HOT! Festival and New Museum Presents: Armen Ra and Bora Yoon
Thursday, July 9, 7 p.m.
Location: New Museum Theater
Series: New Museum Presents
$12 Members, $15 General Public
HOT! Festival and New Museum Presents bring you an evening of music from the outer limits.
World-famous thereminist Armen Ra debuts METAL, a multimedia cycle of five arias selected from the repertoire of Maria Callas. Special guests narrate the content of the arias while the theremin voices the melodies, set against a backdrop of metallic black-and-white footage of Callas, projected in extreme slow motion so that every micro-expression in her face becomes apparent, simultaneously revealing a woman of great pride and profound vulnerability, creating a portrait that is both hauntingly mythological and painfully human.
Bora Yoon presents ( (( PHONATION )) ), an exploration of the point at which sound connects to the subliminal through the timbre languages of the voice, found sounds, new and antiquated instruments, and electronic devices. Using a sound designer’s approach to performance composition steered by a penchant for a song, ( (( PHONATION )) ) engages with music as music, and not as part of a genre. ( (( PHONATION )) ) takes the means to one end, and uses it for another to form new utterances and the beginnings of a new sonic language, within its spatial and architectural context. In every case, a particular sonic geography is evoked that might be inspired by a simple, found sound in the world, or an expression of a sonic paradox bouncing around only in the mind.
Armen Ra is an American artist and performer of Iranian-Armenian descent. Born in Tehran, he was raised by his mother, a concert pianist, and his aunt, a renowned opera singer and ikebana master. He taught himself to play the theremin, and is one of the best-known players of the instrument alive today. His music fuses Armenian folk music with modern instrumentation, along with melodic lounge standards and classical arias. He lives and plays in New York. Armen Ra has played at The United Nations, Wiener Konzerthaus Mozartsaal Vienna, CBGBs, Knitting Factory, La MaMa E.T.C., Joe's Pub, Boulder Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, The Gershwin Hotel, B.B. King Museum, and Dietch Projects.
Bora Yoon is an experimental multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer, featured in WIRE magazine and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for creating architectural soundscapes from everyday objects, chamber instruments, digital devices, and voice. She has toured her innovative sound work internationally with solo performances at Lincoln Center, Bang on a Can Marathon, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Nam June Paik Museum in Seoul, with releases on Swirl Records, SubRosa, and the Journal of Popular Noise. She has created unique concepts for live sound design, including one in a 55,000-square-foot abandoned WPA pool in Brooklyn for seven sopranos on bicycles. She has been commissioned by the Young People's Chorus of NYC and the SAYAKA Ladies' Consort of Tokyo to create surround-sound choral performance works: Semaphore Conductus (2008) and CPS/RPM (2009). Collaborators include Reykjavic sound artist Ben Frost, poet Sekou Sundiata, DJ Spooky, Kaki King, and the League of Electronic Musicians & Urban Robots.
Launched in 1991 as an initiative of Dixon Place, HOT! Festival (July 1-August 1) is a pioneering festival of queer performance and culture. In fact, it’s the longest running festival of its kind. 2009 sees a dynamic expansion of the festival with the new, state-of-the-art Dixon Place theater complex at the heart of five weeks of performance, literary events, and humanities programming. Dixon Place is located at 161A Christie St. (between Rivington and Delancey).
[link to www.dixonplace.org]
[link: HYPERLINK "http://www.borayoon.com" www.borayoon.com]
[link: HYPERLINK "http://www.myspace.com/armenra" http://www.myspace.com/armenra]
