Over the course of a half century long career, Chilean-born Raúl Ruiz established himself as cinema’s greatest surrealist this side of Luis Buñuel. And like Buñuel, Ruiz was a vagabond, making films wherever funds were available. After the establishment of Chile’s military junta under Augusto Pinochet in 1973, Ruiz fled to Paris, making films in…
Bowerbird is pleased to present musician JJJJJerome Ellis and Philadelphia-based duo Jupiter Blue at The Rotunda. ABOUT THE MUSICIANS JJJJJerome Ellis is a blk disabled animal, stutterer, and artist. He prays, reads, gardens, cycles, wanders, and plays. Through music, literature, performance, and video he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and…
Bowerbird is pleased to present vocal sextet Variant 6 in a concert celebration of their first full-length album, New Suns. The album explores myriad universes of a cappella vocal music featuring works by Jeremy Gill, Gabriel Jackson, Joanne Metcalf, Benjamin C.S. Boyle, and Bruno Bettinelli. This album is a celebration of everything they love about the…
By the time Babette Mangolte began work on The Cold Eye (My Darling Be Careful), her first overtly fictional narrative film, she was already deeply enmeshed in the artistic vanguard of two continents. She had served as the cinematographer for the early groundbreaking films by Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer, photographed and filmed the development of…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a collaboration between the Arcana New Music Ensemble and the annual Wildflowers Composer Festival to present works by the festival faculty. The festival is open to composers who identify as part of gender-marginalized communities, which includes cis-women, trans-women, trans-men, and those who are nonbinary or gender-nonconforming. The summer festival is…
NEW DATE Pat O’Neill’s rarely-screened masterpiece of West Coast cinema is a dazzling synthesis of fast motion and superimposition, appropriated footage and time lapse photography, chroma keying and long exposures. Water and Power layers images drawn from urban Los Angeles, its water source in the Owens Valley, and an otherworldly interior space in increasingly complex permutations. What…
Commissioned by the German public service broadcaster ZDF, Kidlat Tahimik shot this movie in Laguna in the Philippines in 1981 as a contribution to the ZDF teleplay series “Vater Unser” (“Our Father”). These comprised six 45-minute short movies by a group of international directors, which interpreted key phrases from the lexicon of the Apostles’ Creed.…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Laraaji in our home venue at University Lutheran performing an improvised solo piano set on our Steinway Model O. ABOUT THE ARTIST Philadelphia-born, New Jersey-raised polymath Laraaji has maintained a pursuit of spiritual transcendence through music since the mid-70s. After several years of studiously developing an aesthetic informed by Eastern…
Bowerbird is pleased to present New York City based pianist Adam Tendler performing American composer Morton Feldman's (1926 - 1987) late period masterpiece For Bunita Marcus . Music critic James Pritchett describes the work: "For Bunita Marcus , like all the late Feldman works, is an adventure that takes a relatively long time to play out, but…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a double bill featuring Seattle's Telescoping and Philadelphia's Jesse Kudler. Telescoping is a quartet of Dave Abramson (drums, percussion), Al Jones (guitars, electronics, voice), Greg Kelley (trumpet, electronics), and Robert Millis (guitars) that performs "dense, nocturnal improvised music.” Jesse Kudler will be premiering a new site-specific work developed on and…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a rare performance by George Stavis, an American banjo player perhaps best known for his 1969 album Labyrinths , an album considered a landmark in the development of improvisational banjo performance. Opening the evening will be Elkhorn, the Philadelphia based guitar duo Jesse Sheppard and Drew Gardner, who are celbrating…
Bowerbird is thrilled to present Ensemble Pamplemousse in Philadelphia performing a brand-new collection of pieces about the elephant in the room, the devil is in the details, the cat's meow, The Whole Nine Yards, and the bottom line. Using instruments new and old, mechanical and human-operated, digital and digitized, some of the pieces explode various…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Philadelphia's Bismuth Quartet in a special concert featuring compositions by quartet members Carlos Santiago and Veronica Jurkiewicz. For this performance the Bismuth Quartet welcomes special guests Tom Kraines and Matt Engle. PROGRAM Carlos Santiago: Arc for string quartet Veronica Jurkiewicz: Chora for string quartet Arc/Chora sonically explores being alone and…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Yarn/Wire performing the Philadelphia premiere of Catherine Lamb's "Curvo Totalitas". On the score, Lamb describes the piece: "Synthesizer musicians play their material (which are filtered partials of the percussion recordings) in an unforced manner. Melodic contours unfold slowly, relative to the total time. Tones in contours may occassionally be articulated…
Held in the Belgian spring and summer of 1958, the Brussels Exposition was the apogee of World’s Fairs. With its slogan “evaluation of the world for a more humane world” celebrating a new post-war optimism about technology and progress, it was also full of the contradictions of the age, and was equally a celebration of…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Matt Davis' Aerial Photograph at The Rotunda. The ensemble will perform Davis' recent compositional suite, The Sway of Rivers, exploring the elusive nature of time: how it is inconsistently felt, marked, and expressed in sound. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Established in 2002, Matt Davis’ Aerial Photograph is a “wildly imaginative” (Jazziz…
Bowerbird and Nightletter are pleased to present the four-part documentary series On The Edge: Improvisation in Music written and produced by Derek Bailey. For more than four decades, Derek Bailey was one of musical improvisation’s foremost apostles. The English guitarist and experimental musician not only has a litany of classic improvised recordings to his name…
Bowerbird and Nightletter are pleased to present the four-part documentary series On The Edge: Improvisation in Music written and produced by Derek Bailey. For more than four decades, Derek Bailey was one of musical improvisation’s foremost apostles. The English guitarist and experimental musician not only has a litany of classic improvised recordings to his name…
