Wednesday, February 3, 2010

February 4, 8pm, Sidewalk Tzara #9: Film + Dance -- George Manupelli, Katherine Ferrier, Emily Beattie, Will Donovan, Marie Chabert, Marjorie Morgan



February's show marks a new phase for Sidewalk Tzara--the series will now be curated by me, French Clements. Courtney Brown has [decided to focus on Edward Gorey-heroine transubstantiation, and so on, etc]. For my inaugural outing, I'm devoting the night to dance films. We've got some heavy hitters:

George Manupelli--pioneer of film's 1960s avant-garde, founder of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, cinematographer to the Stones--has been holed up for a long while in New Hampshire and wants to share his work again. With us! We'll show some great short films that haven't been seen in public for years, maybe from the original film reels even. (One of Manupelli's earliest collaborators was Steve Paxton, who, in the 1970s, developed the dance technique known as Contact Improvisation.)

Manupelli will show his work with choreographer Katherine Ferrier, also of New Hampshire, to make a new film-dance, performed with Boston-area dancer Jen Green. Ferrier has been working in Contact Improvisation for several decades.

We'll also include shorts from three local artists who work in film: Cambridge choreographer Emily Beattie brings Affected Structures; Will Donovan shows a work for modified digital video made with London-based choreographer Marie Chabert; and, rounding out the evening, cross-media artist Marjorie Morgan shows a film she made in France, Ascent, and two video works for body and voice, Hand Dance and Slough. Morgan's work has, since the 90s, frequently been voted the best of Boston's dance scene the Globe, the Phoenix, and others.

links:
willdonovan.net
emilybeattie.com
georgemanupelli.com
katherineferrier.net
marjoriemorgan.org

Monday, November 30, 2009

December 3, 8pm, Sidewalk Tzara #8: Hartford Sound Alliance Quintet and Abram Taber

Featuring

Hartford Sound Alliance



Bill Solomon (percussion), Lief Ellis (laptop), Matt Sargent (laptop/guitars), Todd Merrell (laptop/shortwave radio), and Stephen Haynes (trumpet/cornet) are members of the Hartford Sound Alliance, a flexible, CT-based collective of composers, performers, sound engineers, and artists. As an improvisation ensemble, they focus on the real-time recycling of live sound, collaborative processing, incorporation of field recordings and radio in live performance, and group composition. The group recently premiered a concert of new works, entitled The Sync Effect, at the Hartford Art School, in collaboration with video artists Gene Gort, Liz Stephens, and Devan Mulvaney.

For more information about the trio, please visit
http://www.hartfordsoundalliance.com,
http://www.mattsargentmusic.com, http://stephenhaynes.blogspot.com,
http://www.toddmerrell.com, and http://www.liefellis.com.


Abram Taber



electric bass + effects


At the tender age of 3, Abram Taber ripped open a cardboard box with a plastic toy screwdriver to get at the ukulele within. Throughout the next 23 years of his life, Abram has worked towards that same goal: unleashing sounds with whatever tools are available.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

November 5, 8pm, Sidewalk Tzara #7: Meg Schedel, Sarah O'Halloran, & Dawn Weleski, Anni Hi, and Jon Glancy with Friends

Featuring:

Anni Hi, Performance Art



Anni Hi is an amateur social scientist--not to be confused with her brief stint in selling personalized amateur soft-core web cam videos--investigating the ways women exist in and with popular culture. Hi conducts field research by entering into places that form contemporary female visual and cultural representation. She is interested in the idea of microfame, and how it relates to a culture cultivated to be watched by others. No stranger to microfame herself, Hi has become a Youtube cewebrity. You can watch her videos at www.youtube.com/user/scandalishious or visit her website at www.scandalishious.com. She will also be appearing on a reality TV dating show on Vh1 in January which she is contractually obligated to say no more about. Hi is currently pursuing her MFA somewhere in upstate NY.


Macerated Peony, Music and Performance Art



Macerated Peony is multi-disciplinary ensemble founded at Florida’s Atlantic Centre for the Arts in 2009 by Dawn Weleski, Margaret Schedel and Sarah O’Halloran. We were drawn together by our shared interest in seriously playful/playfully serious experimentation and collaboration. Our work together includes musical improvisation and composition, sculpture, performance art, and video.

Dawn Weleski is a multi-disciplinary Pittsburgh artist that re-purposes local newspapers, public transportation commutes, and meals with family as transformative social stages to reveal their own social wellness and cultural renewal and to provide a forum for provisional awareness. Her work often acts as a political and social stress test, measuring the health of routine within shared cultural behavior. She encourages relating to the other by opening entry into unfamiliar and uncomfortable systems, by implicating and embedding within the work its own collaborative rules, and by reanimating defunct or retarded connections between seemingly disparate people and places in a state of transition.

Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media. Her works have been performed throughout the United Stated and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com. She is working towards a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle. She serves as the musical director for Kinesthetech Sense and sits on the boards of 60x60 Dance, the BEAM Foundation, the Electronic Music Foundation Institute, the International Computer Music Association, the New West Electronic Art and Music Organization, and Organised Sound. She contributed a chapter to the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music and her article on generative multimedia was recently published in Contemporary Music Review. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. In 2009 she won the first Ruth Anderson Prize for her interactive installation Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair. As an Assistant Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is a core faculty member of cDACT, the consortium for digital art, culture and technology.

Sarah O’Halloran is a composer and performer from Ireland. She is currently a doctoral student in Composition and Computer Technology at University of Virginia working on a practice that brings together music, performance art, and sculpture. In 2004 she graduated from University College Cork with a BA in Music and English, and two years later she completed an MPhil in Musicology focusing on issues of sexual, gender, and national identity in Gerald Barry’s operas. In 2007 she completed an MA in Sonic Arts at Queens University Belfast. Before moving to the US Sarah was based in Cork, Ireland, where she lectured in music part-time at UCC, and was co-director of the Quiet Music Festival, which brought Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros to Ireland for the first time. Sarah's work includes concert music, improvisation, installations, and sculptures. Her music has been performed at festivals including Gaudeamus (Netherlands), Sonorities (UK), and Ostrava Days (Czech Republic).


Jon Glancy with Friends, Musical Improvisation



Gabe Crusier can flow, Abe Taber can fret, Deg Clinter can pick and Jon Glancer can hit.. But WHAT, exactly, shall be done about it?!!!
Come find out before we do, and then lie to us about it: we don't mind, we're used to it.

Monday, September 14, 2009

when the next Sidewalk Tzara is...

There is no October Sidewalk Tzara... but, an exciting November line-up on the usual first Thursday is coming together... details soon!

Thursday, August 27, 2009

September 3, 8pm, Sidewalk Tzara #7: qfwfq duo, Brian Ellis, April Ranger

Featuring:

qfwfq duo
, video and sound performance

Composer and sound artist Andrea Pensado teamed up with digital artist Greg Kowalski in Krakow, Poland, in 1997 to form Qfwfq duo. The duo's main concern has been live sound-image interaction and the use of movement to articulate complex sounds and digital visual material. Their work is highly performatic and often involves the use of sensors and/or motion tracking devices. The elements of Qfwfq’s artistic language are: interactivity, which is treated as an expressive parameter in itself, projected images, electronic sound, voice, movements and / or actions. http://www.qfwfqduo.com/

View a sample of their work, Rara avis (2007):

Rara Avis from Qfwfq duo on Vimeo.


Brian S. Ellis, spoken word poetry

Brian S. Ellis is a poet who performs writing of his own devising. He has been reading in the New England area for four years, and has been touring nationally for two. This includes but is not limited to several local and national slam poetry competitions. His first full book of poems was published in two thousand eight with Write Bloody Books. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. For more information go to http://www.myspace.com/brianstephenellis

April Ranger, spoken word poetry

April Ranger is perhaps best known in Boston as the winner of Emerson College's Nicole DusFresne Playwriting award, but she became an almost instant Cambridge favorite when she began reading regularly on the Cantab open mic. Since day one, her vivid, original imagery has been eliciting longing sighs from our audience, making her the local master of the Oh-I-Wish-I-Had-Written-That poem.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

August 6, 8pm, Sidewalk Tzara #6: Aaron Larget-Caplan, Abram Taber

Featuring:

Aaron Larget-Caplan, guitar

Called “a riveting artist” by the G. Acosta of the Washington Post, classical guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan rides the razor’s edge of the guitar, bringing together the traditional, non-traditional, & contemporary music into exciting and thought provoking programs. He is the founder of the Spanish music & dance group ¡Con Fuego! and the New Lullaby Project. Aaron was born in Oklahoma, raised in Colorado, and graduated from the New England Conservatory. He now resides in greater Boston with wife and muse Catherine. www.AARONLC.com


Abram Taber, guitar and electronics

Abram Taber is a musician and educator currently residing in Medford, MA.

In addition to his day job as a high school music director, he performs in several musical ensembles including the Musical Theatre, Verre and Glancy, Dubler & Taber. He has previously performed with Paraffin Section, Pyotr, Slurred Murrays and Abernathy.

Abram has recently begun working as a solo performer, spurred on by the 2009 RPM Challenge. His solo performances combine elements of pre-composed themes and improvisation. Instrumentation includes electric bass, electric guitar, drums, voice, effects, found sounds and more. The music brings together ideas from minimalism, psychedelia, indie rock, avant-garde classical and noise.

http://www.reallybadreverb.com/

Monday, June 1, 2009

June 11, 8pm, Sidewalk Tzara #5: Brian S. Ellis, Solomon / Ellis / Sargent, Sean Peuquet

Featuring:

Solomon / Ellis / Sargent

Bill Solomon (percussion), Lief Ellis (laptop/electronics), Matt Sargent (laptop/electronics/guitars) are members of the Hartford Sound Alliance, a flexible, CT-based collective of composers, performers, sound engineers, and artists. They regularly perform as a trio, creating visceral, improvisation-based music that especially focuses on the real-time recycling of live sound, collaborative processing, incorporation of field recording in live performance, and group composition. They have recently performed as a trio at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT) [in collaboration with video artists Liz Stephens and Devan Mulvaney], the New Britain Arts Alliance Gallery (New Britain, CT), and the Hartford Art School (West Hartford, CT).

In addition to their work within this ensemble, each of the members maintains an active and varied schedule. This summer, Bill Solomon will perform the solo vibraphone part for Pierre Boulez's Repons in collaboration with the Lucerne Festival, IRCAM and Mr. Boulez. Other upcoming appearances include performances at the Sebago-Long Lake Music Festival, the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at New England Conservatory. An active performer of new music, Bill has commissioned and premiered over thirty works for percussion. He also frequently performs with cellist Katie Kennedy in the duo, The Uncanny Valley.

Matt Sargent’s multi-channel installation works are currently on display in SPCTCLR VWS @ One Brooklyn Bridge Park (Brooklyn, NY) and Art-o-matic (Washington D.C.). His work is informed by his appreciation and ongoing study of natural resonance, field recording, and outdoor listening. Most recently, he has been creating a series of collaborative multimedia pieces for Space Between, an ongoing collaborative project with visual artists JT Kirkland and John M. Adams (works-in-progress can be seen and heard at http://spacebetweenblog.wordpress.com). Among his contributions to this project is Ghost Music, a concert-length composition for solo percussionist (composed specifically for Bill Solomon), accompanied by live wall drawings by John M. Adams.

Lief Ellis’s recent work as a composer and sound engineer has been focused on the creation of hybrid instruments and the transformation of commercial hardware into dynamic MAX/MSP-based musical interfaces. His latest compositions and collaborative projects have included by a performance of The Rings of Yggdrasill by the Hartt School Bass Ensemble (directed by Robert Black), and a series of interactive installation pieces presented at the Hartford Art School with Ken Steen (composer), Bill Solomon (composer), and Rebecca McDonald (video artist).

For more information about the trio, please visit http://www.hartfordsoundalliance.com, http://www.mattsargentmusic.com, and http://www.liefellis.com.

Brian S. Ellis, spoken word poetry

Brian S. Ellis is a poet who performs writing of his own devising. He has been reading in the New England area for four years, and has been touring nationally for two. This includes but is not limited to several local and national slam poetry competitions. His first full book of poems was published in two thousand eight with Write Bloody Books. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. For more information go to http://www.myspace.com/brianstephenellis




Sean Peuquet, laptop and live electronics

Sean Peuquet will be performing a live improvisation using a mixture of sound materials, including pre-recorded audio samples, realtime computer synthesis, and guitar. Throughout the improvisation, rhythm and pitch are dealt with in very simple terms; through speed and delay. He is a composer of both electronic and instrumental music, an audio software programmer, and sometimes a music hardware designer. He grew up in southeast PA, outside of Philadelphia, and now lives in Gainesville, FL. His compositions have been played at a number of places, mainly along the east coast. He is currently a student in composition. Over the past few years he has explored the topic of Discoverable Composition, which deals with writing pieces where an audience is not explicitly aware of music happening in their environment. In undergraduate school, he studied music, psychology, and astronomy; the combination of which has led me to approach experimental composition as a unifying field of study.

Generally, he am interested in how music can interact with extra-musical ideas. Sean's compositions often aim to represent or suggest extra-musical ideas directly through the compositional process. His focus is on exploring physical phenomena, experiences, and relationships through compositional forms, methodologies, and performance dynamics. As a result, tension emerges between the abstracted experience of music and the composition's concrete underpinning. It is this tension that he finds interesting and fruitful. For more information go to: http://www.ludicsound.com/