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 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…
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 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 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 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…
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.…
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…
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…
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 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…
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 the J. Pavone String Ensemble led by New York based composer and performer Jessica Pavone. The foundation of Jessica Pavone's recent ensemble compositions is research on the effects of sonic vibration on human physiology and emotional health. Sustained pitches and clusters of ensemble sounds generate specific physical and cognitive benefits…
Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of…
When Jack Smith transitioned from his relatively brief career as a director headlong into experimental theater in the late 1960s, he already had multiple scandals and groundbreaking films under his belt and had appeared in many more as a muse to Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, and Ron Rice. These films capture Smith in amber as…
This event is SOLD OUT. There will be no tickets available at the door. After moving from his native Seoul, first to Germany to study music alongside the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, and then to the United States, Nam June Paik lived what seems like the romantic archetype of the post-war New…
Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Timothy McCormack's complete MATTER series - a cycle of four solo pieces for trombone, cello, bassoon, and bass clarinet. Written between 2012 and 2017, the MATTER Series traces McCormack’s evolving relationship with physicality, corporeality, and the relationship between a performer and their instrument. Starting from the proposition that sound is…
