A & E

Beginning Friday, area residents are being given the opportunity to see the world -- and for the world to see Pittsburgh -- in a brand new way.

Over 16 days, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's second Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts will showcase eight U.S. or world premieres of performing and visual art work created or influenced by artists from outside North America.

Among the diverse offerings are:

• Ballet Maribor's contemporary take on Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" that pairs Romanian choreographer Edward Clug's sleekly minimalist interpretation with the music of alternative-rock band Radiohead.

• Teatro de los Sentidos' "Eco de la Sombra," which appeals to all five senses in a dramatic and singular theatrical journey.

• "13 Most Beautiful ... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests," which screens a selection of Warhol's four-minute, silent-film portraits or screen tests backed up by a live stage performance of music created by songwriters Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips.

"None of this work has been seen before in the U.S., and it won't be seen here for a long time," says Paul Organisak, the curator of the 2008 Pittsburgh Festival of Firsts, as well as the executive director of Pittsburgh Dance Council and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's vice president of programming. "It should be recognized as a major festival that puts the spotlight on Pittsburgh in a major way, similar to the way sports teams and other regional assets are celebrated."

Presented in conjunction with the Carnegie Museum of Art's 55th Carnegie International, which surveys the contemporary art scene, and the Pittsburgh 250 Festival of Lights, it's a confluence of cultural events that the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust hopes will capture the attention and approval of art lovers near and far.

"One of the long-standing missions or visions of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is to put Pittsburgh on the international culture map as a city that can present and commit to major international work," Organisak says. "What we are hoping to do is show that we are a contemporary, forward-looking Pittsburgh and that we are a city that can celebrate that."

To get the attention of cultural tourists, arts lovers and media representatives from beyond the region the Cultural Trust has been working with VisitPittsburgh, the official tourism promotion agency for Allegheny County, to create travel packages and other incentives to attend festival events.

"It really does give us standing in the arts community when you have eight premieres in six weeks," says Joe McGrath, president and CEO of VisitPittsburgh. "You have to give tourists some reason to have immediacy. The brick and mortar stuff will always be there. This is a nudge to make the decision (to visit) now."

Visitors can assemble individually tailored, specially priced travel packages of hotel rooms and event tickets on the VisitPittsburgh Web site. Media representatives at both VisitPittsburgh and the Cultural Trust have been placing ads in and encouraging coverage by national electronic and print media. According to Mark Power, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's media contact for the festival, Variety, Playbill.com, the Christian Science Monitor, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Washington Post have expressed interest in covering the Festival of Firsts.

Obviously, area arts consumers will be the primary beneficiaries of the festival's events, which Organisak hopes will entertain as well as offer new ways of looking at the world.

"These are new ideas and different ways of expressing universal issues relevant to everyone such as community, bureaucracy, intimacy and how we view ourselves," Organisak says.

But, even those with no interest in attending should recognize its worth, Organisak says.

"Whether the person tailgating in the parking lot attends or not, the fact that Pittsburgh is undertaking such a cultural event should benefit the entire city," he says. "A lot of people are not tailgating. But a majority of us recognize the importance of sports to the city and that it is good for all of us."

Enrique Vargas' Barcelona-based theater company Teatro de los Sentidos engages all the senses with its drama "El Eco de la Sombra" ("The Echo of the Shadow"). The company and the production are both making U.S. debuts in an exclusive appearance that will not be seen elsewhere in this country.

Going beyond traditional theater that engages sight and hearing Teatro de los Sentidos adds the experiences of touch, smell and taste to explore the relationship between the artist, the work and the performance space.

Each audience member embarks on a solitary and personal journey through a labyrinth in which he or she encounters a series of performance tableaux, which challenge and celebrate the senses.

The intent is to create an intensely personal and singular theatrical experience that can be unexpected, exhilarating, moving and different for each participant.

Only 53 attendees will be admitted by timed ticket during each of the 10 performance days. Latecomers cannot be admitted, so ticket holders should arrive at least 15 minutes before their admission time.

"El Eco de la Sombra" is performed Oct. 15 through 25 at the Ellis School Armory, 6482 Aurelia St., near Penn Avenue at Putnam Street, across from Reizenstein School, East Liberty. Admissions are by timed ticket at 20-minute intervals between 7 and 11 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 3 to 7 p.m. Oct. 19. Admission: $25.

-- Alice Carter

One of the more singular performances in the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts comes courtesy of a classically trained British pianist turned performance artist.

Imagine taking a behind the scenes tour where the guide goes off script and starts to talk about himself. Or, instead of telling you when Edward VII commissioned the green room for his mistress, he digresses into philosophical observations on war, nations or immortality.

Such might be the case when Peter Reder conducts his original "Guided Tour" at the Carnegie Museum of Art and Natural History in Oakland.

"I noticed on a few tours that the guide sort of began to reveal something of themselves as the tour progressed, and I began to think how a tour might work that tells the story of a building whilst also making a lot of personal associations or reflections at the same time," he says.

''Guided Tour" premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005. Some people, expecting a conventional guided tour, were quite put off, Reder says.

"Most of those people hated it. In a couple of cases they got quite cross with me and walked out half way through, much to the amusement of the rest of the audience. In one show I had a large group of elderly English ladies who had obviously stumbled unwittingly into my performance with all the ... wrong expectations. They were a bit bemused by it at first, but seemed to be won over by the end. One of them came up to me afterwards and told me she had no idea what was going on, but she wouldn't have missed it for the world!"

Reder briefly visited Pittsburgh in April to investigate possible venues for his show.

"Pittsburgh has a amazing wealth of interesting buildings, any one of which would have been great to work in. I had a difficult decision to make, but I'm sure its going to be fabulous at the Carnegie Museum."

The five shows are nearly sold out. Each show will accommodate a maximum of 20 people. Reder won't drop any clues as to what's in store for audiences who accompany him behind the scenes at the Carnegie -- only that they'll be glad they came.

"They should expect to be enchanted," he says.

Peter Reder "Guided Tour" takes place at 7 p.m. Oct. 13; 7 and 9:30 p.m. Oct. 14; 7 and 9:30 p.m. Oct. 15 at the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Admission: $20; $10 for students.

-- William Loeffler

The sun pulls the planets around itself. The back porch light pulls the moth from the darkness. Trees, which exist thanks to light, grow toward it. These everyday notions are what energize the Starn twins.

Based in Brooklyn, identical twins Doug and Mike Starn have exhibited their unique photo-based works in museums and galleries worldwide for two decades, resulting in international critical acclaim for their conceptual approach to photography.

Two years ago, their exhibition "Absorption and Transmission" at Wood Street Galleries, Downtown, received critical acclaim as well. And now they return with "Gravity of Light."

Premiering in 2004 at the Fargfabriken Kunsthalle (Stockholm, Sweden), "Gravity of Light" features seven monumental photographs seared onto the walls of the Pipe Building, a warehouse in the Strip District, by the brilliant white-blue light of a carbon arc lamp, the most elemental form of artificial light.

The Starns' homemade carbon arc lamp is surrounded, as if chapels in a cathedral of light, with huge icons from each of the Starns' four series -- "Attracted to Light," "Structure of Thought," "Black Pulse" and "Ganjin" -- all literal manifestations of the control of light found in nature.

"Each body has a unique presentation as well as complex and interrelated themes and concepts," Starn says. "Metaphorically, light is all that motivates and controls everything we do, an extension of the classical metaphor as light as knowledge and information, Enlightenment."

"Gravity of Light" runs Friday through Oct. 30 at The Pipe Building, 3000 Liberty Ave., Strip District. Hours are noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, open until 8:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Admission: Free

-- Kurt Shaw

Ballet Maribor from Slovenia opens the festival with a trio of firsts -- the U.S. premiere of "Radio and Juliet," which is choreographer Edward Clug's first rock ballet, and the U.S. debut of the company.

Clug's fresh telling of William Shakespeare's romantic tragedy "Romeo and Juliet" doesn't use the ballet music of Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev's masterpiece. Clug turned instead to the English rock band Radiohead, which he's followed since it was formed and which draws upon an eclectic range of musical influences from pop and rock to jazz and late-20th-century classical music.

"Radio and Juliet" was a breakthrough piece for Clug and Ballet Maribor, leading to many international performances. He uses one woman and six men dancers to distill the story while running it from finish to start.

"Radio and Juliet" will be performed at 7 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday at the Byham Theater, Downtown. Admission is $25 Friday and $19 to $40 Saturday.

-- Mark Kanny

Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa is creating a new blend of fusion: one of jazz and the music of India, the land of his heritage.

The result is "Samdhi: Diasporic Connections," a work that will premiere here Friday and Saturday at the New Hazlett Theatre.

Mahantappa, 37, has been carving a niche in jazz in the past few years by blending his energetically improvisational jazz with the Indian sounds. When he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, it allowed him to go to south India and learn that music "more from the people who create it," he says.

The result is a work that in some ways he says harkens to the fusion of the '80s. But the work, which uses sax, electric bass and guitar and laptop, also uses the Indian mridang, a percussion instrument.

Such explorations are not new for Mahantappa, who was born in Italy and grew up in Boulder, Colo. He received a bachelor's in music at Boston's jazz-oriented Berklee College of Music and a master's at Chicago's Depaul University.

He has performed with jazz stars from drummer Jack DeJohnette to trumpeter Tim Hagens, and has built a style that displays John Coltrane-like chops.

His adventurous play has earned him a spot near the top of the "rising star" categories for alto sax for the past five years in the Downbeat magazine critics' poll.

Mahanthappa performs at 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday at New Hazlett Theatre, 6 Allegheny Square East, North Side. Admission: $20

-- Bob Karlovits

Political satire comes in many flavors. Jo Stromgren's "The Department" tackles a perennial subject, partisanship, without linking it to the U.S. presidential election or even any particular country.

The Norwegian choreographer's subject is a super-secret government department, isolated from the real world and the citizens on whom it keeps a close eye. It is a mixture of dance and theater employing a made-up language whose incomprehensibility conveys the universality of his theme as well as serving as a parody of government-speak.

Stromgren says his work is non-polemical because he doesn't take a stand on domestic surveillance. He's focused on what work in The Department does to those spying, including the absurdity of a large bureaucracies.

British Theatre Guide says, "If you find this performance coming to a venue near you in the future, kill for a ticket."

"The Department" will be performed at 8 p.m. Oct. 23 and 10 p.m. Oct. 24 at the New Hazlett Theater, North Side. Admission is $20.

-- Mark Kanny

In the past 20 years, few bands have traded on the dangerous, decadent allure of New York City as effectively as Luna. To their credit, they always knew who laid the groundwork -- Andy Warhol and his musical proteges the Velvet Underground, who pretty much invented the concept of avant-garde, underground rock 'n' roll with their debut album in 1967.

Recently, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, Luna's prime movers, have taken their forthright fascination to another level. "13 Most Beautiful ... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests" -- at the Byham Theater Oct. 24-25 -- sets Warhol's famous film portraits of visitors to his studio to music.

Luna always took the dreamy pop sensibility of the Velvets' last album, "Loaded," to heart -- instead of their loud, dissonant earlier albums -- and that's the kind of approach they bring to "13 Most Beautiful ..." Each piece of music was created to reflect something about a particular "Screen Test," which will be projected on a movie screen above the band.

The "13 Most Beautiful ..." shows are at 8 p.m. Oct. 24 and 25 at the Byham. Tickets are $25. Details: www.pifof.org.

-- Michael Machosky

Incorporating live and video performances, "Liga" will make its only American appearance Oct. 16 through 18 at the New Hazlett Theatre.

The Amsterdam-based theater company Kassys begins "Liga" with a video of the activities of an acting company in the aftermath of a completed performance. It then turns to live performance as the five young, all-to-human and easily influenced actors engage in a live flashback of that performance, rendered primarily through the physical interaction of the performers.

Humorous, playful and mindful of interior monologues underlying onstage dialogue, "Liga" examines the thin line that separates or blurs distinctions between imagination, fiction and reality in real life and performance.

Performances of "Liga" are at 8 p.m. Oct. 16 through 18 at New Hazlett Theatre, 6 Allegheny Square East, North Side. Admission: $20.

-- Alice Carter

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust kicks off the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts with Afterglow -- a black-tie affair and performance celebration that benefits the Cultural Trust's programs and projects.

The special event begins at 8:30 p.m. Saturday with Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester on stage at the Benedum Center, Downtown.

Slick, nostalgic and nevertheless contemporary, the Berlin-based baritone Raabe and his 12-member band channel the glamour and musical glory of a 1920s and '30s Weimar big band with early jazz as well as the falsetto of ragtime in a performance embellished with humor and drama.

Tickets are $125. The price covers cocktails in the Benedum Center Grand Lobby, Director's Circle tickets to the Max Raabe and Palast Orchester performance, post-performance drinks and desserts in the Eighth Street festival tent and complimentary parking. Details: 412-471-1497.

-- Alice Carter

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