancing. Poet Monica Youn will read from her manuscript in progress, which includes poems on the theme of deracination—to form a racial identity based on other people’s stereotypes, rather than from any central core of authenticity. Hermitage Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood.
  • Gowri Savoor is a visual-teaching artist, whose practice includes sculpture, drawing and the Indian art of Rangoli. Savoor is the founder of A River of Light, an organization committed to bringing art to the community through participatory art events, parades and installations. She has been a teaching artist for more than 20 years, with experience in arts integration and community building. 

Gowri Savoor’s Hermitage Artist Residency generously sponsored by Jan & Bill Farber.

• Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre, which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book, Ignatz, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hermitage Fellowship, Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship, among other honors. The daughter of Korean immigrants, and a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute, she teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia. 

• REMINDER! Friday, March 19, 5:30 p.m.: “The Great American Mime” with Hermitage Fellow Bill Bowers. Celebrated mime, actor and educator Bill Bowers will make the ancient art form of mime accessible to a contemporary audience. This Hermitage Fellow and “speaking mime” deftly intersperses narrative with stunning visual portraits. He invites a look at the humor, pain, and beauty of our humanity through simplicity and grace. Bowers’ Broadway credits include Zazu in The Lion King and Leggett in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Bowers has written and performed his own plays Off-Broadway and in theaters around the world. He has been hailed by critics as “the great American mime,” winning top honors at festivals throughout the world. Bowers is a student of the legendary Marcel Marceau. Hermitage Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood.

Bill Bowers’ artist residency in honor of the Bruce E. Rodgers Endowed Residency.

• REMINDER! Friday, April 2, 5:30 p.m.: “Transformations in Music & Words” with Hermitage Fellows Henry Clarke & Denise Dillenbeck. Music can transform a single life, and literature can transform a whole culture. Violinist Denise Dillenbeck will share musical samples as she reads from her memoir, How Beethoven Saved Me, exploring the relevance of classical music and its power to transform a life. Henry Clarke will read from his latest work, as he challenges us to explore how writing helps us to record, interpret, and shape our culture and society. Hermitage Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood.
  • Henry Clarke is a writer and actor. Television credits include Chuck, House, Lie to Me, Blacklist: Redemption, Power, The Good Fight, FBI, and a Chinese television show called Action English. He has performed Off-Broadway with the SourceWorks Theater and Mint Theater, and regionally with the American Repertory Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Hartford Stage, L.A. Theater Works, and Shakespeare & Co., among many others. As a writer, his plays have been performed in festivals and university theaters, and one was commissioned by the U.S. Embassy for two tours of China. Clarke holds a BA in English from Harvard University, an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College, and an MFA in Acting from The Moscow Art Theater School. He is currently writing a triptych of novels that explores the overwhelming systems of power and privilege that keep the bad guys on top, and what the good guys can do about it. Denise Dillenbeck is a versatile musician with a focus in solo performance. She has toured Europe and America with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and has played with the Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Pennsylvania Ballet Theater, Philly Pops, and many other orchestras across the U.S. She is currently concertmaster of the Yakima Symphony, York Symphony, Siletz Bay Music Festival Orchestra, Lake Chelan Bach Festival Orchestra and the Northwest Sinfonietta. As a teaching artist in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Community Partnership Program, Dillenbeck led urban elementary school students in experiential music learning and directed workshops on aesthetic education for classroom teachers and music educators. The San Francisco Chronicle hails her playing as “simply first-rate.”