an Culture Project presents RITUAL OF THE BODY ELECTRIC
A Multimedia Music and Dance Work Friday, September 5, 8 & 9:30pm at la Esquina
Composer William J. Lackey, choreographer Jennifer Owen and visual artist Nate Fors present the world premiere of Ritual of the Body Electric, a multimedia music and dance work on September 5, 2008. 18 musicians and 5 dancers will perform the 30-minute work that is loosely based on a section of Walt Whitman's “I Sing the Body Electric.”
Two performances will take place on September 5, 2008 at La Esquina (1000 W. 25th St.), at 8:00pm and 9:30 pm. In addition, the artists will lead an informal discussion between performances, from 8:45 - 9:15, about the collaborative process behind the work.
The production features five dancers: Chloe Abel, Jesse Cooper, Matthew Powell, Rebka Sakati, and Jennifer Tierney; and 18 musicians: Dr. Rebecca Sherburn, soprano; Jonathan Borja, flute; Mary Ann Lucas, oboe ; Cheryl Melfi, clarinet; James Keel Williams, bassoon ; Liz Dunning, horn; Chris Larios, trumpet; John J. Jenkins, trombone; Marja M. Kerney, percussion; Mark E. Lowry, percussion; Christopher Levin, piano; Kara Land, harp; Marvin Gruenbaum, violin; Christian A. Fatu, violin; Tim Eshing, viola; Mark Stauffer, cello; Kristin Shafel, bass. The conductor is Christopher Kelts. Mica Thomas is the lighting designer and Christopher Biggs is the technical coordinator.
Tickets are $10 at the door. Fifty percent of all proceeds will be donated to Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics Cancer Program. This work is dedicated to the memory of Kathryn Ann McCallum Lackey.
About the creators/collaborators: William J. Lackey, composer: The music of William J. Lackey has been featured at the Festival of New American Music, the Society of Composers, Inc. National Student Conference, Music for the XXI Century Festival, Quixotic Performance Fusion and California’s Festival of the Arts. The New York Art Ensemble, the California E.A.R. Unit, newEar, Linda Hirst- mezzo-soprano, Alan Hacker-clarinetist and Keith Michael Bohm-saxophonist have performed his music.
In summer of 2008 Lackey was selected as a resident artist for Troika Ranch’s Live–I Workshop where he studied with Dawn Stoppiello and Mark Coniglio at the 3LD Art and Technology Center New York, NY. Lackey was the winner of the 1998 New York Art Ensemble Young Composers Competition. He has received scholarships and fellowships to attend the Bowdoin International Summer Music Festival, Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East (Bennington, VT) and Dartington International Summer School 2002-Advanced Composition Seminar (Devon, England). Lackey is a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate in music composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City's Conservatory of Music and Dance where he also received a Master of Music in composition.
Jennifer Owen, choreographer: Jennifer Owen's ballet career has taken her around the globe. After training with Pacific Northwest Ballet School, San Francisco Ballet School, School of American Ballet, and the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, she went on to dance with the Russian State Ballet, Moscow Renaissance Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, BalletMet, and had the unique experience of appearing as a guest artist with the National Ballet of Turkmenistan. Notable roles Jennifer has danced include the title role in “Giselle,” Kitri in “Don Quixote,” principal roles in George Balanchine's “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” and “Donizetti Variations”, and the central pas de deux in Todd Bolender's “Arena.” Jennifer is currently artistic director, dancer, and choreographer for the Owen/Cox Dance Group, an ensemble she founded with composer Brad Cox in 2006. She has choreographed numerous works for the Owen/Cox Dance Group, as well as nine works for Kansas City Ballet's “In the Wings” choreographic workshop, a piece for Quixotic Performance Fusion, and a winning entry for the 2006 Columbus Choreography Project. Jennifer is the recipient of a 2000 Princess Grace Honorarium.
Nate Fors, visual artist: While primarily a painter, Nate Fors has entertained a great variety of media from drawing and painting to public sculpture, installation, digital prints and video. Reinvention and materials are critical to his methods. Most recently, in May 2008, he collaborated with the Owen/Cox Dance Group on costume and set design for the Bottom of the Big Top, a ballet inspired by early 20th century circus music.
Fors is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Charlotte Street Fund Award, an Avenue of the Arts Foundation Award and a Missouri Visual Artists Biennial Fellowship. He has shown extensively in the Kansas City area as well as in Los Angeles and New York. His solo exhibition venues include the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and his paintings are in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kemper Museum of Art and the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas as well as numerous corporate and private collections. Art in America, in their Annual 2001-2002 Guide, cited his Avenue of the Arts installation, toss, as one of the 23 best public art installations in the United States during the year 2000. In May 2004 Fors completed and installed lllooppi, a permanent outdoor sculpture commissioned by the city of Leawood, Kansas.
Urban Culture Project Presents CARTUNE XPREZ: 2008 AMRCAN FALL TOUR
A roadshow of animated videos and multimedia performances Sunday, September 7, 8pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street KCMO
Urban Culture Project is excited to host Hoolignship’s Cartune Xprez, a one-night multimedia extravaganza on Sunday, September 7, 8pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, Kansas City, Missouri. This event is free and open to the public.
From September to November of 2008, the multimedia dance duo Hooliganship (Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris) will be touring the country presenting the freshest incarnation of “Cartune Xprez”, a 70-minute program of short animated videos that celebrates the wilderness of imagination through motion pictures. Featured artists include Bruce Bickford, Eric Dyer, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, Paper Rad and more. Alongside this cartoon theater they will be performing their most recent piece entitled “Realer” in which audiences strap on a pair of 3D glasses to bear witness to a televised parade gone awry.
The touring program, which roughly mirrors an upcoming Cartune Xprez DVD publication, will provide a rare opportunity to see videos by emerging artists as well as internationally known artists. Collectively, their resume includes collaborations with Frank Zappa and major exhibitions at the Whitney Biennial, the MOMA in New York, the Sundance Film Festival, and many other institutions throughout the world.
Screening Highlights:
Bruce Bickford - Inversion Layer (excerpt) - Bruce Bickford, born in 1947, lives and works near Seattle, Washington. Considered by some critics to be the world's greatest animator, he first garnered recognition for his collaborations with Frank Zappa in the 1970s. ‘Inversion Layer’ is a fast-moving pencil line-animation in which Bickford relentlessly transforms human figures and faces into peculiar beasts, burgers, and other oddities.
Shana Moulton: The Mountain Where Everything is Upside Down - Shana Moulton, born in 1976 lives and works in New York City. She creates evocative videos and performances that combine new age humor with a low-tech elegance. Her use of subtle video effects and simple animated objects charges the seemingly banal domestic rituals in her videos with supernatural qualities. In ‘The Mountain Where Everything is Upside Down’ Moulton stars as Cynthia, an anxiety-ridden hypochondriac who explores a collection of nick-knacks in a surreal workout room.
Takeshi Murata: EscapeSpiritVideoSlime - Takeshi Murata, born in 1974, lives and works in New York. Primarily an abstract animator, Murata has gained recent notoriety through his innovative psychedelic videos. In ‘EscapeSpiritVideoSlime’ he digitally deconstructs and rebuilds a peculiar jungle landscape.
Performance Highlight:,
Hooliganship – Realer - Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris, both born in 1980, live and work in Portland, Oregon. They formed Hooliganship in 2002 creating performances, videos, music, and installations that revel in a hypnotic abundance of digital information. In REALER live music, cartoons, and video game worlds cross paths in a surreal adventure through 3 dimensions. 3D glasses are included.
Past Cartune Xprez shows have been presented at venues including: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA; MonkeyTown, Brooklyn, NY; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles, CA; Blim, Vancouver, Canada; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; Space Gallery, Portland, ME; Maine College of Art, Portland, ME; Drake Hotel, Toronto, ON; Skylab, Columbus, OH; Portland Art Center, Portland, OR; Green Lantern Gallery, Chicago, IL, and numerous other venues.
SPOONBENDER ORCHESTRA Directed by Jeffrey Rukaman
October performance series at la Esquina premieres experimental, site-specific new works by Kansas City based composer Jeffrey Rukaman
+ Gamelan Genta Kasturi Traditional and contemporary Balinese music and dance performance plus kid-friendly workshop
Spoonbender Orchestra: Live performances: October 3, 4, 9 & 10 – all at 7:30pm; $10 + Gamelan Genta Kasturi: Performance: October 18, 7:30; free Performance + workshop: October 19, 2pm; free
PLUS: Dead Set on Destruction: Jay Norton and Mark Hennessey Pelea de Gallos | 1000 West 25th Street, Suite C (a temporary, one-time space) Exhibition opening: October 3, 6 to midnight CD release + performance by 1950da: 9:30pm
Kansas City-based artist Jay Norton, a¸2004 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award recipient, teams up with Lawrence-based multidisciplinary artist Mark Hennessey to present an exhibition of works relating to the theme of death metal and counterculture. Norton’s new paintings and sculptural objects offer a follow-up/counterpoint to his 2007 solo exhibition at Paragraph gallery titled “The Kingdom of God is Within You.” Hennessey, a critically acclaimed poet ("Cue the Bedlam ((More Desperate with Longing than Want of Air))" and internationally-known musician (formerly of PAW), shows recent paintings, sculptures and assemblages. His new band, 1950da, performs live in conjunction with the release of their new CD. Temporary venue generously provided by C&G Construction.
