Encorethe Performing Arts Magazine Tlmewarner 2009 Next Wave Festival
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2009 Next Wave Festival Adam Fuss, 2009 BAM 2009 Next Wave Festival is part of New Works and Diverse Voices at BAM sponsored by: ENCOREThe Performing Arts Magazine TlmeWarner 2009 Next Wave Festival Brooklyn Academy of Music Alan H. Fishman, Chairman of the Board William I. Campbell, Vice Chairman of the Board Adam E. Max, Vice Chairman of the Boa rd Karen Brooks Hopkins, President Joseph V. Melillo, Executive ProdLlcer Presents Imagi na ry City Approximate BAM Harvey Th eater running time: Oct 14-17, 2009 at 7:30pm 80 minutes, no intermission Written and performed by S6 Percussion Video by Jenise Treuting Directed by Rinde Eckert Lighting design by Aaron Copp Sound design by Lawson White Costume design by Karyn Starr and Mauri Weakley Commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festiva l BAM 2009 Next Wave Festival is part of New Works and Diverse Voices at BAM sponsored by Time Warner Inc. Leadership support for the Next Wave Festival is provided by The Ford Foundation. Additional support for BAM Music provided by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. and Amphion Foundation. Imaginary City Imaginary City cogs and moments structures dictations agreements ci rcles extremes i live ... voices building blocks i love you goodnight Imaginary City is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival in consortium with The Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents in partnership with Diverseworks Art Space, The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Newman Center for the Performing Arts , and NPN. Major contributors of NPN are the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation , Nathan Cummings Foundation , MetLife Foundation , and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). KWNATIONAL P EItFOIU'.HCI! NI!. TW ORK For more information: www.npnweb.org 1 Production Development at The Alexander Kasser Theater, Peak Performances @ Montclair State University Director's Note Imaginary City is a meditation on urban life and its sounds, architecture, light, and color. It is a dialogue between S6 Percussion and Jenise Treuting, a poetic exchange. Like almost any city, its form isn't governed by a specific logic: structures appear and dis appear, the accidental becomes institutional , the private, universal. How does one explain the peculiar ecology of city life, its beauty, its grandeur, its comfort and loneliness? One simply inhabits it. There is a small city of bottles, blocks, and other miscellaneous detritus at the center of the stage. There are TVs, like lit windows we see but can't see into. There is a game of Monopoly, played in the back by a concentrated few. The rules are, , nevertheless, read to us. There is a board on which arcane numbers are posted with a collective intensity and earnestness. Sometimes something like a sermon is heard, an almost ancient voice exhorting us to be civil, kind , or even, perhaps, loving. One enters here as one enters a dense wood: surrendering one's particular tempo to the tempo of the place; impatience is futile, patience, rewarded . One is both embraced and lost here, both larger than life and invisible. And what is beyond our immediate grasp here, is not beyond our ken. - Rinde Eckert Who's Who So Percussion: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen , Ziporyn's gamelan-inspired "Melody Compe Adam Sliwinski , and Jason Treuting tition" on their first album, So Percussion. In the following years , the thrill of working with Since coming together at the Yale School amazing composers would yield new pieces of Music in 1999, So Percussion has been by Paul Lansky, Dan Trueman, Steve Reich , creating music that is both raucous and Steve Mackey, Fred Frith, and many others. touching, barbarous and refined . Realizing that percussion instruments can com For their next disc they tackled Drumming, municate all the extremes of emotion and one of the first and few percussion pieces of musical possibility, it has not been an easy symphonic scope (well over an hour long) . music to define. Called an "experimental A landmark American work, Drumming powerhouse" by the Village VOice , "astonish fuses African aesthetics , western philosophi ing and entrancing" by Billboard Magazine, cal concepts, and technologically inspired and "brilliant" by the New York Times , the processes in a minimalist masterpiece. In Brooklyn-based quartet's innovative work 2010, So will be presenting the US pre with today's most exciting composers, and miere of Reich's new Mallet Quartet, written its own original music, has quickly helped for the group and several other renowned So forge a unique and diverse career. percussion ensembles. Although the drum is one of humanity's So's third album, Amid the Noise, heralded most anc ient instruments, Europe and a new direction for the group: original music, America have only recently begun to explore written by member Jason Treutin g. Eager to its full potential, aided by explosions of influ expand their palette, the members experi ence and experimentation from around the mented with glockenspiel, toy piano, vibra world . In the 20th century, musical innova phones , bowed marimba, melodica , tuned tors like Edgard Varese, John Cage, Steve and prepared pipes, metals, duct tape , a Reich, and lannis Xenakis brought these wayward ethernet port, and all kinds of instruments out from behind the trad itional sound programming. Th e resulting idiosyn orchestra and gave them new voice. cratic tone explorations were synchronized to Jenise Treuting's haunting films of street It was excitement about these compos- scenes in Brooklyn and Kyoto. Th is ongoing ers and the sheer fun of playing together wo rk has resulted in exciting new projects r. that inspired the members of So to begin such as the site-specific Music For Trains performing while still in school: Cage's Third in Southern Vermont and Imaginary City, Construction wove elaborate rhythmic coun a sonic meditation on urban soundscapes terpoint using ordinary objects, while Reich's commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Drumming harnessed African inspiration to Music's 2009 Next Wave Festiva l in consor ecstati c effect. tium with five other venues. A blind call to David Lang, Pulitzer Prize For the past several years, So has been winning composer and co-founder of New joining the electronic duo Matmos for shows York's Bang on a Can Festival, yielded their around the country and in Europe , explor first big commissioned piece, "the so-called ing the sonic and theatrical possibilities of laws of nature, " which appeared with Evan beer cans, hair clippers, ceramic bowls, and Who's Who dry ice. Thi s collaboration will culminate in the Ukraine have brought the group interna- a new album to be released on Cantaloupe tiona I acclaim. Records in summer 2010. With an audience comprising "both kinds of Summer of 2009 saw the creation of the an- blue hair ... elde rl y matron here, arty punk nual So Percussion Summer Institute on the there, " (as the Boston Globe described it), campus of Pri nceton University. The Institute So Percussion makes a rare and wonderful is an intensive two-week chamber music breed of music that both compels instantly seminar for co llege-age percussionists. For and offers rewards for engaged listening. their first festival, the four members of So Ed gy (at least in the sense that little other Percussion served as faculty in rehearsal , music sounds like this) and ancient (in that • performance, and discussion of contempo people have been hitting objects for eons), rary music to 23 students from around the perhaps it doesn't need to be defined after all. US. For more information please see www . • sopercussion.com/summerinstitute. Jenise Treuting (video), born and raised in the US , has lived most of her adult life in So Percussion has performed this un- Japan. She is a video essayist who works usual and exciting music allover the United in both documentary and art essays . Her States, with concerts at the Li ncol n Center documentary Invitations and Ultimatums Festival, Carnegie Hall, BAM , Stanford Lively explores Japanese perceptions of the US and Arts , the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Ameri can perceptions of Japan against the many others. In addition, recent tours to background of the occupation of Iraq. Her Russia, Australia , Italy, Germany, Spain, and collaborations with So Percussion include Who's Who Amid the Noise, the group's first re lease Center revival of The Glass Menagerie, featuring all original music; Music for Trains, directed by Gregory Mosher and starring a multi-media performance inspired by the Sally Field; he has also designed frequently sights and sounds of Brattleboro and Bel at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, lows Falls, VT; and now Imaginary City. With most recently winning a San Diego Theater or without the camera, Treuting spends a Critics Award for Joe Hardy's production of great deal of time sitting on curbs and street Bus Stop . He has worked extensively in the corners just watching. dance world , most recently receiving his G second Bessie Award for Jonah Bokaer's Rinde Eckert (director), the 2009 recipient Th e Invention Of Minus One. He has had a of The Alpert Award in the Arts for Theatre long association with Merce Cunningham , and finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in designing such pieces as Ground Level Drama , is a writer, composer, performer, and Overlay , Windows , and Biped, for which director. Celebrated for his remarkably flex he also won a Bessie. Copp's travels have ible and inventive singing voice combined taken him to hundreds of theaters in over with an electric physical presence , Eckert's 30 countries, from .state-of-the-art opera Opera/New Music Theatre productions tour houses to places where the stagehands don't throughout America and to major festivals own shoes, and for audiences ranging from in Europe and Asia .