The Hope College Great Performance Series is opening its 2014-15 season with Lucky Plush Productions on Thursday and Friday, Sept. 25-26, at 7:30 p.m. in the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.
Lucky Plush Productions (LPP) is a Chicago-based dance theater company led by founder and artistic director Julia Rhoads. The company is equally dedicated to creating work that is richly complex while also being broadly accessible. Critics and audiences alike recognize LPP for its complex choreography, moving content, surprising humor, and incisive commentary on contemporary culture. Since its founding in 1999, LPP has premiered more than 30 original works, including 10 evening-length productions.
The company will be performing its recently developed evening-length piece “The Queue.” Set in airport waiting line, “The Queue” creates its material from slapstick comedies, vaudeville theatre, contemporary dance chorography, and absurdist theatre.
“The Chicago Reader” has said of the new production, “Like the elegant and refined physical humor of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’ or Jacques Tati’s ‘Playtime,’ the movement ticks along nonstop with perfect alignment and rhythm, ravishingly self-aware and just a little coy. It's also very funny, and very surreal.”
The performance will be set to the live music of The Claudettes, musicians Johnny Iguana and Michael Caskey, who provide piano and drums accompaniment and even merge into the work itself. The band’s 2013 debut album, “Infernal Piano Plot…HATCHED!” recently won the Independent Music Award for “Best Instrumental Album.”
LPP has received two National Performance Network Creation Fund awards, two NEFA National Dance Project Production Awards and Production Residency Awards, an NEA Art Works grant, an Illinois Arts Council Artstour Award, and a Metlife New Stages in Dance Award. The company’s presentation of “The Queue” was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Individual tickets for the Sept. 25-26 performances are $18 for regular admission, $13 for senior citizens, and $6 for children 18 and under. Admission is free for Hope College students.
Season tickets are also still available for the 2014-15 Great Performance Series, which will continue with Sweet Honey in the Rock (Oct. 17), the Brentano String Quartet (Nov. 7), the Rastrelli Cello Quartet (Jan. 23), Broadway’s Next H!T Musical (Feb. 12-13) and The Bad Plus (March 25). Season subscriptions are $70 for regular admission, $55 for senior citizens, and $140 for a family (regardless of the number of children). The subscriptions are such a savings that they are equivalent to seeing two shows for free.
Tickets are available at the ticket office in the Events and Conferences Office located downtown in the Anderson-Werkman Financial Center at 100 E. Eighth St. The Events and Conferences Office is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and can be called at (616) 395-7890.
More information about the season may be obtained online by visiting hope.edu/gps/.