Corresponding with this month’s Audio March series, this evening’s selection will feature short films by noted minimalist and experimental composers/filmmakers, including:

Robert Nelson’s “Plastic Haircut”
Harry Smith’s “Film No. 3: Interwoven”
Tony Conrad’s “Straight and Narrow”
Storm de Hirsch’s “Peyote Queen”
Jud Yalkut’s “Electronic Fables”
Robert Breer’s “A Man and His Dog Out for Air”

Improv followed by open mic comedy hour. Put your name in a hat and get a chance to crack jokes on stage.

THE LAND OF PLENTY
WHICH GIVES A RICH TASTE+GRAINY TEXTURE YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY WILL LOVE FOR TOAST

A performance with video + real human beings + living sound

Created + performed by Jennifer Allen, Chris Peck, Deke Weaver

There is a Wallace Stegner quote on a plaque in Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument:

“A place is nothing in itself. It has no meaning, it can hardly be said to exist, except in terms of human perception, use and response.”

Manifest Destiny and the American Dream mold the nation – how we imagine ourselves, how we imagine the land. But surely there are places that exist outside “human perception, use and response,” places that have a spiritual existence beyond our presence. Underneath the national myths lie older Judeo-Christian myths, which rest on even older stories, older stories where the land clearly shaped human culture. While clear-cuts and tract-homes are obvious examples of how we shape and imagine the land, how does the land shape us?

Like blind monks describing an elephant with laptops and panflutes, Allen, Peck and Weaver perform live in a multi-projection video environment. With sing-alongs, dancing sandhill cranes, cowboy songs, Led Zeppelin guitar solos, evil bunny prayers, the (fictional) collaboration between John Cage and Karl Marx, a re-enactment of A Discussion of Form juxtaposed with the “sacred geometry” of crop circles, a meditation on the Great Plains, the natural world, and myth, The Land of Plenty hops back and forth over the fuzzy gray line that defines kooks and saints, sentimental mumbo jumbo and deeply felt ritual, New Age cheese and the breathtaking, the haunting, the disturbingly beautiful.

Originally staged as a work-in-progress for Roulette’s 2008 Mixology Festival (NY), Allen joins Peck and Weaver for the Spring 2010 tour of The Land of Plenty. The piece can be adapted to many venues. A six minute video document from the 75 minute work-in-progress is available here.

JENNIFER ALLEN is a choreographer/performer recently transplanted to Champaign, IL. She has created several original evening-length works, her most recent, Open, was performed at The Kitchen (NYC) in April 2007. Her work has been shown at numerous locations in NYC including Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church and The Brooklyn Museum and in Chicago at Links Hall and Millenium Park. Allen was a 2005 MacDowell Colony Fellow and has received support from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Oregon Regional Arts and Culture Council, Movement Research Artists in Residence and a residency through PICA. As a performer she has worked with such influential artists as Yvonne Meier, John Jasperse, Donna Uchizono, DD Dorvillier and Jennifer Monson among others.

CHRIS PECK is a Michigan-born composer investigating the peculiarities of listening and perception through a diverse practice that includes works for large untrained groups, interdisciplinary performance collaborations, and improvisation with the computer. His frequent work with dance has included scores for RoseAnne Spradlin, Eleanor Bauer, Jasperse, David Dorfman, Jeanine Durning, Ming Yang/Dance Forum Taipei, Abby Yager, and others. Ongoing projects include Listening Music for the Age of Crystal Moon Cone, a series of ambient electroacoustic performances and recordings with Stephen Rush and Jon Moniaci, Brooklyn Adult Recorder Choir, directed with choreographer Beth Gill, the Live Sh– performance series curated with Chase Granoff, Manpack Variant, an electronics duo with Jaime Fennelly, and collaborations with interdisciplinary video/performance artist and storyteller Deke Weaver. Chris is currently working on an MA at the Dartmouth College Digital Musics Program in Hanover, NH.

DEKE WEAVER is a writer, performer, video and graphic artist. Experimental theater, film/video, dance, and solo performance venues have presented Weaver’s interdisciplinary performances and videos in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, Russia, and the U.S. A resident at Yaddo and Ucross, a four-time fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and a 2009 Creative Capital grantee, his work, described as “explosive” (San Francisco Weekly) and “brilliant” (The Village Voice) has “handcuffed a secure storytelling knack to a performance style that pushes the energy envelope toward hyperventilating madness” (Sidewalk.com). He also contributes film/video to dance and theater works in the U.S. and abroad. From 1999-2005 he was the Senior Animator for the Showtime Networks’ Broadcast Design Group. He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Every musical performance is accompanied by an unacknowledged, and yet not-so-silent partner. The built environment reflects, refracts, and reshapes sound, and performer and audience act and listen under the influence of its formal language.

The latest instantiation of a performances series commissioned in 2009 by New York’s MATA Foundation, Architectures of Sound assembles an evening of interventions into the uncanny convergence of sound and built space. It presents new works that take the built environment as a compositional tool, and draw upon its materiality, its geometric form, its historical specters and vanishing present.

Architectures of Sound features new works by Casey Thomas Anderson, G. Douglas Barrett, Cameron Hu, David Kant, Avery Lawrence, Michael Winter, and others.

Chirp! is an experiment in effecting seasonal disorder. We will raise
the temperature inside the Bridge’s main gallery space so that we can
wear T-shirts. We will even try to add a little humidity. We will have
music performances, art, and sound installation invoke memories of
(and anticipation for) deep summer. We will have lawn chairs. Chirp!
is not a serious evening, but a reason to have fun, wear short
sleeves, and get a little bit of summer in the air after this very
snowy winter.

A listening session featuring audio stories from and about Virginia.

We’ll explore Virginia’s human and natural landscape with a variety of audio formats: NPR style features, audio art and composition, recorded spoken word, and any other format we find. The audience is invited to participate in discussion and many of the producers/composers will be in attendance.

This show will feature many portraits painted by Charlottesville’s own Eliza Evans and lots of paintings of trees and other woods-related subjects by her friend Allie. Allie’s work also incorporates painting and sewing and some installation aspects.

The show will represent a number of faces of the Charlottesville crowd. In the words of Evans, “We are aiming to be prolific and really fill up the space with beauty and humor.”

Spend Saturday night with Big Shed!

Come on down to The Bridge PAI in Charlottesville, VA for an evening of sounds and stories from around the country … and most importantly, from you.

Shea Shackelford, Jennifer Deer and Jesse Dukes will take you into the world of their latest project—Place + Memory. We want to remember the places that were important to you but now only exist in your own recollection.

If you could go back, where would you go?

Big Shed wants to know.

Transform/Immerse, an evening of multi-channel, nature inspired sound compositions by Matthew Burtner, Kim Cascone, Ted Coffey, David Dunn, Erik DeLuca, and Francisco López. The concert will feature works that transform a space into an immersive sonic magnifier.

A fun sound experiment for audio artists and producers in the spirit of the surrealist games. We give you 10 sounds and you have 30 minutes to mash those into a one-minute piece. Manipulate them any way you like. The rules are this: 1) All 10 sounds must be used. 2) The final product must be 1 minute long. Erik DeLuca and Jesse Dukes supervise. Following the workshop, we’ll hold a concert to listen to our creations which we hope to install in the gallery. Note: You must have your own means of audio editing (a DAW) to participate. If you want to participate but don’t have a workstation, please contact Jesse at jpdukes@zworg.com or Erik at erikdeluca@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to find you a loaner.