Known until 2005 as Danças na Cidade (‘Dances in the City’), the association focused its efforts on the promotion of contemporary dance and the work of young Portuguese choreographers. Highlights from this period include the collaborative projects Dançar o que é Nosso (‘Dancing What is Ours’, begun in 1998) and the Danças na Cidade festival (1993-2004), an internationally relevant platform for the distribution of dance, recognized for its focus on new creators and spirit of artistic and cultural dialogue.

In 2005, the association changed its name to alkantara. The alkantara festival, an intense program of performing arts held in Lisbon, had its first edition in 2006.

A wide range of initiatives — including international meetings, a residency program, national and international co-productions, and research and publishing projects — allow alkantara to reinforce its position as a key player in the local cultural scene and pursue its objectives of promoting and distributing international contemporary art.

Because the value of transversality is at the association’s core, alkantara also leads various training and outreach programs, designed to bring diverse audiences into closer contact with contemporary art.

Since being ceded to alkantara by the Lisbon Municipality in 2008, espaço alkantara, a building located in Lisbon’s historic Santos neighborhood, has become the center of the association’s activities and a welcome challenge to its artistic project.

Alkantara Festival runs May 23 – june 10, 2012

Below are Contemporary Performance’s Highlights. The full program can be viewed here.

Boyzie Cekwana & Panaibra Canda
The Inkomati (dis)cord
european premiere
Teatro São Luiz sala principal
wed 23 may 21h
thu 24 may 21h

In 1984 the Mozambique of Samora Machel and the South African apartheid state signed a non-aggression pact, with the intent to put an end to the support that each gave to the resistance in the neighboring country. The Inkomati accord (named after the Nkomati river that cuts through both countries) however remained dead letter, mainly because South Africa never really ceased to foment the Mozambican civil war.

The Inkomati (dis)cord is set up by Durban based Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Canda from Maputo. At the time the accord was signed, they were children, living at each side of the treaty line. Their performance refers to this failed “historical” agreement as well as to the river that lent its name to it. In an attempt to break through artificial borders and traverse territories, using their own bodies, skins, identities and histories, the choreographers explore the internalized colonial boundaries that still alienate shared histories and aspirations.

Panaibra Canda and Boyzie Cekwana are two pivotal names of contemporary dance in Africa. Besides having gained extensive international recognition for their work, both have set up local structures (Floating Outfit Project in Durban and Culturarte in Maputo) that are essential for the development of dance in the region.

“The Inkomati (dis)cord started as a response to a need we felt, as neighbors and Africans, to begin to pool our resources and tell our stories, from our perspectives, as opposed to that unyielding CNN paradigm of a continent in perpetual precarity.”

Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher & Vladimir Miller
the fault lines
co-presentation Teatro Maria Matos
Museu da Água da EPAL estação elevatória a vapor dos barbadinhos
sat 26 may 17h00 and 21h30
sun 27 may 17h00 and 21h30

Two bodies meet in a playing field demarcated by fluorescent tubes lying on the floor. They stand facing each other diagonally like wrestlers, charge at one another and intertwine while trying to throw the other to the floor and pin him down. Or while trying to nestle up and cling to one another?

One thing leads to another. The collaboration between Meg Stuart, New Orleans born choreographer and one of the key figures in contemporary dance, and her Austrian counterpart Philipp Gehmacher originated in 2007 with the remarkable Maybe forever (shown that year in Culturgest). They found each other again in a research project for Sommerszene 08 in Salzburg. For this occasion they joined forces with Berlin based video designer Vladimir Miller. The three of them were so inspired by this collaboration they decided to develop the fault lines (2010) into a performance. the fault lines sets off as a highly physical confrontation in a contact duet resembling a controlled wrestling match. Stuart and Gehmacher manipulate and heal one another; fascinated by the vulnerability of the other, they search their fault lines and their bodies’ edges. They are then increasingly integrated in the world of images of video artist Vladimir Miller. He films both of them and rearranges, filters, exaggerates and edits the video live, until the events and the video projection visibly diverge. What starts as an intense physical interaction moves almost unnoticeably into a fascinating and uncanny video installation.

Schwalbe
Schwalbe cheats
Teatro Maria Matos sala principal com bancada

mon 28 may 21h30
tue 29 may 21h30

In Schwalbe Cheats the eight performers lose their selves in a game, moral boundaries gradually fading out. Who are we, when we’re driven into a corner? Or when we sense the other is weaker? Or when the other stops playing by the rules? You might try to bluff it out saying ‘it’s only a game’, but at that point it’s already too late to return to reality. What starts as a children’s game, gradually slides off into a gladiators’ battle.

Schwalbe are true masters in distilling their concerns and visions into an absolute simplicity of form, leaving the audience with ample headroom to fill in the multiple layers of their performances.
Just like in their former performances Schwalbe involve an ‘external eye’ to accompany their last rehearsal weeks. For Schwalbe Cheats they worked with Tim Etchells, renowned British theater maker (with Forced Entertainment), writer and visual artist.

Top Content:

Instructions for Movement

International Physical Theatre Laboratory

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: La Pocha Nostra performance intensive in Los Angeles

Call for Installation Artists to Re-Imagine Erotic Pillow Books….

Added by Ampersand Colectivo on April 30, 2012

In search of performers in Paris

ANNA 2V2A 50Hz instalace 22.9.09 work in progress

SKYPE DUET

ACT 2012 WORKSHOPS

DIGERSELTZ – Elvira Frosini / Kataklisma [debut : May 10th-13th 2012, Rome -Italy]

The Opposition/ Dualities

INTAGLIO Ellen Edinoff, Koert Stuyf, Philip Glass

5-5-12headder

The Furies

Bigheaded

MPA OPEN: 48 HOUR-LONG NON STOP PERFORMANCE ART EXTRAVAGANZA

Grietas_RESAD_02

Big, Balloon, You

Construction of Sacrament Burger.

International Theatre Workshops in Norway

Contemporary Performance Blog:

In Performance: DD Dorvillier / human future dance corps – Danza Permanente (Belgium)

Highlights: La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival (NYC)

Opportunities: Call for performers – Station House Opera revival of Roadmetal, Sweetbread (UK)

Featured – Movement Research Festival Spring 2012: PUSH IT. REAL. GOOD. (NYC)

In Performance: Darmstadt – Classics of the Avant Garde (NYC)

Featured Books:

CP Network Curated Books:’Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre- … http://amzn.to/jwcQPW

CP Network Curated Books: ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ by Jacques Rancière (Hardcover… http://amzn.to/k0ZgUO

CP Network Curated Books: ‘Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance http://amzn.to/kHOhi8

Photo from ACT FESTIVAL

Maison de l’Architecture
148, rue Faubourg St-Martin 75010 Paris
01 42 09 33 63
Metro/R.E.R. Gare de l’Est
Multimédia, danse, vidéo, son, performance art, spoken word, installations

For its 16th edition, Dimanche Rouge invites you to discover an evening of experimental performances and a DJ after-party on Sunday, May 20th, from 4pm till midnight.  We are thrilled to announce that the 16th edition of Dimanche Rouge will be held at Maison de l’architecture. Since its inception in Feburary 2011, Dimanche Rouge has hosted 15 unique editions, featuring 450 artists coming from over 50 countries.

PERFORMANCES OF DETERMINED LENGTHS

16h-18h
Alexandre Pombo-Mendes (15’ performance art, France)
Odonchimeg (15’ drawing/action, Mongolia)
Cassandra Tytler (15’ video performance, Australia)

Individual performances by Diverse Universe (Asia/America/Europe/Scandinavia)
Amber Lee (20’ performance art, USA)
Hiroko Tsuchimoto (15’ performance art, Japan)
Arianne Foks (10’ performance art, France)

18h-19h
Curiouser & Curiouser (20’ kinect performance, France/Germany)
Magy Ganiko (15’ body art, Argentina/Japan)
CON.TATTO (15’ video performance art, Italy)

19h-22h
Individual performances by Non Grata
Peppe Rosvik (15’ performance art, Finland)
Orion Maxted (15’ performance art, UK)
Da Yeon Kim (5’ performance art, South-Korea)
Jung Hoon (10’ performance art, South-Korea)
Benjamin Dukhan + Eric Cordier (30’ sound, musical and visual performance, France)
Non Grata (Estonia) Devilgirl, Anonymous Boh, Baka, Tiny Tim,Little Tom, Little Korea, Mr Lee, Ken, Dionysos Monroe, Keisha, Bloody Drunker (30’ art action)

22h-minuit
AFTER PARTY
JunkFood (France) / VJ Mushroom (Argentina)
DJ Peyo (France) / VJ Mushroom (Argentina)

PERFORMANCES OF UNDETERMINED LENGTHS

Marian Kivila (installation, Estonia)
Edduin Gonzalez (live drawing, Panama)
Odonchimeg (drawing, Mongolia)
Vincent Pons (action art, France)

More info www.dimancherouge.org / http://www.maisonarchitecture-idf.org/

Luciana achugar’s FEELingpleasuresatisfactioncelebrationholyFORM is a dance meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and ideology. It presents dance as a celebration of experience, and pleasure as the consummation of experience. In FEELingpleasuresatisfactiocelebrationholyFORM four women engage in a psychedelia inspired kaleidoscope that multiplies their experience and reflects both rigorous formalism and corporeal excess.

11-12 May, 2012, 20:30 (World Premiere)
STUK kunstencentrum
Leuven, Belgium

15-16 May, 2012, 21:00 (French Premiere)
Le Forum, Blanc-Mesnil
Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis

26-30 September, 2012 (US Premiere)
The Kitchen, NYC
Co-presented with the French Institute Alliance Française’s (FIAF) Crossing the Line 2012

https://vimeo.com/41078542

The choreography of Danza Permanente comes from a musical composition created in Vienna two centuries ago by a deaf man. Initially written for four stringed instruments, the score is transposed into movement for four dancers. They embody the musical structure, behaviors, and dynamics of the string quartet over time, and through space. The dancers behave as sound, in their becoming of visible music in silence. The transposition is by DD Dorvillier and Zeena Parkins, with dancers Fabian Barba, Nuno Bizarro, Walter Dundervill, Naiara Mendioroz, and rehearsal assistant Heather Kravas. The acoustic environment by Zeena Parkins and lighting design by Thomas Dunn follow the score and frame this visible music.

Choreography and concept: DD Dorvillier
Acoustic environment, musical direction and analysis: Zeena Parkins
Performers: Fabian Barba, Nuno Bizarro, Walter Dundervill, Naiara Mendioroz
Artistic advisor/rehearsal assistant: Heather Kravas
Lighting design: Thomas Dunn

Costume design: Michelle Amet

2012 Festival Line-Up:

May 9: Love Story, Palestine
May11: Chamber Works I
May 17: Beauty
May 17: The Mermaid Show
May 18: Chamber Works II
May 19: Digital Duets
May 20: East Village Dance Project

Love Story, Palestine
May 9 – May 12, 2012
Wednesday – Friday at 7:30pm
Saturday at 2:30pm & 7:30pm
Free Admission – Reservation Required.

https://vimeo.com/33564674

Concept, Design and Choreography by Yoshiko Chuma and School of Hard Knocks

This is a fiction based on the true story Occupation Layer: PALESTINE by Yoshiko Chuma
featuring members of Palestinian Dance Troupe El-Funoun from Ramallah

Conceptual Artist/Choreographer/Artistic Director of The School of Hard Knocks Yoshiko Chuma continues a lifetime obsession with danger in her new work, Love Story, Palestine. Intentionally confusing documentation with history, Chuma tasks El-Funoun members Sari Husseini and Anas Abu Oun and NYC-based talents Miriam Parker, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Saori Tsukada-—three performers who have never been to Palestine—with re-creating segments from her own documented works and experiences in Ramallah, Palestine. Chuma assembles a mosaic of images and interviews which pertain to pain and longing, as if framing theater with barbed wire. Traditional dance is juxtaposed with contemporary movement, video projection and spoken text in a borderless environment constantly reshaped by sculptural objects. Yoshiko Chuma herself performs on the backdrop of Robert Flynt’s photography.

The Mermaid Show
May 17 – May 20, 2012
by Ann Liv Young

Ann Liv Young, who has routinely provoked, tormented, and enraptured audiences, will do it all once again in the U.S. premiere of “Mermaid Show.” Young
is, of course, the Mermaid, but one who challenges her audience’s passivity in her turn from the sweet Disney creation into a raw fish eating, spitting creature as she emerges from her blow-up pool.

Beauty
May 17 – May 20, 2012 at 7:30pm
by Jane Comfort and Company

Hailed by The Washington Post as “fascinating and fantastic,” Beauty takes a gimlet-eyed look at the extremes women go to achieve impossible beauty. Jane Comfort’s wildly versatile company members don false eyelashes, sequins, and Spanx to compete in a nightly Barbie Beauty Contest judged by random audience members. Ditching Barbie drag, they examine the many beauty procedures available to us lesser creatures: liposuction, botox, plastic surgeries, etc., and those that aren’t: Photoshop, the digital magic that retouches every model we see in magazines. Beauty invites men and women of all ages to consider how they perceive and project notions of female beauty in both benign and malevolent ways, consciously and subconsciously. Comfort was awarded a Guggenheim to create this wickedly funny and poignant work, which is performed in repertory with her Bessie Award-winning Underground River.

Bring on 2012 with its four horsemen and cult sacrifices. If this is the last of the great mortality myths, let’s push it to a real scorched earth explosion. We bring you a new spin on an old-school anthem: Push it. Real. Good. Reckoning with the end of the world-as-we-know-it, we are faced with the competing impulses of fight or flight.

It’s time to push it past the limits of what we know and challenge our bodies and minds to test the boundaries of form and action. We’re in genre-bending terrain. Performance is happening everywhere, and as a result critical questions are emerging about the future of live work. What is the measurement of discipline and energy that is necessary for our work? How do we measure value in the midst of economic ruin? We have to keep pushing with and against these questions to keep going and keep making it happen.

Listen up! We’re talking about aesthetic polyamory. We present dance, sound, writing, visual art, installation and video as autonomous forms with tendencies toward intermingling. Not just intermingling, but gettin’ up in it. Not just gettin’ up in it, but going hog wild. Push it. Real. Good.

All PUSH IT updates will be posted at:
www.movementresearch.org/festival/spring12

Questions for the curatorial team? Contact them at mrfestival@movementresearch.org.

PUSH: THE ZINE
In the depths of the MR Festival Spring 2012 curatorial scramble lies a long rant dated 1:52am, February 3rd, 2012

—–
“remember when we talked about the punk movement and the fuck you attitude? i think “push it” is exactly what the punk movement was. Not, “fuck you, we don’t care what you think” but “fuck you, we care so much it hurts.” i feel like as we close in on a festival setting (and hopefully it’s west park) i’d like to think of the festival as a festival, as a carnival, not just have events that are a big dance party, but the whole festival being a party. a way for the community to come together to celebrate what is unique. what is laborious, what is valued, what is performance. talks and discussions and performances are great but what i would love to think about is returning to the notion of a playground. low low key, low low tech, a breeding ground of ideas. chewed up and spit out. ground up and grassroots. a place where we can drink cheap beer/wine, feel inspired, entertained, overwhelmed. heckle and be heckled. feel accosted and held up.
we don’t really have a playground these days, a place where we experiment, where we fail, where we laugh, where we fall and bleed and dust off the sand and keep on running – away, from, with, towards each other, still laughing.
this, of course, i think, lives in the idea that we have one central venue, an immersive environment, riddled with ringleaders, community organizers”
—–

We want to bring this to publication – PUSH: THE ZINE – a central venue where any and all of you submit your own thoughts, rants, questions, and research about/surrounding/pertaining to performance, to art, to value, to body, to devotion, to labor.

PUSH: THE ZINE, in the tradition, will be photocopied, stapled, laid out on the table, splayed in front of you for your consumption. Unedited and unadorned.

Come to the festival, grab a copy, see some stuff, do some stuff, leave, and definitely come again.

PLEASE SEND ALL SUBMISSIONS/QUESTIONS TO:
PUSHTHEZINE@GMAIL.COM

Festival Events

Tuesday, May 29
Notebook Exhibition and Opening Reception
6-7:30PM, FREE
A diverse collection of notebooks, pages, epistles from the processes and reflections of choreographers, dancers and performers across a spectrum of approaches and forms. Join us for drinks and a viewing of the installation. Performance Event: Miguel Gutierrez, Katy Pyle, and Bridget Everett & the Tender Moments

8PM, $5
Miguel Gutierrez, Superhump

photo: Miguel Gutierrez by Miguel Gutierrez

Superhump is a new, momentary piece by Miguel Gutierrez which has been performed a thousand times. Superhump is a celebration of the end of ideas and a post-conceptual world. Superhump says “It’s raining, might as well smoke.”

Katy Pyle, The Firebird

The Firebird is a re-imagining of Stravinsky and Fokine’s original ballet as a Ballez–a queered theatrical with non-heteronormative characters and partnering. A lesbian princess and a tranimal (part boy, part bird) encounter a dominating Sorceress and a garden of genderf***ing Princes on the road to their liberation.

Bridget Everett & the Tender Moments

Bridget Everett is a singing tour de force known for her funny yet gut-wrenching, outrageous and unpredictable performance work. She and her band, The Tender Moments, look forward to spending an intimate evening with you. Anything can and will happen.

Wednesday, May 30

C.A. Conrad (Soma)tic Poetry Workshop
2-4PM, $10
Location: CENTRAL PARK. Meet at the entrance on W. 81st Street and Central Park West.
The aim of (Soma)tic poetry and poetics is the realization of two basic ideas: (1) Everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new modes of thought and imaginative output. (2) The most vital ingredient to bringing sustainable, human changes to our world is creativity. Among other things, we will build a Human Hibernaculum, a place for our poems to THRIVE by the very community of our workshop! (Soma)tic samples can be found at this link: http://abeautifulmarsupial88.blogspot.com/
Pre-register online at www.movementresearch.org/classesworkshops/festival

Body Language (READING) followed by Yvonne Meier (PERFORMANCE)
7PM, $5 ($4 with Day Pass)

photo: Yvonne Meier by Ian Douglas
READING: Not just about the words but the body delivering them. Language as it comes to bear on what we touch, feel, need, want, do. A poetry reading of self-help, translation, scores, somatics, and letters to absent others, hits you where you need it most.
PARTICIPANTS:
Andrew Blackley, C.A. Conrad, H.R. Hegnauer, Yvonne Meier, Eileen Myles, Kristen Prevallet
Hosted by: Jamie Townsend

PERFORMANCE: “Over the years I’ve developed this Improv. technique that I call Scores.
At this point, the scores are elaborate, excessive, amusing and impossible.” (Yvonne Meier)
Performance Event: stillness-action-sweat-effort
10PM, $5 ($4 with Day Pass)
A performance experiment where the duet is charged with the exploration of stillness, action, sweat and effort. Participants are chosen based on their choreographic approaches and aesthetic differences that touch these categories. Performances can be rehearsed, improvised, score-driven or otherwise. The collaboration can be collective, competitive, a battle, a fusion, or indeterminate.
PARTICIPANTS: Aretha Aoki, devynn emory, Niall Jones, Jennifer Monson

Thursday, May 31st

photo: Chris Forsyth by Maria Dumlao
Sound and Music: Listening Beneath the Surface, a Music Workshop with Chris Forsyth
3-5PM, $10
This workshop will investigate ways of listening to both environmental sound and organized sound (a.k.a music) via demonstration, participation, and investigating our surroundings (including taking a subway ride). How does sound define space? How does our conventional understanding of music affect our perception of sound in general? What are we listening for when we open our ears? The aim of the workshop is to cultivate a greater understanding of and sensitivity to the power of activated listening – getting past the surface noise and into the underlying content that we often ignore both in our day-to-day lives, and in our general consumption of music for pleasure.
Pre-register online at www.movementresearch.org/classesworkshops/festival

Real. Good. Music. A concert. In the sanctuary.
7PM, $5 ($4 with Day Pass)
PARTICIPANTS:
Chris Forsyth, Tatsuya Nakatani, Mike Pride & Mick Barr, Jesske Hume & Ryan Ferreira

Mixed Tape
10PM, $5 ($4 with Day Pass)
Curated by niv Acosta
Six performers hijack, change, distort or magnify a performance with “that ubiquitous deus ex machina, the ironically intended pop song.” (BS)

Friday, June 1st: Formal Friday

DRESS yourself up. GET SCHOOLED by the Dean of Sex Research. Come to the church on FORMal FRIDAY in your finest attire and celebrate your bad self. Go to the DANCE. Pose for all the PHOTOS. You know you want it.

Let’s talk about sex
6-7:30PM, $5 ($4 with Day Pass)
Choreographers, erotica writers, and performance artists talk about doin’ it in the 21st Century.
PARTICIPANTS: Diana Cage, Aimee Herman, John Jasperse, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Antonio Ramos, Lucy Sexton
Moderated by Jillian Peña, Dean of the School of Sex Research at Movement Research and Erin Markey, Assistant Dean

Performance Event: Anna Azrieli, Neal Beasley, Justin Cabrillos, Carmine Covelli, Jesske Hume
8PM, $5 ($4 with Day Pass)
Anna Azrieli , Skirt Scrum
Ideas about manners and society, Jane Austen and Jane Eyre. But when it comes down to it there is a big hoop skirt, a space, and a body finely flailing.

Neal Beasley, kommun: a stud-ee
Descriptions of everyday life frame an everyday body – an “everyman” body – looking at the poetics of the banal and for the release of fantasies desperately humming beneath the tasks of daily life. Another dance, another body, and a dream of an “other” place. The ordering and reordering of language and movement seeks to reveal or invite something larger than the artist’s stale ideas of what is possible or appropriate.

Justin Cabrillos: Troupe
Troupe explores the relationship between the American showman P.T. Barnum and a host of animals and people he put on display including Jumbo the elephant, the Feejee Mermaid, and the “Swedish Nightingale.” The movement, voice, and text integrate selections of his autobiography and the language of disciplinary techniques for children. Inspired by Barnum’s own mingling of different performance forms, this interdisciplinary solo brings together elements of the forms he popularized.

Jesske Hume
“A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.”
-excerpt from
Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens
A dance to alter perceptions of the body, space, and time through both movement and stillness. Seeking limitations in order to push past them, the dancer is present and lives both in her body and in the space around it.

Carmine Covelli: American Tantrums
American Tantrums is a series of short installation art pieces. This marks the debut of Part 1 and will feature a small cast of un-recognizable faces simulating barely recognizable modern day tasks.

ALL DAY:
Tei Blow will be taking portraits:
“El Dorado”
El Dorado: ( select-all.tumblr.com) is a series of portraits of fortune-seekers from around the world, shot with an 8×10 camera. Tonight, Photographer Tei Blow collects a hundred more wayfaring strangers in modern day silver halide negatives.

Saturday, June 2nd

Central Park Sensory Walk
Led by Jennifer Monson
12PM, FREE

Location: CENTRAL PARK. Meet at the entrance on W. 81 St. & Central Park West.

Child Support!
2-4PM, FREE
Location: CENTRAL PARK. Meet at the Diana Ross Playground, W. 81 St. & Central Park West.
Hosted by Anna Sperber
A kid friendly hang-out pot-luck picnic. An opportunity for play between parents and non-parents alike! Bring snacks, games, blankets as well as questions and experiences of parenting in New York City. A space for dialogue and sharing resources.

Studies Project: WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY DANCE and WHERE DOES IT COME FROM and WHERE IS IT GOING?
3-7PM, FREE
3-6pm: Participate!, 6pm: Formal Presentation from The Bureau for the Future of Choreography
This Studies Project is a project initiated by the Bureau for the Future of Choreography to map out a history of contemporary dance and choreography since Judson Church. Taking inspiration from the first director of MoMA, Alfred Barr’s infamous Flowchart of Modernism and various responses to his gesture, what might a flowchart for the past fifty years of experimental dance look like? Participants will be invited to create their own flowchart for the collection of the BFC, followed by a presentation by the Bureau at 6pm.

Performance Event: Tarek Halaby, Dynasty Handbag, and Adrienne Truscott
8PM, $5
Tarek Halaby: Performing for the first time
Tarek Halaby is based in Brussels, Belgium. He has entered into a phase of generating new material. Working without the aim to produce a specific piece or performance, he has set up a series titled “Performing for the first time’ which, in essence, is an experiment on how to produce work and a practice in performing. Anything from movement, to songs, texts, photographs and drawings are used as material and/or to generate material for each performance.

Dynasty Handbag, Sounds Affectionate
Dynasty Handbag tells a dismal story through spastic mime inversion and inaccurate sound collage.

Adrienne Truscott, I Don’t Mean to Brag
Adrienne Truscott’s One-Lady Rape about Comedy starring Her Pussy and little else. (a werk-in-progress).

Ryan Heffington’s SWEATY SUNDAYS with Heather Lang. Followed with jams by JAMS
10PM, $5
Sweaty Sundays is an open level, feel good dance class for people of all ages, shapes and dance backgrounds that began in LA and is crossing the country for all you beautiful people. Costumes are encouraged. Class is followed immediately by a short, wild, intense, probably fatal 90′s Dance Party.

Sunday, June 3

Ridin’ Dirty Wrap Up Party
12PM, FREE
Meet at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park
Grab your gears, join the MR Rough Riders Rebecca Wender, Barbara Bryan, and Ian Douglas, and pedal down to Jacob Riis beach for the PUSH IT Wrap Up Party. Transportation and location information will be available on the website for non-riders. BYO helmet, for real, and Bon Voyage.

Site-specific performances and installations on view throughout the Festival by Megan Byrne, Alan and Michael Fleming, R.E.H Gordon, Katya Grokhovsky, Kennis Hawkins, Aki Sasamoto, Mariana Valencia

Critical Correspondence: Lydia Bell, Elizabeth Feidelson, Tara Sheena, Lindsey Drury (guest artist), and others take turns recording dialogue on Festival events each day.

LOCATION

LOCATION:
All events are held at The Center at West Park (except where otherwise noted)
165 W. 86th St. (West Park Presbyterian Church, corner of Amsterdam Ave.)
NYC

TRANSIT:
1 train to 86th
B, C trains to 86th
TICKETS
All events are $5, except where it says FREE(!).

Classes and Workshops range from $5-10, as listed above.
You can also purchase an $8 DAY PASS, available on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
The Day Pass gives you admission to all events on that day, excluding workshops.

Photo: Mette Sterre (Rotterdam Netherlands)

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Dimanche Rouge #15

Darmstadt “Classics of the Avant Garde” curators Nick Hallett and Zach Layton announce their fourth annual Institute at ISSUE Project Room. This festival,their first at ISSUE’s new space in downtown Brooklyn, celebrates all of June as the ersatz new music history month in New York and draws on a wide variety of experimental approaches from the canon and current practice.

The month begins with an all-star celebration of Pauline Oliveros’s 80th birthday [6/1] and closes with Rhys Chatham playing his classic Guitar Trio (1977) [6/30]. In between sees performances of rarely heard electroacoustic work by Gordon Mumma [6/8], early minimalism from Gamelan Son of Lion [6/22], a composer portrait of drummer Kid Millions and his Man Forever project [6/29], an offering of music for strings and chorus for the John Cage centennial [6/9], and the world premiere of a new work for voice and ensemble by compositional linguist Chris Mann, performed by Either/Or [6/23].

06/01 @ 8:00pm
Darmstadt 2012: Pauline Oliveros 80th Birthday Celebration
Admission: $15 / $12 for members

Photo by Gisela Gamper

Darmstadt celebrates Pauline Oliveros’ 80th birthday with a program celebrating Oliveros’s diverse body of work and a handful of her valued collaborators, including Anmari Wili (piano), Jason Hwang (violin), Alex Waterman (cello), Fast Forward (percussion), Jim Alteri (violinist), and multi-instrumentalist Miguel Frasconi. The program includes For Pauline, Tree Peace, and Oliveros’s participatory Tuning Meditation.

A visionary figure in the experimental tradition, Texas native Pauline Oliveros came of age during the 1950s in the Bay Area, forming the group Sonics with Ramón Sender and Morton Subotnick, which led to the creation of the San Francisco Tape Center. Oliveros directed the center in 1967, where she composed pioneering electronic music including the piece Bye Bye Butterfly (1965). Her body of subsequent work includes choral and instrumental scores, strategies for improvisation, ritual-theater, germinal writings, explorations of drone, and solo performance with her accordion. Her Sonic Meditations of the early 1970s are widely performed and taught internationally. In 1988 she formed the Deep Listening Band after an experience making music with trombonist Stuart Dempster and singer Panaiotis in a disused water tank with 45-second reverb. Her musical spirit continues to perpetuate through her ever-growing network of musical collaborators and students.

06/08 @ 8:00pm
Darmstatdt 2012: Music of Gordon Mumma
Admission: $15 / $12 for members

Gordon Mumma with John Cage, 1970

Performed by Conrad Harris (violin) and Jenny Lin (piano)

Gordon Mumma’s (1935-) work employing electronic circuits into the creation of music led him to the practice of using feedback to modify sound, one of the first artists to do so.  Mumma’s multichannel compositions have incorporated sculpture, multimedia, and choreography within an interdisciplinary spectacle.  Mumma was one of the founders of Ann Arbor’s Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music, collaborated on the legendary ONCE Festivals with Robert Ashley during the early 1960s, played in the ONCE group and Sonic Arts Union, and designed an electronic music system for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan.  In recent years Mumma has focused on acoustic composition, although his musical studies were in piano and horn, and he has been a lifelong practitioner of symphonic and chamber music.  This selection of pieces for violin and piano, performed by Conrad Harris (violin) and Jenny Lin (piano), is drawn from a wide span of Mumma’s career and includes electroacoustic and electronic works.

Program

Suite for Piano (1958-60)
…jardin… (1960-96)
Threesome (1980-95)
SIXPAX SONATAS (1985-97)
11 Note Pieces & Decimal Passacaglia (1978)
7 Dedications (from The Sushi Box and Songs Without Words) (1990s)
Etude on Oxford Changes (1957-60)
YAWAWOT for violin and tape
COMITATUS 2 (2009)

Violinist Conrad Harris has performed new works for violin at Ostrava Days, Darmstadt Ferrienkürse für Neue Musik, Gulbenkian Encounters of New Music, Radio France, Warsaw Autumn, and New York’s Sonic Boom Festival. In addition to being a member of the FLUX Quartet, he is concertmaster/soloist with the S.E.M. Orchestra, Ostravská Banda, and STX Ensemble. He has performed and recorded with such artists as Elliot Sharp, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jean-Claude Risset, Rohan de Saram, and Tiny Tim. He has recorded for Asphodel, Mode, Vandenburg, CRI, Lovely Music, and Vinyl Retentive Records.

Jenny Lin has been acclaimed for her “remarkable technical command” and “a gift for melodic flow” byThe New York Times.  She has numerous premieres and dedications to her credit, and has worked alongside composers such as Jonathan Bepler, Cornelius Dufallo, Luca Francesconi, Jason Freeman, John King, Stephan Moore, Jim Pugliese, Frederic Rzewski, Elliott Sharp, Valentin Silvestrov, Salvatore Sciarrino, Johannes Maria Staud and James Tenney, several of whom have written pieces for her. She has collaborated with Jazz pianist Chris Wiesendanger, avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, trombonist George Lewis, and Wilco members Nels Cline and Glenn Kotche.  Jenny’s extensive discography includes releases on Hänssler Classic, Steinway & Sons, Koch/E1, and BIS Records.  She is the central figure in Cooking for Jenny by Elemental Films, a music documentary portraying her journey to the north of Spain.

06/09 @ 8:00pm
Darmstadt 2012: John Cage Centennial Concert
Admission: $15 / $12 for members

Photo by Rhoda Nathans

Darmstadt and ISSUE Project Room celebrate the John Cage centenary year with this program of works for string ensemble and chorus.  The evening’s program includes Twenty Three, String Quartet in Four Parts, Hymns and Variations

Cage’s Number Pieces, composed during the last six years of his life, feature a technical specification Cage referred to as Time Brackets, in which short fragments of musical material are given to each performer who can flexibly enter and exit the overall musical texture.  Cage referred to these as enabling a kind of “earthquake proof” musical architecture.  Twenty-Three (1988) is scored for twenty three string instruments who each have their own chronometer and can keep time independently of one another.

Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts was originally premiered in August of 1950 at the Black Mountain College and dedicated to Lou Harrison.  The structure of the piece is influenced by Indian conceptions of the four seasons and associated each with a particular kind of force: creation, preservation, destruction and quiescence.

Hymns and Variations (1979) for twelve amplified voices is Cage’s largest choral work. Utilizing material from the 18th Century American composer William Billings (considered the father of American choral music), Cage used a technique of “harmonic subtraction” to produce a ‘sublimely beautiful series of long overlapping tones and empty spaces’.  The inspiration behind this technique could be traced to the “erased De Koonings” of Cage’s longtime associate Robert Rauschenberg.

The String Orchestra of Brooklyn is a close-knit group of musicians dedicated to exploring the breadth of the string repertoire, from the concerti of Bach to the latest experimental works by emerging composers. The orchestra also frequently invites its fellow wind, brass and percussion colleagues to join them for concerts throughout the year. Praised by The Wall Street Journal as “[an] excellent orchestra” and by theNew York Times for its “vivid intensity,” the String Orchestra of Brooklyn is passionately devoted to sharing its inclusive approach to music-making with the greater New York City area. The orchestra also seeks out collaborative projects with other like-minded performance ensembles and organizations, including ISSUE Project Room, American Opera Projects, GHOSTLIGHT Chorus, and the Fort Greene Park Conservancy. Founded in 2007 by violinist and conductor Eli Spindel, the SOB has quickly become an integral part of Brooklyn’s vibrant musical community. Based at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights, the ensemble also presents an annual summer concert in Fort Greene Park, and holds regular chamber recitals around the borough.

Founded in 2010 by artistic director Evelyn Troester, Ghostlight Chorus is an elite chamber choir with 16-20 singers focusing on vocal/choral technique work, musicality, intonation and rhythm mastery, as well as creative improvisation.

Darmstadt 2012: Understanding Hardware Programming in Assembly Workshop with Tristan Perich

This workshop is limited to 15 participants

As the technology in our lives becomes faster and more complicated, our understanding of it has decreased, forcing us to put an implicit faith in its design, inner workings and safety. Composer and visual artist Tristan Perich will present an introductory workshop on hardware programming, providing an understanding of how these systems function at their lowest level. While Perich’s work aims to integrate low-level computation with traditional artistic media—compositions for ensemble with 1-bit electronics or audio art installations—this workshop intends to teach a basic understanding of Assembly, a low-level programming language that drives most hardware at the lowest level. The workshop is intended for those with a basic understanding of computer programming, though it is not necessary. Participants will learn how to program an Amtel microprocessor, a low-cost, highly versatile microchip similar to those used in Arduino boards and in Perich’s own popular artwork 1-Bit Symphony.

Tristan Perich’s work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code. The WIRE Magazine describes his compositions as “an austere meeting of electronic and organic.” 1-Bit Music, his 2004 release, was the first album ever released as a microchip, programmed to synthesize his electronic composition live. His latest circuit album, 1-Bit Symphony (Cantaloupe, 2010) has received critical acclaim, called “sublime” (New York Press), and the Wall Street Journal said “its oscillations have an intense, hypnotic force and a surprising emotional depth.” His award winning work coupling 1-bit electronics with traditional forms in both music (Active Field, Observations) and visual art (Machine Drawings, Microtonal Wall) has been presented around the world, from Sonar and Ars Electronica to the Whitney Museum and bitforms gallery. He was the recipient of a 2011 NYFA Fellowship in Digital Electronic Arts, and a 2009 Award of Distinction from the Prix Ars Electronica.

Tristan Perich is a 2011 Artists’ Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is cosponsored by Artists & Audiences Exchange, a public program Administered by NYFA with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts.

06/22 @ 8:00pm
Darmstadt 2012: Gamelan Son Of Lion: The Braid Pieces of Barbara Benary and other works
Admission: $15 / $12 for members

With Barbara Benary, David Demnitz, Daniel Goode, Lisa Karrer, Jody Kruskal, Skip LaPlante, Laura Liben, Larry Simon, David Simons and pianist Lois Anderson.

Barbara Benary: The Braid Pieces, Aural Shoehorning
David Demnitz: Either/Or-Or/Either
Philip Corner: Gamelan Adagio
Daniel Goode: Hear the Sound of Random Numbers

“Between 1974 and 1980, [Benary wrote] a series of Braid pieces for gamelan: Braid Piece, Sleeping Braid,Counter-Braid, Macramé, and others. Pretty, slowly changing, steady in momentum, these are more note-specific, based on a diatonic progression of 14 pitches in alternating intervals—F# B A D C# F# E A G C# B E D G (F#). They involve performers playing the bells of the gamelan in interlocking rhythmic patterns, sometimes proceeding through the pitch-braid at their own pace, sometimes with added free melody, canons, and text. They set the pattern for Benary’s music of an underlying static or cyclic structure around which other elements are entwined. In fact, she is one of those composers whose music seems generated by a single archetype, the way Oliveros’s music stems from the breath, Xenakis’s from noise, Lois Vierk’s from the glissando. The braid—with its elements ever reappearing, twining around one another, recurring within orderly process—is a good image to keep in mind through all of Benary’s music.”
—Kyle Gann

Gamelan Son of Lion is a repertory ensemble based in downtown New York specializing in contemporary music written for the instruments of the Javanese gamelan. Having performed continuously since 1976, GSOL now rates among the oldest of American gamelan ensembles. The ensemble was begun by a core group of composers: Barbara Benary, Daniel Goode, and Philip Corner. More than a hundred pieces have been premiered by the ensemble since its inception. Gamelan Son of Lion is organized as a not-for-profit corporation and has been supported in its presentations by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts International and several private foundations. The ensemble performed as guests of the Government of Indonesia at Expo 86 in Vancouver, Canada, and toured Java in 1996, participating in the Jogjakarta Gamelan Festival and the Borobudur Festival. More recent tours have been to New Zealand and Estonia.

Barbara Benary studied the musics of India and Indonesia at Sarah Lawrence College and Wesleyan University. She has performed in the ensembles of Philip Glass, Jon Gibson, Alvin Lucier, Philip Corner and Daniel Goode. She received a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in 1972 and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and 1993, alongside grants from Meet The Composer and the Jerome Foundation. Benary is a co-founder of Gamelan Son of Lion.

New Music Box interview with Barbara Benary:

Art of Projection

Ten essays, written by leading art historians and critics, including Stan Douglas, Mieke Bal and Beatriz Colomina, address precedents for the projection of images in space, including nineteenth-century magic lantern shows and the novel spatial/temporal representations pioneered by Surrealists and experimental filmmakers during the early and mid-twentieth century. Central to the book’s thesis are various alternatives–which were investigated by adherents of Expanded Cinema in the 70s and resurrected by video artists in the 90s–to the conventional portrayals of space and time promoted by the mainstream culture industry. Art of Projection serves as a timely reconsideration of media art’s history.

Contents:

Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon
Forward

Stan Douglas in conversation with Christopher Eamon
Regarding Shadows

Tom Gunning
The Long and The Short of it: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, From Natural Magic to The Avant – Garde

Veatriz Colomina
Enclosed by Images: The Eamese’ Multiscreen Architecture

Scen Lütticken
Liberating Time

Branden W. Joseph
“My Mind Split Open”: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable

Gregor Stemmrich
Dan Graham’s Cinema and Film Theory

David Joselit
Touching Pictures: Toward a Political Science of Video

Thomas McDonough
Production/Projection: Notes on The Capitalist Fairy Tale

Mark Nash
Between Cinema and a Hard Place: Dilemmas of The Moving Image as a Post-Medium

Mary Ann Doane
The Location of The Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity

Mieka Bal
Setting The Stage: The Subject Mise En Scène