Wednesday, August 29, 2018

SUBMERSION LA



SUBMERSION LA


WHO
Cilla Vee Life Arts – with Cilla Vee, Grayson Morris, Blair Bogin, Pedro Jimenez, Kio Griffith, Carole Kim, G.E. Stinson, Joseph Hammer, Miller Wrenn (replacing Steuart Liebig)

WHAT
Submersion – an immersive, multi-media environment of sound, image and motion

WHEN
Friday October 19th -  8pm – 11pm

WHERE
Coaxial Arts Foundation
1815 S Main St, Los Angeles, CA 90016

HOW MUCH
$7



Cilla Vee Life Arts presents:
SUBMERSION

Definition:
Immersion. Hiding. Beneath the surface. Completely absorbed by / involved in.
Differential Topology.  Differentiable Manifolds. Soft Question.

Performance:
An immersive, multi-media environment of sound, image and motion.
The everyday world melts away as though wandering deep into a forest or ocean.
Everything changes.
Time. Space. Temperature.
The psyche surrenders.
Transcendence.
SUBMERSION is a durational performance installation during which the audience is free to come and go throughout.



Cilla Vee Life Arts


CILLA VEE LIFE ARTS is an inter-disciplinary arts organization founded in 2002 in the South Bronx by Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) – now based in Asheville NC.
It serves as an umbrella for multiple projects that focus on collaboration and facilitation. With a mission of blurring boundaries and crossing categories, CVLA draws from a diverse pool of artists with a wide range of artistic backgrounds.
Performances can include anything from dance, movement, music, sound, text, film and video, visual and performance art to installation and beyond.

“When it's summer in the city, people do weird things. Performers especially. ....“Beguiling”
John Rockwell – New York Times

Cilla Vee Life Arts - http://www.cillavee.com/

This Fall Cilla Vee is touring cross country and the west coast in order to connect and collaborate with area artists in each location.

  
ARTIST INFORMATION

Grayson Morris - https://emersion.art/
Blair Bogin - http://blairbogin.com/
Kio Griffith - www.kiogriffith.com
Carole Kim - http://www.carole.kim/
Miller Wrenn - https://millerwrenn.com/



Cilla Vee  (movement)


Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of Cilla Vee Life Arts  – an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration.
Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art.
Claire has presented her work in venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow , the New York
Botanical Gardens , Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center  and Art Basel Miami. She has performed and taught throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Pakistan.
Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance  and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts . Her pre-professional training includes the Royal Academy of Dance  and the Royal Schools of Music  examinations. She also served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation  in New York and holds an MFA in Creative Practice  from the Transart Institute  with Plymouth University, UK.
On moving to the USA in 1992, Claire held the positions of Dancer for Unto These Hills  drama on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and for Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater  in North Carolina, as well as serving as a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance  and as Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company  in Tennessee.
Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded Cilla Vee Life Arts  and, with the support of arts advocates such as Chashama , Bronx Council on the Arts  and Arts for Art , began to develop and present her signature modes of work – including Motion Sculpture Movement Installations  and The Sound Of Movement  projects.
She is the creator of the Living Art pedagogy for performance art.
Claire now uses Asheville NC as her home-base.

“My work as an artist blurs boundaries and crosses categories. Re-defining the traditional concepts of a “piece” and challenging the conventions of performance, time, space and audience relationships.”


Grayson Morris (movement)


Grayson Morris is a multi-disciplinary performer from Asheville, NC, currently based in Los Angeles . She has appeared on Gotham Comedy Live and toured nationally with her solo show Am I a Grownup Yet? She runs a biannual immersive performance art series in Asheville called emersion, which is currently in its third year. She performs regularly in LA where she moved to study theatrical clowning.


Blair Bogin (movement)


BLAIR BOGIN is an interdisciplinary artist. She earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Amidst her art practice, she is a counseling Astrologer (Sisterbride) and Kundalini Yoga Instructor.


Pedro Jimenez (movement)


Kio Griffith (projection)


Kio Griffith is a Los Angeles and Japan based visual and sound artist, independent curator, writer, and producer. His work includes drawing, painting, sound, video, performance, electronics, language, sculpture and installation.
He has exhibited in the UK, Japan, Germany, Croatia, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Turkey, Belgium and the U.S.
His current projects include founder / project director at TYPE (Tokyo+Yokohama Projects Exchange), co-founder of Transit Republic, IMMI, and Genzou, independent curator, contributing editor at Fabrik, Artscape and Art Bridge magazines, former art director at Angel City Jazz Festival and has designed over 300 music album packaging.
Griffith was recently invited to exhibit in the 2016 Aichi Trienniale and currently on research for a public project for the Setouchi Triennale.


Carole Kim (projection)



Carole Kim is a media artist with a focus on video projection environments for multi-media installation, performance and photography. She has a very hands-on, tactile approach to the materials she works with, pushing the moving image to take on optical, spatial and dimensional form. She is interested in the integration of disciplines where all media are on a level playing field working in tandem towards creating the entirety of an experience.
Her work has been supported by the Irvine Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation, MAP fund, City of Los Angeles, Pasadena Arts Council, The Music Center, Durfee Foundation, REDCAT, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), The Getty Center, Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) ,Dublab, Newtown, Turbulence.org, CalArts, and The Center for Experiments in Art, Information, and Technology. She was selected as a recipient of a 2013 COLA Fellowship, 2014 CCI
Investing in Artists Grant, 2015 Metabolic Studio Chora Council Grant and a 2015 CHIME Grant. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Descanso Gardens working on a year-long project that will culminate in a solo exhibition and site-specific performances.


GE Stinson (sound)


G.E. Stinson's exploration of American folk music forms began as a child immersed in the gospel music of his family in Oklahoma. He continued in Chicago, studying/playing blues with Cash McCall, Hound Dog Taylor, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, among others.
Stinson eventually received a composition scholarship with William Russo at Columbia College. In 1972, he co-founded the seminal fusion/world music group, Shadowfax. During his tenure with this group, he performed and composed on seven recordings, toured extensively in the U.S., Europe, South America and Japan including performances at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Academy of Music, and Wolftrap. In 1988, Stinson along with the other members of Shadowfax were honored with a Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the following year began a collaboration with Momix Dance Theater which culminated in a national tour.
1990 brought the formation of the G.E. Stinson Group in Los Angeles and the subsequent completion of a recording entitled "The Same Without You" in 1993. This was to be the first of many collaborations that would lead to Stinson becoming a prominent member of the Los Angeles New Music community. Among these projects are the Wayne Peet Trio recording "Fully Engulfed"; Adam Rudolph's opera "The Dreamer"; "Right of Violet" featuring Alex Cline and Jeff Gauthier; Unique Cheerful Events (an improvising collective); guitar duets with Nels Cline and A Thousand Other Names, a Stinson led group which completed a self titled recording in 1996 on Birdcage records. Stinson continues to compose for dance and has contributed to numerous motion picture soundtracks including Sunset Strip directed by Hans Fjellestad.


Joseph Hammer (sound)


Since 1980, Joseph Hammer has played analog synthesizers and samplers and manipulated tape loops in the bands Dinosaurs With Horns (formed in 1982), Steaming Coils and Debt of Nature -- all groups with Rick Potts -- as well as with Points Of Friction, Blue Daisies and more. Hammer has collaborated with eclectic songster Eugene Chadbourne and one of Japan's premiere sound experimenters, Otomo Yoshihide. Hammer's unconvential 'homegrown' approach utilizes audio CD sources abstracted by hand with vintage magnetic tape gear; a live "phonomontage." He cites as his primary musical influences: receiving more than one AM radio station at a time, and a specific episode of the '70s T.V. show Land of the Giants during which astronauts thwart alien tyrants by using tape loops.

In the field of found sound, Joseph Hammer is the master of survey and delay; With looped tape and a gloved hand, he taps a magnetic vein, coaxing fragments of occluded origin into a sonic sui generis.


Steuart Liebig (sound)


When prompted to talk about himself in the third person, electric bassist/composer Steuart Liebig will tell you that he has been playing and writing music for a long time.  It’s probably more interesting to see what other people have said about him:

“To say only that he plays bass would be misleading. As an improviser, he commands a shocking array of effects. As a composer, he can create rigorous but liberating frameworks for wide-open jazz on one hand and harmonica honk on the other. And mainly, he hears everybody else, assimilates it all and kicks it to another level.”

“A major concern of Steuart Liebig’s is space; acknowledging it, defining it, dividing it up. If anyone can be funky without necessarily grooving, it’s bassist Liebig, a master of the unexpected cosmic event.”

“Liebig is equally at home charting lunar terrain as he is in the pocket.”

“. . . nonpareil rethinker of electric bass . . . “

“Steuart Liebig’s bass isn’t a bass, it’s a giant alien creature in the heaving throes of partition.”

One of his recent focuses has been attempting to develop different techniques and timbral resources that are outside the normal practice of his instrument. 

Miller Wrenn is replacing Stuart Leibig.
















Sunday, August 26, 2018

SUBMERSION Oakland




SUBMERSION Oakland


WHO
Gench and Cilla Vee Life Arts – with Cilla Vee, Thomas Dimuzio, Kit Young, Lori Varga, Aurora Josephson, Chandra Shukla.

WHAT
Submersion – an immersive, multi-media environment of sound, image and motion

WHEN
Saturday October 13th – 9pm – 12 midnight

WHERE
Pro Arts – 150 Frank H Ogawa Plaza, Oakland CA 94612

HOW MUCH
Sliding scale $7 - $15

Gench and Cilla Vee Life Arts present:
SUBMERSION

Definition:
Immersion. Hiding. Beneath the surface. Completely absorbed by / involved in.
Differential Topology.  Differentiable Manifolds. Soft Question.

Performance:
An immersive, multi-media environment of sound, image and motion.
The everyday world melts away as though wandering deep into a forest or ocean.
Everything changes.
Time. Space. Temperature.
The psyche surrenders.
Transcendence.
SUBMERSION is a durational performance installation during which the audience is free to come and go throughout. 




ARTIST INFORMATION


Cilla Vee Life Arts



CILLA VEE LIFE ARTS is an inter-disciplinary arts organization founded in 2002 in the South Bronx by Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) – now based in Asheville NC.
It serves as an umbrella for multiple projects that focus on collaboration and facilitation. With a mission of blurring boundaries and crossing categories, CVLA draws from a diverse pool of artists with a wide range of artistic backgrounds.
Performances can include anything from dance, movement, music, sound, text, film and video, visual and performance art to installation and beyond.

“When it's summer in the city, people do weird things. Performers especially. ....“Beguiling”
John Rockwell – New York Times

Cilla Vee Life Arts - http://www.cillavee.com/

This Fall Cilla Vee is touring cross country and the west coast in order to connect and collaborate with area artists in each location.


Chandra Shukla - http://xambuca.com/




Cilla Vee 


 
Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of Cilla Vee Life Arts  – an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration.
Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art.
Claire has presented her work in venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow , the New York
Botanical Gardens , Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center  and Art Basel Miami. She has performed and taught throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Pakistan.
Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance  and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts . Her pre-professional training includes the Royal Academy of Dance  and the Royal Schools of Music  examinations. She also served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation  in New York and holds an MFA in Creative Practice  from the Transart Institute  with Plymouth University, UK.
On moving to the USA in 1992, Claire held the positions of Dancer for Unto These Hills  drama on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and for Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater  in North Carolina, as well as serving as a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance  and as Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company  in Tennessee.
Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded Cilla Vee Life Arts  and, with the support of arts advocates such as Chashama , Bronx Council on the Arts  and Arts for Art , began to develop and present her signature modes of work – including Motion Sculpture Movement Installations  and The Sound Of Movement  projects.
She is the creator of the Living Art pedagogy for performance art.
Claire now uses Asheville NC as her home-base.

“My work as an artist blurs boundaries and crosses categories. Re-defining the traditional concepts of a “piece” and challenging the conventions of performance, time, space and audience relationships.”


Thomas Dimuzio


THOMAS DIMUZIO is a musician, composer, sound designer, mastering engineer, label proprietor, and music technologist residing in San Francisco, California. Inspired by John Cage and with roots firmly planted in Led Zeppelin, Dimuzio combines sound with the power of music into sonic excursions that transport the listener into other worldly aural realms. “His work has a narrative, filmic tug that will draw you into its dark corners, ears alert… brilliant and rarely less than entertaining.” —Peter Marsh, BBC
Long regarded as a musical pioneer for his innovative use of live sampling and looping techniques, Dimuzio has earned a deserved reputation worldwide as an avant-garde sound artist in touch with the aesthetic pulse of time and technology. A true sonic alchemist who can seemingly create music events out of almost anything, Dimuzio's listed sound sources on his various releases include everything from 'modified 10 speed bicycle' and 'resonating water pipe' to short-wave radios, loops, feedback, samplers, synthesizers and even normal instruments such as guitar, clarinet and trumpet. Dimuzio's eclecticism bespeaks a career equally informed by a profound dedication to his craft and collaborations with friends, artists and technologists alike.

“Attending a Thomas Dimuzio performance is like lying underneath a web of freeway bridges with your eyes closed; blocking out all visuals except the brief daggers of light that flicker with each passing car. There is a sense of probable dread—metal, wooden or cigarette debris from the vehicles could fly off and injure you—but also one of hypnotized calm, thanks to the amplified hum of Michelin and Goodyear against greased concrete.” —Cameron MacDonald, Pitchfork Media
Dimuzio's recordings have been released internationally by ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, No Fun Productions, Sonoris, Drone Records, Record Label Records, Odd Size, Seeland, and other independent labels. Among his collaborators are Chris Cutler, Dan Burke, Joseph Hammer, Anla Courtis, Nick Didkovsky, Due Process, Voice of Eye, Fred Frith, David Lee Myers, 5uu's, ISIS, Matmos, Wobbly and Negativland.


Kit Young

  
Kit is an artist who produces video embedded sculpture, video art, and performance art. His studio is in a store front space on San Pablo Ave. in Oakland, CA.
In recent years he has been building video art systems that are flexible enough to be played in an improvisational way. He performs collaboratively with other sound and visual artists at venues that host expanded cinema events. He also conducts live experimental sessions in his studio, the results of which become video shorts. Though his work utilizes new media technique, his practice is grounded in the experimental cinema thematic traditions of perception, awareness, and humor.
He has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. Recent screenings or performances have taken place at the Montreal Underground Film Festival, (Canada); Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image, (Johnson City N.Y.); The Berkeley Video and Film Festival, (Berkeley, CA.); the Experimental Film Festival, (Middlesbrough, England); and Crossroads Film Festival, (San Francisco, CA.).


Lori Varga



Lori Varga is a veteran Bay Area analog film & Light projection Artist. Utilizing forgotten / near obsolete technology into optically challenging psychedelic light shows & multi-projector visual displays- as her main form of expression. Lori has been hand-making 16mm multi projector film collages & audio collages since 1994. Delving deep into the world of culture jamming and experimental media work from an early age, she has made visual art as her mantra for the last 28 years.

Alongside various tech work for experimental light shows , Lori has made over 15 short experimental /collage essay films in super 8mm & 16mm format. From 1999 till 2010, she projected analog/background films & hand- painted film loops for well-known touring psychedelic rock/avant-garde bands throughout Texas and US Mid-West. Her performance work has been shown often in venues & theaters such as The Cinematex as Film Festival, Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Shapeshifter’s Cinema, Blanton History Museum, Berkeley’s BAMPFA museum Analog Light Show Festival, The Lab (SF) , Filmhuis Cavia Film Fest Amsterdam ,New Orleans Media festival 2003 & small Micro cinemas all over the world. Usually she works solo, with a large, expansive table of analog projection units (slide projectors/ timers/16mm film projectors/ Analyst units/ modified stage gear)- currently she is branching out to incorporate digital projection units & camera systems into her live setups. Alongside working with experimental and found film footage/ educational imagery she also creates music using vintage cassette recorders, offbeat & satire – like samples, various , awkward ,circuit -bent sound instruments and 1950’s reel to reel tape decks. Recent Past Collaborations have been with well -known Bay Area film and sound artists: Kit Young, Thomas Dimuzio, Tom Djll, Richard Reed, Sarah Brady, & John Davis.

Lori has produced huge film installations and radically challenging display systems for music acts such as The Butthole Surfers, St37, Book of Shadows, Legendary Pink Dots & Austin's Noise x No Wave Music Fest. Also previously played Moog THEREMIN for the Austin Theremonic Orchestra project.

Overall, this unstoppable woman is an extreme multimedia collaborator & curator.  She savors live, immersive work with Improvisational and Experimental Electronic musicians.


Aurora Josephson


Aurora Josephson is a musician and visual artist who currently resides in Oakland, California. Building on the foundation of operatic training and a BA and an MFA in Music Performance from Mills College, she has forged a bold vocal style that is uniquely her own. To unleash the limitless range of sonic possibilities in the voice, Josephson employs a variety of extended and unconventional techniques drawn from the worlds of contemporary composition, improvisation, and rock. Current projects include Headlights with Derek Gedalecia(Headboggle) on electronics & keyboards, and Tainted Pussy with Sharkiface on electronics and Katerina Kopelevich on keyboards. She has performed and recorded with Alvin Curran, Gianni Gebbia, Henry Kaiser, Joelle Leandre and William Winant, and musical groups Big City Orchestrae, Flying Luttenbachers, The Molecules, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, T.D. Skatchitband and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.


Derek Gedalchia


Derek Gedalecia, a.k.a. Headboggle, has been performing electronic keyboard-based soundscapes for several years in the Bay Area in over a hundred local performances at venues ranging from GTK to YBCA. Incorporating lowbrow with highbrow art, music, and comedy, Head Boggle’s intent is to fuse together a new ecstatic improvisational performance style with a carefully crafted musical underbed. In his formative years, Gedalecia studied classical and ragtime piano from noted ragtime composer/revivalist Dr. Brian Dykstra.

Chandra Shukla will be replacing Derek. Welcome Chandra!
















PSYCHIC BANDWIDTH San Francisco




PSYCHIC BANDWIDTH San Francisco

WHO
Cilla Vee Life Arts – with Cilla Vee, Gino Robair, Cheryl Leonard, Amy Reed, Rent Romus, Ivy Johnson, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Eric Kupers and the CSU East Bay Inclusive Interdisciplinary Enemble (plus others TBA)

WHAT
Psychic Bandwidth – chance operations of cross-disciplinary performance modes

WHEN
Thursday October 11th – 8pm  -10pm

WHERE
Luggage Store Gallery – 1007 Market St. San Francisco, CA

HOW MUCH
Sliding scale $6 - $15


Outsound Presents at LSG Creative Music Series

Cilla Vee Life Arts presents:
PSYCHIC BANDWIDTH

Definition:
Data transfer capacity of the mind.

Performance:
Psychic Bandwidth – chance operations of cross-disciplinary performance modes.
Improvized collaborations of Sound with Movement, Spoken Word and other Performance Arts test the Psychic Bandwidth of artists and audience alike.
Duos, Trios, Quartets and All.
Picked randomly on the spot.
Unpredictable.
Each artist could do anything at any moment.
Do we have the Psychic Bandwidth to absorb it all?
To see everything. To hear everything.
To catch and process each interaction.
Casting our psychic net wide and reeling it all in to our consciousness.

Asheville NC’s Cilla Vee Life Arts commissions some of the Bay Area’s finest improvisers to throw down in this mix!

  

Cilla Vee Life Arts



CILLA VEE LIFE ARTS is an inter-disciplinary arts organization founded in 2002 in the South Bronx by Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) – now based in Asheville NC.
It serves as an umbrella for multiple projects that focus on collaboration and facilitation. With a mission of blurring boundaries and crossing categories, CVLA draws from a diverse pool of artists with a wide range of artistic backgrounds.
Performances can include anything from dance, movement, music, sound, text, film and video, visual and performance art to installation and beyond.

“When it's summer in the city, people do weird things. Performers especially. ....“Beguiling”
John Rockwell – New York Times

Cilla Vee Life Arts - http://www.cillavee.com/


This Fall Cilla Vee is touring cross-country and the west coast in order to connect and collaborate with area artists in each location.


ARTIST INFORMATION



Rent Romus - http://www.romus.net/
Ivy Johnson - https://ivyjohnsonblog.wordpress.com/ 
Tongo Eisen-Martin - http://www.blackfirepress.com/ 
Eric Kupers - http://www.dandeliondancetheater.org/ 
Inclusive Interdisciplinary Ensemble - https://www.facebook.com/CSUEBIIE/



Cilla Vee 

Photo: Matt Jamie
Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of Cilla Vee Life Arts – an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration. Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art.
Claire has presented her work in venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow, the New York
Botanical Gardens, Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and Art Basel Miami. She has performed and taught throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Pakistan.
Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts. Her pre-professional training includes the Royal Academy of Dance and the Royal Schools of Music examinations. She also served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation in New York and holds an MFA in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute with Plymouth University, UK.
On moving to the USA in 1992, Claire held the positions of Dancer for Unto These Hills drama on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and for Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater in North Carolina, as well as serving as a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance and as Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company in Tennessee.
Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded Cilla Vee Life Arts and, with the support of arts advocates such as Chashama, Bronx Council on the Arts and Arts for Art, began to develop and present her signature modes of work – including Motion Sculpture Movement Installations and The Sound Of Movement projects.

She is the creator of the Living Art pedagogy for performance art.

Claire now uses Asheville NC as her home-base.


Gino Robair


Gino Robair has created music for dance, theater, radio, television, silent film, and gamelan orchestra, and his works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. He was composer in residence with the California Shakespeare Festival for five seasons and served as music director for the CBS animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. His commercial work includes themes for the MTV and Comedy Central cable networks.
Robair is also one of the "25 innovative percussionists" included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001). He has recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Eugene Chadbourne, among many others. In addition, Robair has performed with John Zorn, Nina Hagen, Fred Frith, Eddie Prevost, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Myra Melford, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Club Foot Orchestra.
Robair is a founding member of the Splatter Trio and the heavy-metal band, Pink Mountain. In addition, he runs Rastascan Records, a label devoted to creative music.
As a writer about music technology, Robair has contributed to Mix, Remix, Guitar Player, and Electronic Musician (EM) magazine, where he was an editor for 10 years. He is the author of two books, including The Ultimate Personal Recording Studio (Thompson; 2006).


Cheryl Leonard


 
Cheryl E. Leonard is a composer, performer, and instrument builder whose works investigate sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her projects cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments, and often feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments and field recordings from remote locales. She uses microphones to explore the subtle intricacies of sounds and develops compositions that highlight these unique voices. Intrigued by cross-disciplinary collaboration, Leonard has produced installations and multimedia works with visual artists and scientists; composed for film, video, dance, and theater; and designed sounds for museums. Her music has been performed worldwide and is available on multiple record labels. Her awards include residencies at Kunstnarhuset Messen, Djerassi, the Arctic Circle, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, and Villa Montalvo, and grants from the National Science Foundations’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, and ASCAP.
 


Amy Reed


 


Amy Melissa Reed is a visual artist and improviser creating new sonic language for guitar, exploring the spontaneous possibilities of song, and researching the composer’s relationship to dreaming, storytelling, and listening. They create visual and sonic work that remembers the relationship and healing forces of land and our body’s relationship with the earth. They compose for solo and ensemble.
They curate Ma Series and focus their time and energies to build an international community of composers and improvisers who support each other and the research, practice, and performance of experimental, healing, and adventurous sonic work.
 

Rent Romus


Rent Romus is a saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader, music producer, and community leader hailed by Downbeat as having "...a bold sound, unmistakable sincerity and conviction". A third generation Finnish American born in the great north of upper Michigan and growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Romus' work on the saxophone has been dubbed “ferocious” by the San Francisco Weekly and “central to the creative music world of the West Coast” by writer jazz critic Frank Rubolino. From his very beginnings as a student of jazz while being exposed to the twilight tutelage of Stan Getz he found himself drawn to the outer realms of Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, as well as Arthur Blythe, Derek Bailey and Merzbow. He leads the Lords of Outland a free improvisation unit since 1994, the Life’s Blood Ensemble a compostional contemporary ensemble, and works with pianist Thollem McDonas in the Bloom Project as well as the collective improvisation group The Ruminations.
He has recorded over 40 albums exploring improvisation and composition in a wide variety of musical settings both as a leader and sideman which have included Chico Freeman, John Tchicai, Vinny Golia, Teppo Hauta-aho, Thollem McDonas, Stefan Pasborg, James Zitro, Heikki Koskinen, Marcos Fernandez, and Ernesto Diaz-Infante to name a few. He is the founder of Edgetone Records with over 30 years of independent music production, and performance experience as well as the founder and Executive Director of Outsound Presents under which curates the bi-weekly music series known as SIMM at the Musicians Union Hall, the weekly Luggage Store Gallery Creative Music Series, as well as annual Outsound New Music Summit, the Bay Area's creative music festival held every summer in San Francisco.
 

Ivy Johnson


Ivy Johnson is a poet and performance artist in Oakland, CA.
Her book, As They Fall, is a collection of 110 notecards for aleatoric ritual and was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2013.
She is co-founder of The Third Thing, an ecstatic feminist performance art duo. Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs published their self-titled chapbook, The Third Thing, in 2016.  Her book Born Again just came out with The Operating System.


Tongo Eisen-Martin


Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.



Eric Kupers

Photo: Hans Holtan
Eric Kupers has co-directed, choreographed, and performed with Dandelion Dancetheater since its inception. Eric is a Professor of Dance at Cal State University East Bay. He is the director of Bandelion (his core research collaboration within Dandelion Dancetheater founded in 2006,) as well as the CSUEB Inclusive Interdisciplinary Ensemble (founded in 2006,) which brings together students, alumni, community members and professional performers with and without disabilities and from diverse cultures to create original performance works. Eric has been a resident artist at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, CELLspace, Jon Sims Center for the Arts, and ODC Theater.


IIE

photo: Ben Ailes
The CSU East Bay Inclusive Interdisciplinary Ensemble (IIE) is directed by Professor Eric Kupers and is part of the CSU East Bay Theatre and Dance Department.
Made up of students, alumni, faculty, staff, community members and professional artists with and without disabilities, the IIE creates original, inclusive performance works and performs throughout the Bay Area and on tour every year. 
 






Sacred Dance Guild - Sacred Sundays - Presentation by Claire Elizabeth Barratt

  Cilla Vee - final performance - VIGIL: Prayers of Healing for the Living and the Dead. Photo: Fred Hatt Claire Elizabeth...