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…
Dedicated to Daphne Oram On a celluloid film print, even sound is made of light. Running alongside the picture is the optical soundtrack, an image in itself. A beam of light penetrates it, exciting a photoelectric cell with its sound determined by the pattern of black and white. Ever since sound first joined film, artists…
Bowerbird is pleased to present New York-based composer, saxophonist, and flutist Anna Webber's Simple Trio. Webber, called “one of the most exciting new arrivals on the New York avant-garde jazz scene” by Peter Margasak in the Chicago Reader, has been working with her Simple Trio since 2013. They have released two albums on Skirl Records:…
Introduced by Gregory Zinman, editor, “We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik” 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…
Bowerbird is pleased to presented the duo of Peter Evans (trumpets) & Levy Lorenzo (percussion/electronics). Evans and Lorenzo began performing duo as part of the International Contemporary Ensemble's OpenICE commissioning series in early 2016. Their music is an otherworldly blur of dense rhythmic frameworks, elaborate notated pieces, open improvisation and weird drones. Lorenzo's complex of…
This event was originally scheduled for Feb 26 but has been rescheduled for March 11. Rightfully renowned as a composer, vocalist, choreographer, and stage director, Meredith Monk’s underseen films present their own inventive reflections on the cataclysms of history. Quarry began as a live multimedia opera in 1976 featuring a black and white short film…