Kristy Edmunds Presents the World
CAP UCLA's Kristy Edmunds discusses the challenges of negotiating an online season, what the plans might be for reopening, and how the pandemic has personally changed her.
"Before being appointed executive and artistic director of UCLA Live in 2011, Kristy Edmunds had already been a cultural force. Born in a small town in Washington state in 1965, she went on to found the Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and its Time Based Art Festival (TBA) in Oregon in 1995, before heading Australia’s Melbourne Festival and then moving to New York, where she helped transform the historic Park Avenue Armory into a hip 21st-century arts venue.
Mikhail Baryshnikov in a scene from Letter to a Man | Credit: Lucy Jansch In addition to changing the program’s name to the Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA), Edmunds has provided a platform for critical innovators in all disciplines of artistic practice. Among the many hundreds of performers she has presented during her tenure are Simon McBurney’s theater troupe, Complicité, musicians of all stripes — from Kronos Quartet, Philip Glass, and Max Richter to Keith Jarrett and the late Chick Corea — as well as spoken-word artists such as David Sedaris and Fran Lebowitz.
Her abiding love for dance has also made for stellar programming: In 2013 she offered a series of performances by Trisha Brown Dance Company, including Man Walking Down the Side of a Building; in 2015 Edmunds featured a four-night retrospective of the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker; and in 2016, Mikhail Baryshnikov assumed the persona of Vaslav Nijinsky in Robert Wilson’s Letter to a Man. Another unforgettable evening was the 2019 presentation, “Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event.” Featuring the work of the late Merce Cunningham, the performance took place simultaneously in Los Angeles, New York, and London and is still available to stream.
Over the years, Edmunds’s knowledge of and commitment to the arts has helped amplify contemporary issues, unsung heroes, and unheard voices, all contributing to the evolution of UCLA as a world-class performing-arts institution. Indeed, expanding its reach, Edmunds, who is married to dancer/choreographer Ros Warby with whom she has two sons, began collaborating with The Theatre at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles in 2018, with eight programs slated at the Ace in the 2019–2020 season. COVID-19, however, intervened, while an operatic version of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, written by singer/composer Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon, which was performed at Royce Hall on March 7, 2020, was the last live performance with an audience in attendance to date.
I caught up with Edmunds by phone from her office on the UCLA campus. We chatted about myriad topics, including the challenges of negotiating an online season, what the plans might be for reopening and how the pandemic has personally changed her."— Victoria Looseleaf, Apr. 11, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the San Francisco Classical Voice website.
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