Exercises with Zack Winokur

Zack Winokur is a stage director, choreographer, and dancer. Future highlights include directing Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera, and a newly devised piece of theater combining music and dance, in collaboration with his own company AMOC, and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra which tours the Bay Area, the Krannert Center, and comes to the Met Museum next fall. Highlights from last season include his “rich, seamless” (New York Times) production of The Black Clown, an adaptation of the Langston Hughes poem starring Davóne Tines with music by Michael Schachter, at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center and the American Repertory Theater; his “darkly captivating” (New York Times) production of Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, with music by Tyshawn Sorey, text by Claudia Rankine, and starring Julia Bullock on the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a new production of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón starring Davóne Tines, also at the Met Museum; and a new piece for the Los Angeles Dance Project at the Luma Foundation in Arles, France. In 2017 Winokur, founded AMOC (American Modern Opera Company). AMOC, which Winokur co-directs with composer Matthew Aucoin, is an ensemble of singers, musicians, and dancers committed to creating a body of new, discipline-colliding music-theater works. Described by the New York Times as “blindingly impressive” and “preternaturally talented,” AMOC’s productions are collaborations between its core members that range from operatic stage work to creatively curated chamber events.

(Vocalise)

A radio series of proprioceptive exercises, interviews about practices of communication, and archival sound. A routine for warming up our means of communication. Presented monthly as a combination of live and prerecorded sessions.

Lend me your ears!
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works… Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are' he said. 'Here we are' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were' he said, 'Eeyop! Here we are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.' "
-- Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”

To reach an arm out of one’s mouth, peek through one’s ear, and speak out of one’s eye. Communication happens by any means possible. It is the different ways bodies extend themselves, as limbs that bridge things—reaching out, stretching and sometimes touching, with a light tap, “Marco!”

How we voice, how we gesture, how we manner, how we empathize.
Exercises to find all ways of thinking of language, and to exercise them as their own paths of communication.

To empathize over radio. Invite to do the same—feel, mimic, echo. “Polo”
The sound of leading, of following, of teaching speaking.
And learning to make a body of a limb.

Tongue and Cheek was first developed and aired on Montez Press Radio beginning in the summer of 2018. Montez Press Radio is an experimental radio station and commissioning platform for unexpected works from artists and other creative voices. MPR continues to air new episodes of Tongue and Cheek during its monthly live broadcast at 46 Canal St in Chinatown, New York.