"You'll die laughing" The New York Po • . . . 310 1 • 1 1 .. 4 31 • COMEDY THRILLER 11 , V a t iooll . VI Geo% • April 17 - May 12 Meadow Brook Theatre Supported by the michigan council for arts and cultural affairs Presented with the generous support of 0 Oakland University's Professional Theatre LEAR CORPORATION Hudson's, Harmony House and Blockbuster Music Visit Our Facilities And See What All We Have To Offer!! " THE DE TR O 30555 Grand River Farmington Hills Get Results... Advertise in our new Entertainment Section! Shari Cimino (810)354-7123 Ext. 208 THE JEWE IR gi-INEWS 810.478.2010 Next time you feed your face, think about your heart. Go easy on your heart and start cutting back on foods that are high in saturated fat and cholesterol. The change'll do you good. U American Heart Association Craig Allen have met face- to-face as artistic collabora- tors just a couple times, but this weekend they'll present a music-dance performance that they hope will generate as much excitement — more even — as one they might have rehearsed Ticketmaster (810) 645-6666 *Banquet... *Party... 04 A manda Stanger-Read and Meadow Brook Box Office (810) 377-3300 *Bar/Bat Mitzvah... ' LIZ STEVENS SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS For tickets call When Planning Your Next • It's All That Jazz For Rabbi Craig Allen WERE FIGHTING FOR YOUR LIFE of notation used to chant biblical texts. In the process, he discov- ered that troupe and Afro- Caribbean and jazz music shared similar rhythmic natures. And both, he stresses, are "conducive to dance (in that they are) very nonrestrictive." Allen approached Stanger- Read about performing his work after seeing her dance this past fall in Ann Arbor. They have officially "prac- ticed" just once, though Stanger-Read has been studying a tape of Allen's music. She will dance two solos in the piece; her hus- band Scott Read will join her for the duet. "The composer and in- terpreter oftentimes have been two distinct aspects of a work like this," Allen says. "And what I'm trying to do is blur that." The energy of the piece, Allen believes, stems not only from the unfamiliar pulse of the music and his atonal Hebrew chanting, Above: Composer and pianist Rabbi Craig Allen's three-part work "Pilgrimage" will be performed by dancer Amanda Stanger-Read. Right: Amanda Stanger-Read: The dancer and Allen will have practiced just once. Her performance will incorporate improvisational movements. regularly together over the course of several months. "Pilgrimage" is a three- part work in which compos- er and pianist Allen, rabbi at Congregation Beit Kodesh in Livonia, accompanies Stanger-Read's improvisa- tional movement. What's unique is Allen's score: The mu- sic and vocalizations are based on the biblical texts "Song of Solomon," "The Book of Ruth" and "Ecclesiastes." To add to the confusion, Allen couches the composition in the rhythms of jazz, a world he is vastly famil- iar with and one he believes fits naturally in this context. The texts, Allen says, "are edit- ed and set to music in a very con- temporary setting" — one imminently conducive to the im- provisational nature of both jazz and dance. As a master's student in com- position at George Washington University, Allen wrote his the- sis on troupe, an ancient system but also from the fact that no one, not even the performers, know what might happen on stage. The audience, Allen says, `Iden- tifies with your anxiety. They re- alize that you realize that this is the first and only time this music will be done exactly like this." Allen's live playing will be ac- companied by a tape of his vocals and percussion by jazz master Jerry LeDuff. (Allen, who stud- ied with William Albright at the University of Michigan, has worked with Marcus Belgrave and other jazz luminaries; one of his compositions was performed by members of the Israel Phil- harmonic after winning an Is- raeli music festival in 1984.) tN