Category: Press Releases

What: The 2017 edition of Mixology showcases Roulette’s powerful 12-channel soundsystem and features Olivia Block, Greg Fox, and Eli Keszler as highlights.
When: Wednesday, February 22, 2017 – Saturday, February 25, 8pm
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $25/20 Online $20/15 Doors
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: General Admission $20, Members/Students/Seniors $15, $25/20 Tickets at the door

Brooklyn, NY – Roulette’s powerful 12-channel soundsystem is the common denominator of this year’s Mixology Festival. Each evening groups artists with a roughly similar approach, each offering a unique perspective on sonic space. The theme in all cases is immersion; participation through active, physical engagement with the medium.

The festival is curated by Michael J. Schumacher, a composer, performer and installation artist based in Brooklyn. The founder and director of Diapason, a gallery devoted to sound art, Schumacher is the current music director of the Liz Gerring Dance Company.

He has received awards and residencies from NYFA, Harvestworks, EMPAC, DAAD, and others. He is an adjunct professor at NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering and a guest lecturer at Bard College and Columbia University. Schumacher’s Room Pieces, published by XI Records, is a 5-DVD set of sound installations as computer applications, playable on up to eight speakers, which may be installed on a computer to create sound environments in the home. The piece ran continuously for one year in the lobby of EMPAC.

Mario de Vega’s sound installation Target ZIP Code (Zone Improvement Plan), which features the exhibition space translated into a frequency value, will be on view each night throughout the festival. Exploring the physicality of listening and the threshold of human perception, Mario de Vega researches the materiality of sound, the vulnerability of systems, materials and individuals, and the potential of unstable systems.

Works and Installations by Olivia Block, Jason Lescalleet, Mario de Vega, Jim O’Rourke project
Wednesday, February 22

Five artists unleash lo-fi / hi-fi pleasures and resonant wonder, test the threshold of perception and unstable systems, and drive a 12-channel rig.

Sonic Youth producer Jim O’Rourke is composing a new piece to be played by festival curator Michael Schumacher. O’Rourke is an American musician and record producer who has collaborated with Loren Connors, Phill Niblock, Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, and Keiji Haino amongst others. O’Rourke played for the Merce Cunningham dance company for four years with music director Takehisa Kosugi. He is the 2001 recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Composer and media artist Olivia Block performs a live mix of an extended version of Dissolution B in 16 Channels, improvising the diffusion of sounds through different channels and speakers. Block creates studio-based sound compositions for concerts, site-specific multi-speaker installations, scores for chamber groups, and cinematic sound designs. Her compositions include field recordings, amplified objects, orchestral instruments, and electronic textures. Her current work reflects her interests in ethnographic sound and “found” recorded and text-based materials. Her recent installation, Sonambient Pavilion, which utilized the sounds from Harry Bertoia’s Sonambient sculptures, was featured on the cover of the Chicago Reader. Her electroacoustic studio piece, Dissolution, is now out on Glistening Examples.

Jason Lescalleet presents the world premiere of modern musique concrete for multichannel immersion. The performance will be a hybrid of tape music, field recordings, and electronic music. Since establishing himself as a preeminent voice in contemporary electro-acoustic study, Lescalleet has exploded the notion of what is possible within the realm of tape-based music. His recorded catalog acknowledges a diversity of application, from lo-fi reel-to-reel soundscaping and work for hand-held cassette machines, to digital sampling and computer generated composition. Lescalleet’s live actions further expand his oeuvre to include work with video, dance, performance art and multimedia concerns.

Cecilia Lopez presents eardrumcluster, an installation and composition for resonating steel drums made with multichannel sound, feedback and live performers. The piece explores the juxtaposition of two different resonant spaces: the ears and the steel drums. The sound material is constructed with recordings of otoacoustic emissions and sounds tuned to the resonance of the steel drums. Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician and installation artist from Buenos Aires. Her work explores the boundaries between composition and improvisation, as well as the resonance properties of diverse materials through the creation of non-conventional sound devices and systems. She holds and M.F.A from Bard College and an M.A. in composition from Wesleyan University.

Drummers and Frequencies: Greg Fox, Eli Keszler, Mario de Vega
Thursday, February 23

Drummers with curiosity about hybrid systems engage the acoustic, electronic, and mechanical to test Roulette’s 12-channel immersive system.

Greg Fox is a New York City born-and-bred drummer, multidisciplinary artist, and teacher. He has played on and released 49 records since 2008, including his work with Liturgy, ZS, Ben Frost, Colin Stetson, Skeletons, Hieroglyphic Being, Man Forever, and others, as well as with his own solo work and his projects GDFX and Guardian Alien. Fox has toured worldwide with various groups and collaborations, held residencies at Clocktower and Pioneer Works, and was awarded “Best Drummer in NYC” by the Village Voice in 2011. Fox uses a hybridized electroacoustic drum setup to explore new dimensions through the traditional gestures of the modern drummer and the possibilities inherent in electronic and computer music.

Eli Keszler is a New York-based artist, composer, and percussionist. His compositions and visual works examine the limits of instrumentation, notation, and space in its institutional, musical and public form. Keszler’s sound installations, music and visual work have appeared at Lincoln Center, MIT List Center, SculptureCenter, The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, and more. Keszler has released solo records for ESP-Disk and PAN, and most recently released Sounds of Speed on Empty Editions from Empty Gallery in Hong Kong. Keszler is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and a 2016 NYFA Fellow.

Reshaping Roulette with Kenneth Kirschner, Daniel Neumann, Anne Guthrie, Ben Manley
Friday, February 24

Can you transform a room using just acoustic phenomena, pattern manipulation, immersion, and durational composition complicated by chance?

Kenneth Kirschner will perform a live multichannel realization of his composition September 27, 2016. A composer in experimental music working at the intersection of avant-garde classical composition and contemporary electronic music, Kirschner’s work is characterized by a close integration of acoustic and electronic sound sources; a strong focus on harmony, pattern, and long-form development; and experimentation with techniques such as chance procedures, indeterminacy, and microtonality within a digital context. His work has been released by labels such as Sub Rosa, 12k, and Room40. Kirschner was a 2015 artist in residence at Eyebeam and a 2016 artist in residence in Times Square.

Daniel Neumann’s FROM WITHIN A FIELD #05 is an ongoing electroacoustic live performance for multichannel speaker systems that uses loudspeakers and room response as an instrument to form a spatial field. Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and professional audio engineer, originally from Germany. He holds a master’s degree in media art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig and also studied electronic music composition under Emanuele Casale in Catania, Italy. Neumann’s main focus is how sound interacts with space and how spaces can be shaped by sound. Neumann is the curator and organizer of CT::SWaM, an event series in NYC and Berlin that engages in spatial sound works and focused listening.

Anne Guthrie premieres 3D field recordings and spatialized electronics that will be layered and processed in real-time to provide an immersive and flexible listening experience. An acoustician, composer, and French horn player, Anne Guthrie studied Music Composition and English at the University of Iowa and received her Ph.D. in Architectural Acoustics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her electronic music focuses on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings.

Composer and experimenter Ben Manley explores the natural variability of wind, amplified small vibrations, and resonant objects as a means of generating dynamic electroacoustic environments. Manley has presented performances and installations at venues including Experimental Intermedia, The Kitchen, Roulette, ISSUE Project Room, Paula Cooper Gallery, Harvestworks, and more. He has collaborated with Connie Crothers, Jim Staley, Dan Evans Farkas, and has appeared with Composers Inside Electronics in David Tudor’s Rainforest IV at the Lincoln Center Festival 1998 and with Essential Music in performances of works by John Cage and Robert Ashley.

Dance & Installation: Liz Gerring with Michael Schumacher / Leila Bordreuil / Ursula Scherrer
Saturday, February 25

A four-hour durational experience for dancers, 12-channel sound, and multi-channel video projection with audience invited to wander and wonder.

Michael Schumacher, Ursula Scherrer, and Liz Gerring have been collaborating for decades together – Schumacher and Gerring’s work together dates back to loft performances in the 1980s, and Scherrer joined their experiments in the 1990s. Participants include members of the Liz Gerring Dance Company, three musicians including Michael Schumacher on piano, Leila Bordreuil on cello, and Ursula Scherrer projecting video. The music, video and dance aspects will respond to one another throughout the duration of the piece, working on similar timing but each improvising through a pre-determined structure in response to a musical score written by Schumacher.

Scherrer will place multiple projectors around the hall, breaking the space into distinct visual areas. In preparation, Scherrer filmed details of the dancers’ movements in front of a black background. The dancers will be nude, but close-ups of different parts of their bodies will make the subject often unrecognizable in its abstraction. Scherrer will then project this footage onto the naked bodies of other dancers that will act add texture and color to their flesh. The audience will be encouraged to walk around the space between the different points of interest.

The poetic quality of Ursula Scherrer’s work reminds one of moving paintings, drawing the viewer into the images, leaving the viewer with their own stories. Scherrer transforms spaces and landscapes into serene, abstract portraits of rhythm, color and light. A Swiss artist living in New York City, Scherrer’s aesthetic training began with dance, transitioned to choreography, and has now expanded to photography, video, text, mixed media and performance art.

Liz Gerring studied dance at the Cornish Institute in Seattle. In 1987, she received a BFA from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Kazuko Hirabayashi and Doris Rudko. In March 1998, she presented her first piece, a four-hour movement installation, and soon after formed the Liz Gerring Dance Company. Liz Gerring was awarded the Jacob’s Pillow Prize in June 2015 and a Joyce Theater residency and creation award in the same year. In 2016/17 she was awarded a New York City Center Choreographic Fellowship

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist and composer from Aix-en-Provence, France. Her cello playing is often improvised, and mainly focuses on texture variations and a collage of phantom overtones and pitched utterances. Through an original vocabulary of extended techniques, preparations, and imaginative amplification methods, her instrument is used as an abstract resonant body to challenge conventional cello practice. Her composed works draw from a similar texture-based musical aesthetic, but also focus on the relationship between sound and space.

What: Roulette’s contemporary dance program returns with the New Movement Series curated by choreographer Jennifer Lafferty.
When: Wednesday, February 15, 2017 – Friday, February 18, 2017, 8pm
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20/15 Online/Doors
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: General Admission $20, Members/Students/Seniors $15, $25/20 Tickets at the door

Brooklyn, NY – Curator Jennifer Lafferty convenes 14 of contemporary dance’s most exciting players for February’s annual [DANCEROULETTE] series at Roulette. The New Movement Series features 14 artists presenting experimental work in dance and choreography. This four-day series features three or four performances per night, each with a unique approach to artistry, composition and dance.

Southern California native Jennifer Lafferty studied dance at University of California, Los Angeles. A frequent contributor to Roulette’s contemporary dance programming, Lafferty previously curated the [DANCEROULETTE]’s New Movement Series in February 2016 and the Five x Three series in February 2015.

Roulette’s ongoing [DANCEROULETTE] series reflects the commitment to presenting experimental dance that we’ve held since our founding in 1978, particularly the collaborative efforts of composers and choreographers exploring the relationship between sound and movement, choreography and composition. Roulette’s move to Brooklyn in September 2011 has enabled the organization to initiate a regular season of [DANCEROULETTE] presentations, which now hosts nearly 40 performances yearly.

Abigail Levine, John Hoobyar, Jessie Gold, Rebecca Brooks
Wednesday, February 15

Abigail Levine is a New York-based artist whose work is rooted in dance and informed by visual and performance art. She has presented her work at venues including the Movement Research Festival, Mount Tremper Arts, Danspace Project, Gibney Dance, and the Center for Performance Research. As a performer, Abigail has worked recently with Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneemann, Clarinda Mac Low, Larissa Velez-Jackson, and Will Rawls. She is currently Visiting faculty in Dance at Wesleyan University.

John Hoobyar is an artist and performer in New York City. He has collaborated with many illustrious folk and was a danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival in 2016.  

Jessie Gold presents Untitled (Fold), a duet performed by Elizabeth Hart and Nikki Rollason Childree with music by Ivan Berko. The performance attempts to fold the space inside the body without creating hard lines — an attempt at softness and making inexplicable the necessity of lines. Gold is a New York City–based dancer and artist. Her first solo exhibition, Carmela DeSanso at Bas Fisher Invitational, functioned as a set for a fictitious dance by way of a painting and video installation. She was the co-owner of the artist-run bar and performance space Cafe Dancer from 2010-2015, through which she co-curated the performance series Contemporary Dancing at NADA New York in 2013.

Rebecca Brooks lives and works between Brooklyn and Vermont. She worked as a dance artist in New York City for 13 years and is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at Bennington College.

Marc Crousillat, Maddie Schimmel, Anonymous: Pierre Guilbault and Cori Kresge
Thursday, February 16

Marc Crousillat presents Brass Orchids, a solo performance incorporating a process of layering and re-narrativizing movements, techniques, and ideologies.

NYC-based dancer Marc Crousillat has performed in the works of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (2014-present), Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey, John Jasperse, and Alessandro Sciarroni. His dances which have been shown at Open Performance, 5×7 Space at HyLo Labs, FringeArts Philly, and Center for Performance Research as an artist-in-residence at Chez Bushwick. Crousillat received his BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He is the 2016 recipient of the Princess Grace Award Dance Fellowship.

Maddie Schimmel presents Laminates in collaboration with performers Camille Delaney, Justin Faircloth, Stanley Gambucci, Patrick McGrath, and Cassidy Wagner. The performance explores the notion of bodies are a shared space, but not a shared experience. Maddie Schimmel studied dance at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and is currently working as a freelance dancer and choreographer in New York City.

Fun / Young / God is a new dance work examining the phenomenon of the American rock star and the cycle of how society creates and reabsorbs these figures. The two dancers, Pierre Guilbault and Cori Kresge, are tasked with reproducing the movements of these icons, as well as channeling their own charismatic powers. This work is created anonymously for the entirety of its production. Viewing audiences are invited to experience the performance as its own autonomous entity, free of associations that are often based on who the creator is or is not.

Raised in Vancouver, Pierre Guilbault graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts with a BFA in dance. Guilbault has done extensive work in and around the Merce Cunningham workshops at Westbeth and New York City Center and is currently working on projects with Ellen Cornfield, Liz Gerring, and Jody Oberfelder.

Cori Kresge is a NYC-based dancer and teacher with a BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase. In 2005, Kresge received a Darmasiswa International Scholarship to study Balinese dance in Indonesia. She has been a member of the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group, José Navas / Compagnie Flak, and Stephen Petronio Company. She currently freelances and collaborates with various artists including Esme Boyce, Bill Young, Sarah Skaggs, Liz Magic Laser, and many others.

Heather Lang, Marilyn Maywald Yahel, Netta Yerushalmy & Marc Crousillat
Friday, February 17

Heather Lang is an artist from Chicago. She received her BFA in dance from New York University.

Marilyn Maywald Yahel has been dancing in New York City for the past decade with Beth Gill, Melanie Maar, Vicky Shick, Melinda Ring, Maggie Bennett, Steven Reker, and Yin Mei. She has performed her own solos through Danspace Project, Roulette, BAX, Movement Research, and Dixon Place. Marilyn graduated from Arizona State University and grew up in Nashville, TN. Commercial credits include backup dancing for Reggie Watts, Wynona and Naomi Judd, and Shania Twain. Marilyn teaches Pilates at Finetune Studio in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband Sam and son Ben.

Netta Yerushalmy is a dance artist based in New York City. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Jerome Robbins Bogliasco Fellow, and a NYFA Fellow. Her work has been presented by Danspace Project, The Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Harkness Festival, La Mama, F.D. 13, Curtain-Up (Tel-Aviv), and others. She is a 2016-17 Extended Life participant through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a MR Artist-In-Residence, and will be in residence at the Watermill Center, Djerassi, and SUNY Brockport.

NYC-based dancer Marc Crousillat has performed in the works of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (2014-present), Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey, John Jasperse, and Alessandro Sciarroni. His dances which have been shown at Open Performance, 5×7 Space at HyLo Labs, FringeArts Philly, and Center for Performance Research as an artist-in-residence at Chez Bushwick. Crousillat received his BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He is the 2016 recipient of the Princess Grace Award Dance Fellowship.

Melanie Maar, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, Tatyana Tenenbaum
Saturday, February 18

New-York-via-Vienna dance artist Melanie Maar performs Rough Dimensions. Maar’s work grows out of exploring the intimacy between movement and sound, energy and material, animalism and humanism, feminism and objectism, the personal and the communal, resonance and struggle within changing contexts. She was awarded the 2015 Grant to Artists from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her choreographies have been commissioned by Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, as well as Laboratory Arte Alameda Mexico, ImPulsTanz Vienna, and Tanzfabrik Berlin. She currently collaborates with sound artists Christian Schröder, Kenta Nagai, the performance collective Masters of Ceremony, and within composer Anthony Braxton’s Pine Top Aerial Project. She co-curated the Moving Sounds Festival for The Austrian Cultural Forum NY in 2013 and Movement Research Festival in 2010. Having taught internationally, Maar is currently faculty at Movement Research and a guest teacher at The New School’s Lang College.

EmmaGrace Skove-Epes performs an excerpt of a new work, In Search of Mirrors. Performed alongside an accumulating cast of collaborators, In Search of Mirrors constructs and unravels real, remembered, and imagined landscapes and environments transposed onto and melded with and into the performance space. Skove-Epes is a choreographer and dancer, born, raised, and currently residing in Brooklyn. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (MFA ‘15) and Bard College (BA ’08), her choreography has been presented at venues including AUNTS, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Center for Performance Research, and Judson Memorial Church. As a performer, she has danced with Edisa Weeks, Jon Kinzel, Jodi Melnick, and Sondra Loring, among others. She is a former space grant recipient at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange and Gowanus Arts.

Untitled Work for Voice is an evolving collection of solos for the singing body from Tatyana Tenenbaum. Taking the form of a backstage drama, performers assemble a performance before our eyes, laying bare the threads and layers within meaning and intention. Each performer possesses a solo practice, distinct in its set of textures, tones, and states. The solos overlap and intertwine to reveal a “production” in variable apertures of focus and legibility.

Tatyana Tenenbaum is a choreographer and composer based in Brooklyn. Her work explores the phenomenal space of the singing body, from interwoven perspectives of dance, performance, theater and music. Her original work has been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Temple University,Dance Theater Workshop Fresh Tracks, Center for Performance Research, Roulette, Danspace Project’s Draftwork series, Panopoly Performance Laboratory, The Watermill Center and AUNTS. She has performed and collaborated with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks, Daria Fain and Robert Kocik, Jennifer Monson/iLAND, and Levi Gonzalez.