STREAMED LIVE ON FREE103POINT9 ONLINE RADIO

"Improvised and Otherwise: A Festival of Sound and Form" is an annual event established to encourage and support the momentum of experimental composers and performers. In an effort to represent a diverse group of artists, Improvised and Otherwise strives to cross generational and geographic boundaries. The driving force behind this event is to foster a new opportunity for a broad range of media and performance aesthetics.

Friday, March 31
lower lights collective
Point of Departure
Static Decoy
Estelle Woodward + Alison Robinson - movement
Jeff Arnal - sound / set design
The BodyCartography Project
Performed and directed by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad
Sound Alice Kemp
Constellation: Higher Octave
by K.J. Holmes and Roy Campbell
Sounds
Dancers: Marie Baker Lee, Zachary Model, and Nancy Zendora.
Musician: Rob Brown.
Visual Artist: Jo Wood-Brown.

Saturday, April 1
Improvisation Évolutionnaire
Troika Ranch with Mark Coniglio & Dawn Stoppiello
HERD (2004)
Video/sound installation by Maya Ciarrocchi.
Sound score by Albert Mathias.
Arthur Brooks/Penny Campbell
The Things Themselves
Performed and Video by Lisa Gonzales
Sound: Oren Ambarchi and Serge Gainsbourg.
The Rat Land
A chamber opera by Gordon Beeferman, libretto by Charlotte Jackson.
Prologue and Scene 1, premiere performance featuring Anti-Social Music, Clay Greenberg, conductor.
Cast: Laurie Rubin, Michael Douglas Jones, Marcus DeLoach, Martha Sullivan, Andrew Catalano.
Directed by Beth Greenberg.
Friday, March 31

lower lights collective
Matt Bauder, Patrick Farrell, Aki Sasamoto, Dan St. Clair, Lily Skove, Kate Ten Eyck and Arturo Vidich.
lower lights collective is a group of artists who work in performance, sound, and sculpture. Previous works have been presented by Movement Research at the Judson Church, and The Chocolate Factory. Our collaboration maintains each artist's distinct vision, while not allowing any particular voice to be greater than another. We basically ignore each other, but still sort of get influenced by what we see out of the corner of the eye, or hear out of the corner of the ear.

Point of Departure
Static Decoy
Estelle Woodward + Alison Robinson - movement
Jeff Arnal - sound / set design
Static Decoy is part of an ongoing collaborative project for percussion and movement created and performed by Estelle Woodward, Alison Robinson and Jeff Arnal. Founded in 2002, this trio shares a dynamic and vocabulary that has been cultivated over time, and is rooted in the performance of improvisation. Point of Departure examines the idea of limits and how they are always expanding as we grow. This structure invites participants to introduce multiple events within a single composition. The piece evolves as the group navigates the impact that each event has on the space, and the modalities through which actions dissolve into one another. The performers work to unearth the residue of previous events as they de/re-construct the layers of the composition.

The BodyCartography Project
Performed and directed by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad
Sound Alice Kemp
Since 1997 The BodyCartography Project, directed by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, has been investigating the resonance of space. They work with the bodies' relationship to the physical, architectural, climatic, technological and social landscapes that we inhabit in urban/wilderness and private/public contexts. Their ventures include dance performances, film/video projects and educational workshops. They have created works for over one hundred and thirty performance events in the USA, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Japan, Europe and Russia.
www.bodycartography.org

Constellation: Higher Octave
by K.J. Holmes and Roy Campbell
This duet is a phase of the performance piece Constellation begun by dance artist K.J. Holmes in 1999. Constellation is about the changing alignments of bodies, sound, light and story improvised by dance and trumpet in various combinations. Higher Octave explores the harmonic structures between dance, trumpet and voice to play with vibration, resonation and the unfolding of spirit in response to life's experiences.

Sounds
Dancers: Marie Baker Lee, Zachary Model, and Nancy Zendora.
Musician: Rob Brown.
Visual Artist: Jo Wood-Brown.
Sounds is a collaboration between choreographer Nancy Zendora, visual artist Jo Wood-Brown and composer musician Rob Brown. The collaboration is built upon the installations of Wood-Brown animated in video that fluidly exchange with the spaces in Brown’s music and the mythic imagery of Zendora’s dances.


Saturday, April 1

Improvisation Évolutionnaire
Troika Ranch with Mark Coniglio & Dawn Stoppiello
This improvisation is an adaptation of one section of Troika Ranch's recently premiered work 16 [R]evolutions. It uses camera tracking technology to allow the performer to interactively generate the imagery, as well as to manipulate the sound score. The notion of this short section is to begin the improvisation with a single gesture, and to let this gesture (along with the resulting imagery and sound) evolve to a state of complexity over the course of the performance.

HERD (2004)
Video/sound installation by Maya Ciarrocchi.
Sound score by Albert Mathias.
Herd is a single channel video/sound installation that focuses on the extraordinary quotidian energy of New York City. The frenetic movement of the street is slowed to a pace where the viewer can form an intimate relationship to the histrionics of everyday events. Herd contains a sound score by Albert Mathias and was originally created as décor for Merce Cunningham's Events in 2004.

Arthur Brooks/Penny Campbell
Penny Campbell/Arthur Brooks
Penny Campbell (dancer) and Arthur Brooks (trumpet and flugelhorn) met in 1973 at Bennington College. Arthur, who had studied with Cecil Taylor at Antioch and later performed with him in New York and Europe, had arrived to continue his studies with Bill Dixon. Penny, a 1970 graduate of Bennington, had returned to work with Bill and Judith Dunn. Arthur went on to teach at Bennington for another 20-plus years in the Black Music Division, while Penny joined the dance faculty at Middlebury College, farther north in Vermont. In 1983, the two began a collaborative ensemble with dancer Susan Sgorbati and musician Rick O'Neal, performing improvised, evening-length works in various settings around the state and the northeast. Joined by dancers Peter Schmitz and Terry Creach and musicians Michael Chorney, Jeremy Harlos and Justin Perdue, they also performed as The Giants of Sciants for many years. Arthur has maintained his Ensemble V throughout the years as well and founded the Academy of Improvisational Music Studies in Vermont in 2003. In the last ten years, Penny and Arthur have both taught and performed at Work in the Performance of Improvisation, a summer intensive at Bennington College, and in venues around the world. Their work is composed improvisationally and improvised compositionally.

The Things Themselves
Performed and Video by Lisa Gonzales
Sound: Oren Ambarchi and Serge Gainsbourg.
"The Things Themselves" is an introspective retrospective of the moment before, exploring the physicality inherent in a mysterious change.
Lisa Gonzales is a dance maker and performing artist who also dabbles in the wonderful art of puppetry. She was based in New York from 1999-2004, and currently lives in Chicago, where she is on faculty at Columbia College Chicago. She shows her work across the United States and will be traveling to Taipei, Taiwan and Yaroslavo, Russia this summer. She is also on faculty at the "Movement Intensive in Compositional Improvisation" which will kick off its first summer in June at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Lisa is a founding member of "The Architects," a dance company committed to the performance of improvisation.

The Rat Land
A chamber opera by Gordon Beeferman, libretto by Charlotte Jackson.
Prologue and Scene 1, premiere performance featuring Anti-Social Music, Clay Greenberg, conductor.
Cast: Laurie Rubin, Michael Douglas Jones, Marcus DeLoach, Martha Sullivan, Andrew Catalano.
Directed by Beth Greenberg.

“The Rat Land” chronicles the disintegration of a troubled and eccentric family. The plot centers on their adolescent daughter, Karen, coming of age as best she can amidst a post-Cold War American Grotesque. Caught between her nightmarish home life and a near-psychotic fantasy world of her own devising, she faces grown-up problems of violence, isolation, madness, and death. Prologue: a mysterious apparition. Scene 1: the family’s dinner hour is ruined. Alone, Karen reveals to us her secret fantasy world and its deities…
Composer, pianist and improviser Gordon Beeferman has written a variety of works for soloists, chamber groups and orchestra, and creates collaborative works with writers, dancers and visual artists. He has received awards and commissions from BMI, Concert Artists Guild, and the Fromm Foundation. Anti-Social Music is a NY-based composer/performer collective formed by musicians in their 20s and 30s dedicated to supporting the music of our generation and connecting the worlds of composed contemporary classical/jazz and the rock/punk/indie scenes that surround us.
Beth Greenberg is a stage director at New York City Opera.


Tickets: $15 adults, $10 students/seniors, or $25 for a festival pass, buy tickets on-line from BRIC.
www.improvisedandotherwise.com.

This event is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. In Kings County the Decentralization Program is administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. (BAC).