Public Program

  • Everywhere All the Time
    Diana Balmori
    Designer
  • GRANTEE
    Seán Curran & David Skidmore
    GRANT YEAR
    2017

Seán Curran and David Skidmore (Third Coast Percussion), Everywhere All the Time, 2018. Set design by Diana Balmori.

Performed by seven dancers and four musicians, Everywhere All the Time is an interdisciplinary performance work that includes choreography and direction by Seán Curran, a set and visual design by the late Diana Balmori, and musical direction and compositions by David Skidmore. A creative endeavor connecting dance, music, art, and architecture, the production is inspired by themes of tension and the interplay of harmony and discord in our natural world. New York City-based contemporary dance ensemble Seán Curran Company and Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion are premiering Everywhere All the Time at University of Alabama's Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center in fall 2018 before touring the work to New York City, Chicago, and throughout the U.S. in a program celebrating Seán Curran Company's twentieth anniversary. Following the tour, Balmori's set pieces are available for exhibition at institutions such as museums, libraries, performing arts centers, and universities.

Diana Balmori (1932–2016) was an influential landscape architect whose ecologically sensitive designs integrated buildings and the natural environment in projects ranging from urban rooftop gardens to South Korea's new administrative capital, Sejong City. She founded Balmori Associates in 1990, where her extensive work included the transformation of Bilbao's old port into the city's greenest neighborhood; the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center in New York City; Beale Street Landing Park along the Mississippi River; and the master plan for the Farmington Canal Linear Park on the campus of Yale University. She served on the US Commission of Fine Arts and the National Rails-to-Trails Committee and was a Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. She also taught, holding a joint appointment at Yale University's School of Architecture and School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Balmori's numerous books include Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (Wiley, 2014) and A Landscape Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2010).

Seán Curran's career in the arts spans thirty years, and includes awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Robbins Foundation, New York Dance, and Performance "Bessies," and many others. His contemporary dance ensemble, Seán Curran Company, was founded in 1997 and has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Asia with home seasons at prestigious venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Joyce Theater. In addition to work for his company, Curran is a sought-after choreographer and director for opera and theater and teacher for dance festivals and university dance departments. He is renowned for his performance work in the 1980s and '90s with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and as an original cast member of STOMP! A graduate and faculty member of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Curran now serves as chair of the Department of Dance.

David Skidmore is an ensemble member and executive director of Third Coast Percussion. Founded in 2005, the group has been awarded a 2017 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. As a chamber musician, Skidmore has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center Festival, Kimmel Center, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC, Troy, NY), June in Buffalo, Klangspuren Schwaz, the Ojai Music Festival, and the Bang on a Can Marathon. He was a member of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble from 2007 to 2011 and Ensemble ACJW from 2008 to 2010. He has performed and collaborated with conductors Pierre Boulez, Lorin Maazel, David Robertson, and Michael Tilson Thomas, composers Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Matthias Pintscher, and Peter Eötvos, and chamber ensembles So Percussion and eighth blackbird. Skidmore's compositions are performed regularly in concert halls across the country. He holds a bachelor's of music from Northwestern University and a master's of music from the Yale School of Music.