Tag: Roulette TV

Roulette TV: Meredith Monk

Roulette is proud to premiere a new Roulette TV episode featuring the legendary creator and composer Meredith Monk. The episode traces a series of 10 performances that Monk curated at Roulette from 2016–2017 and features an exclusive interview.

Listen to the complete series of 10 concerts Meredith Monk curated at Roulette. Evolving out of a desire to dissolve genre boundaries and categories and highlight the freedom of imagination, authenticity, and liveliness of each artist’s practice, the performances ranged from experimental vocal music to electronic improvisation, from dance to film, and from rock and roll sound art to pop classics reimagined. Artists include David Behrman, Theo Bleckmann, Missy Mazzoli and GABI, American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Don Byron, Robin Holcomb, Ellen Fisher, Phil Kline and Jim Jarmusch, Dick Connette, and Ensemble Connect.

A Call to Curiosity with Meredith Monk

Our friend Meredith Monk recently sat down with Roulette TV in her home, and we loved what she had to say: that art is an antidote to the predictability of daily life and consumer culture.

We couldn’t agree more.

Art gets us out into the world and defines, expands, and challenges who we are. It asks us to take the right kind of risks and pushes us towards who we might become. Roulette is literally named after a game of chance, precisely because we celebrate the risk and adventurousness that define experimental performance, the people who make it, and the people who love it.

We all deserve what Roulette has to offer: a place to come together around delightfully weird live art; to have a beer in our renovated 1928 art-deco theater; to engage with extraordinary work and talk face-to-face about it; to be unapologetically curious together.

We need these values. And Roulette needs you.

Help Roulette protect this creative space we’ve built over the last 40 years — join us in creating a more curious, more connected, more open world.

New Roulette TV: Gelsey Bell and Erik Ruin: Prisoner’s Song

Roulette TV sits down with Gelsey Bell and Erik Ruin to discuss their performance at Roulette, the way in which they developed this piece, and how the piece is meant to function for a viewer.

Prisoner’s Song is a performance created by composer Gelsey Bell and visual artist Erik Ruin about the prison experience. Using shadow puppets and projections alongside a variety of musical idioms, the piece draws on historic ballads, poetry, audio interviews with people who have spent time in prison, and other primary sources to create a fragmentary encounter with the states of mind and heart prison engenders.

Produced by
Jim Staley

Directed and Edited by
Wolfgang Daniel

Photographed by
Wolfgang Daniel
Sonia Li

New Roulette TV: BERANGERE MAXIMIN // Siklon Sound Objects, Microphonics, Digital Chimeras

Roulette TV talks with Bérangère Maximin about the solo set at Roulette, the development of her creative practice, and her relationship to music.

Bérangère Maximin’s music engages the listener in considerations of space and textures. Since her debut album, Tant Que Les Heures Passent on Tzadik (2008), she has gradually developed a hyper-personal style, creating sensual, hypnotic, sultry pieces with immediate impact. The electroacoustic composer’s repertoire is marked by encounters that have inspired her writing in various degrees.

She studied under the musique concrète composer Denis Dufour (a member of the famous GRM and a pupil of Pierre Schaeffer). Taking inspiration from the New York improv scene and her European tour in solo and in duo with the likes of Fred Frith, Fennesz, and Rhys Chatham, her work developed towards live practice, playing with laptops and midi controllers delivering what she calls her digital chimeras. This work led her to compose No One Is An Island (Sub Rosa, 2012), the second and only collaborative album so far, and the confirmation of the respect Bérangère had started to get from established artists. The minimal series Infinitesimal (Sub Rosa, 2013) describes a slow transformation, a deep introspection far removed from the convention of the genre, very special imaginary areas where only matters the physicality of the moment. Dangerous Orbits, out since May 2015, is her first album for Crammed Discs’ Made To Measure series.

Produced By
Jim Staley

Directed by
Wolfgang Daniel

New Roulette TV: KEELY GARFIELD // POW

Roulette TV sits down and talks with Keely Garfield about such things as her artistic practice, the power of dance to allow the artist to be fully present in a moment, and the relationship of Frankenstein to the development of POW.

Keely Garfield’s personal and professional engagement in the world at large is the heart of all of her creative work. Alongside her choreographies for her acclaimed company, Keely Garfield Dance, the British-born choreographer, dancer, teacher, and curator has created work for ballet dancers at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, directed the movements of antique puppets for The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s production of Golem, and choreographed musical theater productions including Gypsy (Sundance Theatre, Utah), Carnival (New Jersey Shakespeare Festival), and Yeast Nation, The Triumph of Life! (Perseverance Theater, Alaska). Keely has made dances for students (Barnard, Hunter, The New School etc), children (DTW’s Family Matters, Lincoln Center’s Reel to Real etc), and MTV (Adam Ant, Herbie Hancock). Keely holds an MFA from UWM, and is engaged as a visiting professor of dance in many university departments. Additionally, Keely is an E-RYT 500 yoga teacher, a Donna Karan/ Urban Zen Integrative Therapist working in oncology and hospice.

Produced by
Jim Staley

Directed by
Wolfgang Daniel

Photographed by
Wolfgang Daniel
Sonia Li

New Roulette TV: ROBIN HOLCOMB // Solo

Roulette TV sits down and has a discussion with Robin Holcomb about her solo performance at Roulette, her history with New York, and her lyrical process.

Pianist/vocalist/composer Robin Holcomb has performed internationally as a solo artist and the leader of various ensembles. Following Sundanese gamelan performance studies at UC Santa Cruz and several years spent sharecropping tobacco in North Carolina, she was active in New York for many years as a composer and performer with deep roots in the downtown avant-garde as one of the original Studio Henry mavericks. She has recorded her music for Songlines, Tzadik, Nonesuch and New World records. Currently living in Seattle, she composes and performs music for ensembles of all sizes, theatre, film and dance productions as well as several major song cycles including We Are All Failing Them, a sidewise regard of the Donner Party for film and magic objects, The Utopia Project concerned with utopian societies in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s and O, Say a Sunset reflecting the life and work of environmentalist Rachel Carson. She is a founder of the New York Composers Orchestra and now is a co-director of the Washington Composers Orchestra (WACO). She is currently recording with cellist Peggy Lee, a long-time collaborator.

Produced By
Jim Staley

Directed by
Wolfgang Daniel