PROGRAM: FROM BEING WHERE YOU WERE
CLAIRE CHASE / WINSOME BROWN
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 3, 12PM
Duration: 1hr 45min (including intermission)
PROGRAM
Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase (2015)
By Pauline Oliveros
With text by Grace Chase
Performed by Claire Chase (text, percussion, contrabass flute)
and Levy Lorenzo (Expanded Instrument System)
Lighting by Nicholas Houfek
Technical Direction by Connor Martin
Directed by Winsome Brown
Runtime: 25 mins
~INTERMISSION~
This is Mary Brown (2015)
Written and performed by Winsome Brown
Lighting by Nicholas Houfek
Technical Direction by Connor Martin
Directed by Brad Rouse
Runtime: 60 minutes
After the show, join the artists for a post-performance talkback!
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase
In 2015, I asked Pauline if she would write a piece for the third installation of the Density 2036 project. I had recently acquired a new contrabass flute, and Pauline was enthusiastic about writing for—and with—this mammoth dance partner, which she affectionately named “Big Bertha.” Early in the workshop process, Pauline decided that the piece needed to be a kind of duo with the Expanded Instrument System (EIS), a computer-controlled sound interface that she began designing in 1963 and continued to evolve throughout her life. She described playing with the EIS as “akin to improvising with an extraterrestrial”—or making music with a being that is so advanced that it can remember, respond, and imaginatively embellish any given material with the kind of telepathy and emotional intelligence that we all aspire to as musicians. She also decided that Bertha should only make an appearance at the end of the piece, and that the core of the work should privilege text as music.
As she was searching for a text, Pauline asked me what I was reading. I rattled off a few items that were on my nightstand at the time, none of which seemed particularly interesting to her. She kept asking me, as if I might be hiding something from her, “What else are you reading?” Pauline was a grandmother figure to me, and grandmothers tend to know when you’re hiding something from them. As it turns out, I was shy to tell her that the book I was reading most devotedly at the time was a collection of my own grandmother Grace’s writings. Pauline’s eyes lit up, and she said, “Tell me about Grace.”
Like so many women in her generation, Grace was never taken seriously as an artist, even though she had an astonishingly rigorous artistic practice: she wrote every day of her life. Grace also suffered from mental illness; she’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia in her 20’s, and like so many Americans, was shunned and shamed by the medical establishment and by the community around her. Grace attempted to manage her illness through her writing. Her texts are by turns poetic and satirical, slapstick and dramatic, full of chaos and rage and joy and moments of searing clarity. She was both enchanted and tormented by the voices in her head, and she wrote about each of them in their full and unapologetic humanity.
Pauline fell in love with Grace’s words, and with the magical interplay of Grace’s lines with the EIS. The piece poured out from there. My hope is that our performance, in this marvelous new staging by my beloved friend and colleague Winsome Brown, will honor both women—my adopted grandmother and my real one—in all their brilliance, resilience, marvelous complexity, and grace. Thank you for listening.
– Claire Chase
This is Mary Brown
Mary Brown (née Montgomery) was born in Dublin, Ireland on December 20, 1942. The second of 5 siblings, she was athletic, mischievous, and iconoclastic. Following a brief courtship and a marriage proposal over a long-distance telephone call, she moved to Toronto in 1967. Children adored her, and she was cherished in her community. When she died in 2012, the cashiers from the local grocery store came to her funeral. This is Mary Brown was included in La MaMa ETC’s 2015 season and toured to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the same year. It received rave reviews in both places. We are very excited to share this beloved work with you again, paired for the first time with another deep and intimate work: Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase. Mary Brown was linked after her death to Pauline Oliveros and Claire Chase: Pauline Oliveros’ Concerto for Bass Drum and Ensemble was a commission in honor of Mary Brown, facilitated by Chase. On Oliveros’ suggestion, texts from Mary Brown’s writings were used as movement headings in the concerto. One of these was:
Chores for children. Oh dear they can be so, so boring–
unless approached creatively. I do remember
asking the 3 of you for help with leaf raking–
probably done with a grudge, but the joy of jumping
into the bundle made up for it in the end.
– Winsome Brown
The artists would like to thank IONE and the Center for Deep Listening; Elias Assimakopoulos and Chatham High School; Laura Mullen for help with the Grace texts early in the process; Connor Martin, Oleg Balitskiy, Krispy Perroni, Kelly Mackerer, Claude Arpels, Philomena Arpels, Sharon Harms, and Kirstin Valdez Quade for their support.
SUPPORT PS21
Thank you for your ongoing support. Your contributions allow us to present adventurous programming and nurture original work from pioneering international and regional artists. Your generosity also supports our low-cost, community-focused initiatives, and helps preserve our beautiful 100-acre campus in the heart of the Hudson Valley. Please consider making a tax deductible donation to the 2023 Annual Fund or becoming a member at PS21chatham.org/support.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning projectDensity 2036. Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She served as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall for the 2022-23 season, where she curated and performed a year of concerts for audiences of all ages. Chase is currently Professor of the Practice at Harvard University and a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School. She lives in Brooklyn. www.clairechase.net
Chase’s Density 2036 is a 24-year project begun in 2013 to commission a new body of repertory for solo flute each year until the 100th anniversary of Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5. Chase will commission, premiere, and record a new program of flute music every year until 2036. Each piece in the project will expand the boundaries of the instrument. For the ten-year anniversary of Density 2036 in May 2023, Chase performed all commissions up to the present in a ten-concert series of events co-produced by Carnegie Hall and The Kitchen. Central to the Density 2036 project is a commitment to supporting an international, multigenerational community of flutists who will take the flute repertoire in new interpretive and performative directions.
The Density Fellows program, launched this year in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the project, will provide ten exceptional emerging flutists each season with the resources to intensively study, perform, and record Density repertoire under the mentorship of Chase and the Densitycomposers. Alex Ross of The New Yorker recently described the project as “a quarter-century journey that has little precedent,” and The New York Times described it as “one of the great musical undertakings of our time, a singular project by a singular artist on the messily ambitious scale of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and Stockhausen’s ‘Licht.’” Read more at www.density2036.org.
Winsome Brown is a writer, director, and Obie-award winning actor. She was a visiting artist at the Performing Garage and participated in long-term theater projects with directors André Gregory and Irina Brook. Winsome frequently collaborates with musicians; her film “The Violinist” (2012), is a 16mm experimental narrative with music by Dave Soldier. As an actress, Winsome is known for portraying strong and charismatic women and being both funny and heartbreaking. Stage: King John, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare on the Sound); Grey House (Broadway, Lyceum); Burial at Thebes (Irish Rep); Hillary Clinton in Du Yun’s opera Women: The War Within; André Gregory and Wallace Shawn’s Master Builder; Heather Woodbury’s Obie-winning Tale of 2Cities. Film/TV: News of the World, Dopesick, Blacklist, The Crowded Room, Supergirl, Resurrection, Elementary, A Master Builder (dir. Jonathan Demme); Buffy. Winsome narrates regularly for Apple News+. www.winsomebrown.com.
Winsome dedicates these performances with love to Durre Nabi.
Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. His body of work spans custom electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, interactive installation, free improvisation, and classical percussion. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. Lorenzo’s work has been featured at MoMA PS1, MIT Media Lab, STEIM, Pitchfork, BBC, Rewire, The Hermitage, Burning Man, and The New York Times which named him an “electronics wizard”. He has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, George Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Leo Villareal, Autumn Knight, Christine Sun Kim, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Steve Schick, and Henry Threadgill. Dr. Lorenzo is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab. In 2022, he made his debut as a featured electronic concerto soloist with the New York Philharmonic.
Brad Rouse collaborated with Obie-winner Winsome Brown on This is Mary Brown (La MaMa) and Hit the Body Alarm (The Performing Garage). Brad directed the world premiere of Billy Porter’s Ghetto Superstar (Public Theater) in addition to plays and musicals at City Center (NYC), Ahmanson Theatre (LA), Hartford Stage, and Juilliard. Brad’s stage work has been featured on CBS (60 Minutes II) and NPR (All Things Considered). In 2018, the Off-Broadway Alliance nominated his production of Goldstein for Best New Musical. For ten years, Brad assisted Broadway legend Harold Prince on new work by Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Carol Burnett, Alfred Uhry, Jason Robert Brown, and Jim Steinman. Today, Brad helps federal defendants prepare for sentencing through WhiteCollarAdvice.com. The New York Times Magazine and The Daily podcast featured his justice work in 2022. Please visit bradrouse.com.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is a NYC-based Lighting Designer. Frequent and recent collaborators include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyáwith the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Nathalie Joachim, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, Marc Neikrug’sA Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynthand other applications of live lighting for performance. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) “Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I finally know what harmony is… It’s about the pleasure of making music.” – John Cage. Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer, and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary-dissolving music making. In the 1950’s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered in San Francisco. In the 1960’s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and ritual. She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement (Columbia University), The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music (ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany) and The John Cage award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded Deep Listening which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation, and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts, as well as musical sounds. “Deep Listening is my life practice,” Oliveros explained simply. Oliveros founded the Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer. Her creative work is currently disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc.
ABOUT PS21
A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times): adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists in music, dance, and theater, and visionaries creating entirely new genres. On our open-air Pavilion Theater stage, across our expansive, unspoiled grounds, and in the diverse surrounding communities, PS21 cultivates and presents productions that transcend aesthetic boundaries and revitalize existing artistic languages and grammars. Throughout the year, we host developmental residencies for dancers, musicians, actors, and creators of original, unclassifiable new work. Rooted in community collaboration, PS21’s programming engages creatively with critical global and social issues. It is a mecca for innovative and original artistic voices, a destination for performance that can be experienced nowhere else in the region.
PS21’s Pavilion Theater is a green-energy marvel surrounded by 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands that are a haven to wildlife and visitors across the region. Integrated into our unspoiled campus, the theater embodies our commitments to the public: open, inviting, and optimized for their enjoyment and encouraging citizen expression and participation.
READ MORE ABOUT PS21
CREDITS
PS21 concerts are supported in part by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music and The Alice M. Ditson Fund.
PS21’s programs are made possible in part with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, FACE Contemporary Theater and FUSED (French U.S. Exchange in Dance), programs of FACE Foundation in partnership with Villa Albertine, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music and The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Ackerman Foundation, MidAtlantic Arts Foundation, Veillette Nifosi Foundation, Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Hudson River Bank & Trust Foundation, Evelyn Bordewick Foundation, JM Kaplan Fund, Robert Craft/Igor Stravinsky Foundation, Eutopia Foundation, and Prospect Hill Foundation, as well as our valued donors through memberships, Producers Circle, commissioning, and annual Gala. The performances of L’Étang by Gisèle Vienne are part of Albertine Dance Season and received support from Villa Albertine.
|
