VioLens / 2008
VioLens is an interdisciplinary adaptation of four Heinrich Hoffman children’s stories. These 19th century morality lessons are taken to the stage, melding theater, chamber music, and movement into an evening-length work that questions society’s perceptions of morality, violence and family.
VioLens explores the mutation of three fictitious children’s tales and their real life counterparts. It manipulates the disturbing effects of misbehavior into symbolic action. The selected stories focus on themes of fire, food and racism, and pull the audience towards the threshold of humor and horror.
Sounds / 2007
Three composers, Nico Muhly, Paola Prestini, and Milica Paranosic, take Kandinsky’s book of woodcuts and prose from 1912 using four colors — black, white, blue and red — and specific woodcuts as an inspiration for a music/movement/film collaboration.
Muhly’s world explores the sound of silence, the colors of black and white, told through music and photography manipulated by filmmaker Maro Valentin.
Prestini’s Sounds is a mediation on the meaning and implications of blue, red, black, and white in our society. Through the personification of each color, new perspectives on race, love, and the difficulties of connection in the era of extreme communication are uncovered.
Paranosic’s Sounds addresses the balance between collective identities and individualism, expressed through largely choral sections of music, movement, and film.
Traveling Songs / 2007
Traveling Songs is a transmedia work about migration and travel that reflects the minstrel nature of VIA’s diverse ensemble. Traveling Songs expresses notions of home and far away lands, artistically carrying the audience through new environments and sounds.
The Democrazy Project / 2002
The Democrazy project is a performance series that inquires into the role of the arts in a democratic society. The Democrazy Project is led by historian and writer James Allen Smith in collaboration with VisionIntoArt. It premiered in 2002 at the Lincoln Center Institute, and has subsequently toured to the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Museum of the American Indian, and Dickinson College
A Tough Line / 2002
A Tough Line is a multimdeia theoter piece based on the dramatic seizure of the Nord-Ost theater in Moscow in 2002 by Chechen separatists, holding the theater audience captive. VisionIntoArt builds a work from the blurring of fiction and real life, when theatrical expression was captured by political reality. A Tough Line asks us to re-evaluate notions of terrorism, negotiation, and justice. This piece was featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, BAM, ASCAP’s “Thru the Walls” series at the Cutting Room, and at Dickinson College.
