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:: BIOGRAPHIES :: |
BIOGRAPHIES
Liz Allbee (modern times):
Liz Allbee is a voracious musician whose work spans many genres, including new music, improvisation, electronic composition, Asian folk and pop, noise, minimalist, free jazz and experimental rock. She has played with a wide array of musicians, including Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, Hans Grusel, Birgit Uhler, Alberto Braida, Fabrizio Spera, Gino Robair, Yugen Noh Theater, SFSound, and with members of Caroliner, Sun City Girls, and Rova. She lives in Oakland, CA. See lizallbee.net.
“Allbee is no slouch, a sharp and gifted musician with a highly developed personality and a warped sense of humour……” -Sound Projector #15, London, UK. Spring 2007
Carolina Bäckman (Finding Aurora):
Carolina Bäckman is a Denmark-based dancer who has performed internationally and extensively throughout Scandinavia. While searching for and Finding Aurora, Carolina expands her role as performer and enactor to that of experimenter and questioner. In 2007, she was a research participant in Grenzstadt Middle East, a workshop performance collaboration with Haifa Cultural Center in Amman Jordan, with the Recoil performance group and Danish choreographer Tina Tarpgaard. She has participated in several projects with Danish/Swedish choreographer Klara Elenius, one of which is the film project "Insyn," which has received awards at international festivals such as Cinedans in Amsterdam and IMZ's Dancescreen 2007 in the Hague. Carolina has worked with choreographer Emma Nordanfors for many years and has danced in projects by choreographers Ari Rosenzweig (DK), Lotte Sigh (DK), and Hedvig Lykke (NO), as well as in several independent projects.
Mathias Bossi (Dutch Classic):
Matthias Bossi is the drummer/orator for Rock-Against-Rock pioneers Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and was a member of NYC's Grammy-nominated rock juggernaut, Skeleton Key. As a founder of The Book of Knots, a Brooklyn-based recording collective, he has had the pleasure of collaborating with Tom Waits, Mike Watt, Jon Langford, Carla Bozulich, Zeena Parkins, and author Rick Moody. In the world of theatre and dance, he has written music for Jo Kreiter, inkBoat, and Central Works, and will collaborate with Carla Kihlstedt on an upcoming score for choreographer Deborah Slater. He is currently on the road with guitarist Fred Frith in his new project, Cosa Brava, and also enjoys making music with singer/songwriter's John Vanderslice and Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent.
Merlin Coleman (A Clear Story / working with Katherin McInnis)
Merlin Coleman (www.merlinman.com) is a composer and interdisciplinary performing artist with training in western classical voice and cello, east Indian voice and Javanese gamelan. She has a strong background in experimentation, improvisation, writing and performance art.
Her compositions are based in live performance of Cello/voice compositions, which she performs solo and with guests, and in recorded soundscapes presented in installations, live performance pieces, and film and dance soundtracks.
Merlin co-curates The Milk Bar performance and film series with Ian Winters and Mary Armentrout (www.milkbar.org).
She presents work in the San Francisco bay area regularly and has been awarded numerous residencies around the country. Her work has been presented throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan.
George Cremaschi (Finding Aurora):
George Cremaschi's work involves extending musical language, vocabulary and discourse using both traditional and non-traditional acoustic as well as electronic sources with non-idiomatic composition and free improvisation as the means.
He was born in New York City, and studied jazz at Jazzmobile in Harlem and composition at Greenwich House Music School in Greenwich Village. As a composer, he has written nearly 100 pieces for chamber groups, small ensembles, solo contrabass, electronics, cinema, spoken word, dance and theater. His work appears on over 30 recordings on the Apestaartje, Evolving Ear, Black Saint, Leo, Beak Doctor, Evander, Rastascan, Music & Arts, Nine Winds and 482 Music labels.
Recent years have seen many performances and collaborations in the US and Europe with such renowned musicians as Evan Parker, Marshall Allen, Andrea Parkins, Gert-Jan Prins, Mats Gustafsson, Paul Lovens, Nels Cline, Saadet Türköz, Nicolas Collins, Lê Quan Ninh, Butch Morris, Cecil Taylor, and Rova Saxophone Quartet among many others.
Evelyn Ficarra (short films about water / submarine):
A dual citizen (UK/USA), Evelyn Ficarra studied composition with Jonathan Harvey and Peter Wiegold at the University of Sussex, receiving her MA in 1986, and also studied at the National Film and Television School, graduating in Screen Music in 1994. She returned to academia in 2005, having been awarded a Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ficarra's work has received support from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, the Sonic Arts Network, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, the Hinrichsen Foundation and Poems on the Underground.
She has had composer residencies at the International Electronic Music Studio (EMS) in Stockholm (1993) and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2004.) Her works have been short-listed for the Prix Noroit, Bourges and Luigi Russolo competitions. Her music has been heard in various formats (in concerts, theatres, music festivals, film festivals, television and radio broadcasts) in the UK, Europe, the Americas and the Far East. Her solo CD Frantic Mid-Atlantic was released by Sargasso in 1999.
Ficarra is especially interested in cross-arts work and electro-acoustic media, and in addition to her concert works has written music for dance, theatre, film and radio. Notable collaborators include Ian Spink (with Second Stride Dance Theatre , 1988, and the Dangerous Talk 1997 Choreodrome Project); Jerwood Award winning choreographer Sarah Fahie (in the company she and Ficarra started together, naked fish productions, 2002-continuing) and director Sue Buckmaster, with theatre-rites, on Shopworks (London International Festival of Theatre/Vienna Festival 2003) and In One Ear (Lyric Hammersmith and UK Tour, 2004/6.)
Recent/notable projects include Rendition, for prepared piano, harpsichord and video, a collaboration with Keynote+ (Kate Ryder and Jane Chapman) and photographer/video artist Ian Winters, which premiered at the BMIC's Cutting Edge Festival in 2006; Submarine Revisited selected for the Unknown Public's Critical Notice project 2007 and London Cries (an exploration of current London street cries) for chamber group, solo voices and tape, commissioned by Poems on the Underground and the Apollo Chamber Orchestra and premiered in the City of London Festival in 2002, and subsequently performed in a British Council concert at the Hanoi Opera House in Vietnam, 2003.
Lucy HG/ League of Imaginary Scientists (Finding Aurora):
Lucy Hg is the research coordinator for the League of Imaginary Scientists, a creative laboratory for art and science. In Finding Aurora Lucy draws on her experience with the League to transform the process of creative inquiry into an interactive medium. Multidisciplinary projects by Lucy exhibit globally. Works from her Imaginary Science series were exhibited at Colombia’s celebration of the World Year of Physics in Bogotá in 2005. She first collaborated with Emma Nordanfors and E.K.K.O at CESTA in the Czech Republic in 2006. In 2007 League research was presented in Medical/Arts at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena and in Command Z at the Museum of Torrance in California. Her work with international networked storytelling collective Aether9 include projects at the Mapping Festival at BAC in Geneva, NetUser4 in Bulgaria, and MAAC in Brussels. The League’s city-building project, rebuildingRome.com, created with Liz Kueneke as part of Rome’s Eternal Tour in 2008, finds collaborators in towns named Rome or Roma around the globe. Lucy is the recipient of many grants, including an award from e-MobiLArt to pursue interdisciplinary research in collaboration with international interactive artists. A complete listing of the League’s ongoing experiments is on-line at imaginaryscience.org.
Eric Koziol (Dutch Classic):
Eric Koziol is a San Francisco based video artist. His work has taken the form of dance films, multi-screen installation, and interactive media environments for live performance. Local collaborators have included Shinichi Koga / inkBoat, Sherwood Chen, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Faun Fables, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Ben Stokes/ D.H.S. Eric's work has been exhibited at The Asian Art Museum in S.F., The Hammer Museum in LA, PS122 and Anthology Film Archives in NYC, and numerous international dance and film festivals. Eric is also a founding member of the music video production company H-Gun Labs which operated from 1989-2001 in Chicago, LA and SF. His work with H-Gun included clips for Nine Inch nails, Diamanda Galas, Public Enemy, Soundgarden, DJ Shadow, and De La Soul.
Katya Madrid (Open Cinema collaborator)
Katya Madrid is an artist and art historian. She works as a program coordinator and juror for OPEN CINEMA, an international short film and animation festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is also curating a video art installation at the Center for Modern Art, St. Petersburg, as part of their cooperation with the Baltic Festival, as well as producing a short-film section for them. Katya is very excited to have contributed to the Milk Bar programming for the past two years.
Katherin McInnis (A Clear Story, working with Merlin Coleman)
Katherin McInnis’s work has screened at festivals, including the New York Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Slamdance, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Ann Arbor Film Festival) and in museums and galleries: the Pompidou Center, SFMoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, New Langton Arts, and the NGBK (Berlin).
Most recently, she was a Visiting Artist in Conceptual/Information Arts at San Francisco State University, teaching digital video and audio. I've also taught HD production and video production for mobile devices at the Bay Area Video Coalition, and introductory film classes for motion picture and animation students at the Academy of Art University and at the College of San Mateo.
Emma Nordanfors (Finding Aurora):
Emma Nordanforsis a Swedish choreographer currently based out of Berlin. Her main focus lies in collaboration with other art forms, where form follows function and a project’s thematic elements determine the disciplines she draws on. Emma instigated the search Finding Aurora, which has stretched her methodology from that of the choreography of movement to the coordination, and exercising, of thoughts. Emma is a part of the Scandinavian collective of choreographers E.K.K.O. Works in collaboration with E.K.K.O include the site-specific, Copenhagen, set in an old butcher’s hall in 2007, the interactive media and dance piece, Shallow of Breath, performed at CESTA (Cultural Exchange Station of Tábor) in the Czech Republic in 2006, and the outdoor performance of Zoom in Copenhagen in 2004. Her solo choreography has been presented and supported extensively, with awards from the Danish Art Council and various Nordic foundations. Emma also teaches dance composition at the National School for Contemporary Dance in Denmark and writes for Scandinavian culture magazines, including Tidningen Kulturen. Her next performance collaboration is Esther is crawling, which will premiere at Århus in Denmark in Spring, 2009.
Dan Plonsey (Modern Times w/ Liz Albee and Daniel Popsicle Ensemble):
Dan Plonsey was born in Cleveland, Ohio, 49 years ago. He began composing music and improvising in 1977, inspired by the music of Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Mauricio Kagel, and Charles Ives. Soon enough, Plonsey came to structure his pieces around melodies. The issue in most of his music is the tension between melody and accompaniment, and within the melody itself. Plonsey works almost exclusively with instruments found in jazz bands, along with occasional strings and non-Western instruments when available. Much of his music is to a large degree determined by "whoever happens to be around," and one of Plonsey's strengths as a composer is to get a lot done in the little bits of time left after teaching high school math and being with his family. Plonsey's early music was often humorous; his more recent compositions are less overtly so, yet he still is guided by the principle that if an idea appears to be too simpleminded to employ -- use it.
paige starling sorvillo / blindsight (Dutch Classic):
paige starling sorvillo creates sense-saturated performance in both solo and ensemble form as artistic director for the San Francisco-based performance company blindsight. Integrating a filmic aesthetic with non-linear (and most often silent) narrative, she composes architectural and emotional landscapes devised in and across the languages of immersive and interactive video, contemporary Butoh dance, and experimental music. Her company blindsight brings together extraordinary collaborating artists from multiple disciplines to build fully integrated performance where each discipline’s voice is heard equally and where new dialects emerge across forms. Recent intermedia works include Third Skin, NOHspace, 2003; ‘these are my arms holding you, tearing you apart.’, CounterPULSE, 2005 & DanceMission (as part of the SF WOW Festival), 2007; and thirty seven isolated events, presented first as a site-specific work-in-progress at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum in 2007 and premiered this spring at CounterPULSE as part of the 2008 San Francisco International Arts Festival. Sorvillo has performed and collaborated extensively throughout the SF Bay Area and the US as well as in Germany and the Czech Republic. Her work has been supported by the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theatre Bay Area’s CA$H grant, Meet the Composer, the East Bay Community Foundation’s Fund for Artists, Asian American Dance Performances, CHIME, NOHspace, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, San Francisco’s CounterPULSE, and Oakland’s Temescal Arts Center. This September 8th & 9th, sorvillo/blindsight presents slow time and unnecessary conversation, an evening of short new works at NOHspace, San Francisco as part of NOHspace Presents.
Ian Winters (short films about water):
Ian Winters is a San Francisco Bay Area based photographer, video-maker and performer. Working at the intersection of architectural form, frozen image, and time-based media Winters collaborates with composers and choreographers to create open-ended environments through performance, photographic/video/film media, and sonic environments. He has on-going long-term collaborations with choreographers paige starling sorvillo and Mary Armentrout, performance artist Stine Eva Jorgensen, and composer Evelyn Ficarra, and is the co-curator of the MilkBar with Mary Armentrout and Merlin Coleman. His work has been shown and internationally including at 21 Grand, CounterPULSE, Dance Mission Theater, Parkway Cinema, UC Berkeley, London’s Cutting Edge Festival, Corsham Music Festival, Highways in Los Angeles, LA Freewaves, Dartington College, St. Petersburg Open Cinema Festival, ArtSpace16/Malden among others. He is looking forward to a residency at I-Park later this year. Winters trained in photography, film and performance at SMFA-Boston and Tufts University. He also works as Executive Director of the Northern California Land Trust. See ianwinters.com
Irina V. Yevteyeva (Yevteyeva retrospective):
Born on March 14, 1956 in Leningrad.
Graduated from N. Krupskaya Institute of Culture, department of photography, studio of G. Aronov and G. Zimmerman (1980). Completed a post-graduate course in LGITMIK (now St. Petersburg Academy of Performing Arts) (1990). Defended a PhD thesis on the theme «Genre-formation process in the national animation of the 60’s – 80’s: From the parable to polyphonic structures» (1991). PhD in Arts.
Film director at the Lenfilm Studios (since 1989). Professor of the University of Culture and Arts (now the Academy of Culture and Arts) teaching cinema dramatic arts (since 1991); a senior research worker of the Russian Institute of Arts History.
I. Yevteyeva’s films defy standard classification. She creates hand-made screen pictures in the literal sense of the word. Being a director and critic, practitioner and theorist, designer and researcher, Irina Yevteyeva has developed her own unique techniques of «film-painting» on the interface of cinema and animation. I. Yevteyeva calls herself an animator and cartoon-maker, but she also works with actors and live performers; she needs this, as she herself puts it, «to always have the feeling of cinema». When working on her first film, «A horse, a violin… and a little jumpily» (1991), there was not a spare animation machine for her, so she had to invent an alternative technique. It was labour-consuming: each shot was made by hand, using light, glass, a projector and a camera. However, I. Yevteyeva implemented her concept brilliantly, integrating documentary and animation material
Her film «The Clown» was made in just six months together with cameraman Genrikh Marandzhian and composer Andrey Sigle. Yet it was this 10-minute miniature that had brought Irina Yevteyeva world recognition: in 2002 in Venice «The Clown» received a «Silver Lion». The latest film project realized by Irina Yevteyeva is «The Demon» after the painting by M. Vrubel, the poem of the same title by M. Lermontov, and Goethe’s «Faust». Her current work – film «Theseus» – is in production.
Irina Yevteyeva: «I am well aware that the films I make are not for general release, and the majority will never see them. The most important thing is that the films do find their viewers anyway.» see http://proline-film.com/persons/1.html