Bill T. Jones is an historic figure in the world of Dance. His creative practice spans storytelling, civic engagement, and—yes, of course—movement, through which he develops evening-length works that bring together all of the theatrical arts. He is most often described as a choreographer, director, and masterful performer. To me, Bill is primarily a conceptual artist and community leader, with a photographer’s eye and a singular perspective, which he shapes onto the bodies of the ensemble he co-founded in 1982, alongside the gone-too-soon Arnie Zane, and which, in 2016, cut the word “Dance” from its name—the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company.
In 2014, I began a collaboration with Bill, as musical composer of the work that would push him towards this elision. Analogy/Dora: Tramontane (2015), based on an oral history with his mother-in-law, Dora Amelan, relied on the acting skills of his performers more heavily than in the company’s past. Bill’s concept expanded into a trilogy. I was invited to remain as composer, music director, and performer for the full project, and tasked with writing material for the entire company to sing. The Analogy Trilogy toured the US through 2019, and includes Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka The Escape Artist (2016), focusing on Bill’s relationship with his nephew, Lance T. Briggs, and Analogy/Ambros: The Emigrant (2017), adapted from a W.G. Sebald story, and embedded with my cycle of 14 songs, sung by the company, and resembling a book musical. A derivative work, A Letter to My Nephew, which deals with the complexities of affection against a backdrop of violence, premiered in Paris on November 13, 2015, the night of coordinated terrorist attacks on the city. (The company was unharmed.) Rooted in this memory, A Letter continued to tour internationally, including a run at BAM’s 2017 Next Wave Festival. In Summer 2019, I began work on my seventh project with Bill, a commission from the Park Avenue Armory, Deep Blue Sea. Staged within a massive video installation by architect Liz Diller and featuring a cast of over 100, the work was interrupted just shy of its April 2020 premiere. After months of delay, Deep Blue Sea premiered in September 2021. An adapted version goes on a national tour in Spring 2022.
Shana Moulton has developed an influential art practice that balances video, performance, and sculpture to critique the impacts of technology and late-stage capitalism on (female) bodies. With humor and pathos, Shana embodies an alter ego named Cynthia, a withdrawn, neurotic interpretation of her real-life insecurities. Self-help objects come to life as surrealist ready-mades, which Shana inflects with digital trompe l’oeil effects. The first 9 episodes of her video art serial, Whispering Pines, a feminist parody of post-internet aesthetics found a wide audience in the art world during the early 2000s. More recently, Shana has made extraordinary leaps into the sphere of public art.
In 2009, I approached Shana about adapting her video art serial into a pop opera, and the next year we premiered Whispering Pines 10, a live performance, which depicts Cynthia’s failure at becoming an environmental activist. This version incorporated interactive technology and a ‘set’ of multi-channel projection, with live singers and electronic music. In 2018, we reshaped the work into a digital project that encompasses cinema, the internet, and installation. And in 2020, at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, we made the full Whispering Pines 10 publicly available, online. I have scored and performed in many of Shana’s other site-specific projects, including on a 16-foot parade float of her design through the streets of Paris to a crowd of a million; as the opening act for legendary Japanese band, Acid Mothers Temple; and in a Dickensian winter holiday spectacular at a former Methodist Church in London.
Joshua White established himself among the first wave of electronic multimedia artists when, in 1967, he was hired by Bill Graham to produce live visuals for all the concerts at Fillmore East. The Joshua Light Show was born, incorporating stage and lighting design into the then-trendy practice of projecting painted slides and kinetic, colored oil-and-water interactions. With a unique rear-projection design, Josh elevated and expanded the form into a more cinematic art, which defined the aesthetic of his generation, crafting what is now called Visual Music in iconic duets with Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, The Who, The Doors, And, And, And. By 1970, Josh had segued into a career as director, that put him behind the scenes of every influential shift in pop and avant-garde culture since that time, including film effects, stadium concert production, broadcast television, commercial theater, video art, and the earliest stages of streaming content on the internet. His later career has seen these efforts recognized in an institutional context, as a pioneer of multimedia art.
In 2007, I helped stage a second act for the Joshua Light Show, as producer and music curator of a new, diverse group of artists working in video, lighting, and design, under Josh’s direction. The music would not at all be a throwback to the culture out of which the lightshow emerged, but rather contemporary music that allowed the work to be experienced in its own right, as cinematic art and Visual Music. My interest was to find sound pairings in two specific audio realms: electronic music, typically rhythmatic, that holds time for abstract images to develop; and improvising acoustic ensembles that reflect the live and collective aspects of the visual form. As more opportunities arose for the new JLS, my role matured into something more like a Music Director. Watching from the perspective of the audience throughout our concerts, I would speak to the active lightshow artists directly through a headset, and narrate the physical actions of the live musicians, along with my predictions of when and how the music would change. Using my fluency in both music and the JLS image-making process, I would translate, in realtime, the languages of listening to seeing, of sound to light. In 2011, an opportunity to compose an original score for a series of lightshow events at the Hayden Planetarium in New York’s Museum of Natural History, led to Fulldome, a multi-movement audiovisual work. The JLS continued to tour internationally through its 50th anniversary in 2017.
Miguel Gutierrez’s joint practice as choreographer, musician, and writer routinely results in what he defines as “performances that are about things, and are things themselves.” He constructs uncanny procedures for dancers, objects, images, and words with breezy self-awareness. An early work begins with the artist’s face on a television screen, repeatedly asking, “Do you have any idea what you are going to do?” to which in-person Miguel responds, in a variety of interpretations, “We’ll just let ourselves go and see how it works out.” The memorable first installment of his Age & Beauty trilogy, performed at 2014’s Whitney Biennial, is an hour of sensuously charged aerobics and tongue-twisting orality, that ends abruptly. “I’m done. You are free to go!” he shouts, cutting off applause, and forcing everyone out of the theater. He engages performers and us, the audience, with entertaining shocks, to think honestly about our bodies and the spaces we inhabit. Miguel’s career is focused in the contemporary dance world, where he is a lauded director and performer.
My first encounter with Miguel was before we knew each other, when I was asked to copy his singing at a live concert for which he was unavailable to perform. Our paths crossed years later, in art and performance circles, and various contexts for vocal collaboration opened up. (That our voices might be complementary had already been established.) We have an informal a cappella duo we call Nudity in Dance, that has performed at Joe’s Pub, Poetry Project, and for the BOFFO festival. In 2016, Miguel along with the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones invited me to collaborate on a reimagining of dance and music by John Bernd, a choreographer active during the 1980s whose life was cut short by AIDS. This resulted in the Bessie-awarded Variations on Themes from Lost & Found: Scenes from a Life and Other Works by John Bernd.
Zach Layton is a musical multi-hyphenate par excellence. His creative practice broadly encompasses electroacoustic composition, live signal processing, modular synthesis, biofeedback techniques, and sound spatialization. The foundation for these activities stems from his sensitivity as a live performer and improviser, primarily on guitar, although his recent dive into pianism and Jazz theory reflects an unending curiosity and talent. One might find Zach playing his 17-string electric bass in a spare but heavy rock trio at a Lower East Side gallery; or in the outdoor gardens at Wave Hill, overseeing a concert of his score for strings, bowed guitar, and multiple channels of field recording, Stridulitrum, which evokes the movements of insects. Popular in the String Orchestra of Brooklyn’s repertoire, it is affectionately known as “the bug piece.”
Zach’s and my friendship began in the late 1990s, when we were in our early 20s. I lent him my car to drive across the state of Ohio, from Oberlin to Columbus. While we barely knew each other, I put my blind faith in his abilities. This describes the spirit of our collaboration to this day. In the early 2000s, we both moved to New York City, where we helped each other develop our own, unique, transdisiciplinary practices, incorporating electronic music, video, and performance, within both new media culture and Brooklyn’s burgeoning Electroclash scene: a dystopian mingling of minimal techno and New Wave performance aesthetics that reveled in queer subversion. Yet its moment was brief. Upon the shift away from retrofuturism by the year 2003, we found ourselves committed to championing the avant-garde musical tradition we both cherished as students. Its presence was simply missing from New York City’s institutions of music and art, and we thought we could fix that. The Darmstadt series was born in 2004. Zach’s instincts as an institution builder were clear from the get-go, and I aided in his mission to present concerts of “Essential Repertoire” (Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Braxton, and a lot of Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example) in conversation with contemporary voices, such as Tristan Perich, Claire Chase, and Missy Mazzoli—artists whose careers have since flourished. The Darmstadt series had its most fruitful era from 2008-2012, when Zach served as curator and technical supervisor at ISSUE Project Room, constantly getting positive reviews in the press. While the series is now basically inactive, we still produce an annual concert of Terry Riley’s In C, which has become a cherished tradition in New York City. Zach and I maintain a number of informal collaborative projects‚ including the improvising band, Sexual Energies School, which has played at The Stone, The Kitchen, St. Mark’s Church, and for the Performa biennial.