This concert featured six performers (Keith Fullerton Whitman, Fat Worm of Error, David Shively, Caboladies, Graham Lambkin, and Jason Lescalleet) celebrating the experimental music micro-cultures—underground sonic research labs for aesthetics and technology—that exist in many cities. Performances in tiny clubs, nonprofit galleries, people’s houses, bookstores, and on college campuses provide fertile ground from which experimental musicians and audiences have evolved. 

Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer and performer obsessed with electronic music—from its midcentury origins in Europe to its contemporary worldwide incarnation as “digital music.”

Fat Worm of Error is a “rock” band that collectively writes songs with nonmusical sounds, structural constraints, and open improvisational passages mixed with readymade props and costumes.

David Shively performs as a soloist and chamber musician ranging from traditional percussion to Hungarian cimbalom to analog electronic systems and feedback.

Caboladies is an experimental electronic duo formed by Chris Bush and Eric Lanham in Lexington, Kentucky, in response to a vibrant experimental music community.

Graham Lambkin formed his first band, The Shadow Ring, in a small town in England, building a passionate fan base because of its sui generis blend of folk, noise, cracked electronics, and surrealist poetry.

Jason Lescalleet—one of a growing list of producer/musicians who rework existing material—uses reel-to-reel tape decks to explore the textures of low fidelity analog sounds and the natural phenomena of old tape and obsolete technology.

• Rock/noise homespun electronics by Fat Worm of Error
• Analog synthesis by composer, performer, and record distributor Keith Fullerton Whitman
• David Shively performing Max Neuhaus' electronic classics from the 50s
• Live electronics by Caboladies
• The unique duo of Jason Lescalleet and Graham Lambkin

Taking an existing text as a starting point, artists explode the concept of script and bring to life works that imbue music, film, theater, dance, interactive sculpture, and talks with the essence of the text.

With such varied sources as diaries of polar exploration, science fiction, ancient Roman play fragments, and an essay on shadows, this series focuses on the process of creating performance and art, sparked by a passage of words.

Wings of Desire is Wim Wenders' award-winning existential film about angels who silently watch over all of humanity, and guide individuals through the trials of their daily lives. The film follows the angel Damien (Bruno Ganz) as he falls in love with a trapeze artist and strives to relinquish his immortality to join her on earth. The film is divided between the angels, which exist outside of time, and humanity, which exists within it, showing these different temporal states through shifts between color and black-and-white film. In his notes for Wings of Desire, Wenders commented on how difficult it would be to be an angel: “To live for an eternity and to be present all the time. To live with the essence of things—not to be able to raise a cup of coffee and drink it, or really touch somebody.”

Wim Wenders is one of the leading representatives of new German cinema. He enrolled in the University of Television and Film in Munich in 1967, and was deeply influenced by the new American underground, a genre of filmmaking derived from Andy Warhol’s films featuring long, uneventful scenes with an open narrative. Wenders was one of the 15 directors and writers who in 1971 founded the Filmverlag der Autoren to handle production, rights, and distribution of their films. His first professional film was an adaptation of Peter Handke’s novel The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, for which he was awarded the Prize of the International Federation of Film Critics in Venice. Other notable films include Lightening Over Water (1980); Wings of Desire (1987), for which he was awarded Best Director at Cannes, the European Film Festival, and German Film Awards; Until the End of the World (1991); Faraway, So Close! (1993); The End of Violence (1997); Buena Vista Social Club (1999); The Million Dollar Hotel (2000); and most recently, the 3-D film Pina (2011).

In the 1990s, Wim Wenders became chairman and then president of the European Film Academy. Since 2003, he has been a professor at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg.

A Performa Commission with the National Arts Centre of Canada

Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed pairs acclaimed filmmaker Guy Maddin’s classic first feature film with a live performance of a newly-commissioned score by composer Matthew Patton. The score will be performed by a remarkable cast of Icelandic string musicians and vocalists including twin sisters Kristin Anna Valtysdottir and Gyda Valtysdottir (formerly of the band mum), Sigur Rós bandmates Amiina, Borgar Magnason, and more.

This event offers a unique glimpse inside the artistic process via a performance still in its rehearsal phase prior to its premiere at the Performa11 Festival in NYC in November of this year.

Dramatic new narration, written by Maddin, will be performed live. Foley sound effects will be created live by three members of Seattle’s Aono Jikken Ensemble, and new live visuals, created on stage in front of the audience, will be conceived and directed by Maddin as well, with all of these different parts working together to create a breathtaking spectacle casting Tales from the Gimli Hospital in an entirely new light.

A cult sensation when it was released theatrically in 1988, the original Tales from the Gimli Hospital tells the dreamlike, elliptical story of the jealousy and madness instilled in two men sharing a hospital room in a remote Canadian village. The film first propelled Maddin to international prominence, become an unprecedented success on the midnight movie circuit, and is now being revisited in an entirely new way.

Shot originally in the 4:3 aspect ratio of older movies, but now living in the world of widescreen, this performance will literally reframe the film. Along with the stunning backdrop of sound and narration created by the performers, this beautifully haunting and moving artwork will bring Maddin’s original film to life in stunning and unexpected ways.

FREE with limited seating.

Evelyn's Café will open at 5:30 PM with a full menu of meals, snacks, and beverages as well as a selection of wines. Service continues between and after events.

A Work in Progress Showing

Rosa Sánchez and Alain Baumann of Kònic thtr present excerpts of past works in performance, installation, and interactive technology, and share the status of their current work in progress, Before the beep—a dance performance piece inside an interactive and distributed installation, which allows the public to participate both remotely and in person. A dancer is the core, activating the information generated by the audience on-site through the use of cell phones, and through text and audiovisual input from the audience connected via the Internet. Before the beep refers to the changes of perception in interpersonal communication mediated by new technologies, and to the spaces that this mediation generates.

DANCE MOViES Commissions support new works that fuse dance with the technologies of the moving image.  

World premieres of three new dance films and an installation commissioned by EMPAC’s DANCE MOViES program, followed by a procession led by the punk marching band Mucca Pazza, featured in the film Fanfare for Marching Band.

A Circus of One

US, 15-minute looping video installation Director: Alison Crocetta Composer: Jason Treuting A Circus of One is a 16 mm black-and-white film directed by visual artist Alison Crocetta in collaboration with composer Jason Treuting. This film records Crocetta as a clownish figure within a one-ring circus completing a series of eight acts that run the gamut from feats of daring to absurd gestures. These performance actions form a filmic garland with Treuting’s score that draws inspiration from historic circus music and the tradition of musique concrète.

Fauna

Chile, 20 minutes Script and General Direction: Paulo Fernández Choreographic Direction and Production: Rodrigo Chaverini Original Music and Sound: Tomas González Art: Paulo Fernández & Antonio Becerro Performers: Camila Scholtbach, Luis Acevedo & Daniela Tenhamm Fauna creates an audiovisual world of confined and fantastical spaces, setting in motion a poetic dialogue between nature and artifice. Bodies possessed by different states inhabit landscapes configured in these restricted spaces. The film evokes a rhythmic relationship between body and location, dark and latent, questioning the concreteness of reality and life as staging.

Fanfare for Marching Band

US, 15:35 minutes Director: Danièle Wilmouth Choreographer: Peter Carpenter Band: Mucca Pazza A film following the mayhem created by a ragtag musical militia that embarks on an impotent invasion through a parallel universe, where their exuberant music is out of sync and unheard. The two worlds are finally unified when the band masters the tempo and patience of empathy.

Spring Cleaning

US, 10 minutes Director: Pooh Kaye Performer and animation assistant: Alexander Clack Sound design and sound edit: John Kilgore Choreographer and filmmaker Pooh Kaye’s alter ego, Wild Girl, played by Alex Clack, has a busy day weeding the dandelions, raking up dead brush, and mowing the lawn. Dandelions swirl in animated patterns around her, the flowers popping in and out of her ears and mouth as she tries to speak. The ground swallows her and spits her out, and piles of brush attack her as she tries to rid her lawn of dead branches. Kaye returns to her early Super 8 films from the 1970s, which explored the human body’s relationship to the world.

Half man and half horse, satyrs were the legendary companions of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theater. In Dionysia, Poor Dog Group uses ancient drama, lore, and imagery found on clay pots, to reinvent the “satyr play.” Based on fragments of these plays, many by Euripides, Dionysia relates the myth of Thyestes and Atreus and delves into the ritualistic, unstable, and sometimes hilarious behavior of satyrs. Commissioned by EMPAC and created during a three-week residency including the work’s premiere, Dionysia channels forgotten rites into a full-blown physical expression of the bestial qualities inherent in contemporary life, revealing a world both barbaric and beautiful. 

Poor Dog Group is a Los Angeles-based collective of performance and media artists committed to nurturing a distinctive aesthetic through adventurous collaboration in the creation of new work and through the radical reexaminations of existing texts.

Quote Unquote: Experiments in Time-Based Text was an interdisciplinary series presenting works by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for time-based works including installation, film, and performance.

Evocative artist interpretations of an array of environments, real and imagined, from surreal urban worlds to the mutation of natural landscapes via architectural explorations highlighting our ever changing world.

• philip hunt: lost and found / uk 2008 / 24:00
• harduin, phrakornkham, bourgois, cabourg + vergne / miam! / france 2008 / 06:35
• astereokid: galactic mail / uk 2008 / 04:50
• pascal bideau: oona… sometimes flips out / uk 2008 / 02:14
• lefebvre, tanon-chi, tardivier, vovau + walker: après la pluie [after the rain] / france 2008 / 02:58
• clement crocq: machu picchu post / france 2008 / 05:35
• desfretier, dufresne, kauffmann + laugero: bave circus / france 2008 / 04:50
• guru studio: hazed / canada 2009 / 02:00
• loubaresse, bouyer, cheriet + vivien: scoop volante [flying saucer] / france 2008 / 01:29

Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed paired Guy Maddin’s first feature film with a live performance of a newly-commissioned score by Matthew Patton, performed by a cast of Icelandic string musicians and vocalists including twin sisters Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir and Gyða Valtýsdóttir (formerly of the band múm), Sigur Rós bandmates Amiina, Borgar Magnason, and more. A new narration, written by Maddin, was also performed live, accompanied by Foley sound effects (by Seattle’s Aono Jikken Ensemble) and live visuals created by electronics engineer Paul Corley. A cult sensation when it was released in 1988, Tales from the Gimli Hospital tells a dream-like, elliptical story of jealousy and madness instilled in two men sharing a hospital room in a remote Canadian village. In this new performance, the score takes the original film in an entirely new direction: layers of music mirror the film’s story-within-a-story structure and provides an ethereal quality that underscores the dark and haunting elements of the film.