The Long Breath
Thingamajigs Performance Group convenes with singer-songwriter-scholar Gelsey Bell (New York) and yogini Ann Dyer (Oakland) in an evening of experimental performance and meditations on alternate tunings, durational forms, and new work. The evening will feature performative projection by Keith Evans and compositions by TPG members Edward Schocker, Dylan Bolles and Suki O’Kane.
About The Artists
- Gelsey Bell is a singer, songwriter, and scholar. Described by the New York Times as a “brandy-voiced” “winning soprano” whose performance of her own music is “virtuosic” and “glorious noise,” she has released two studio albums, Under A Piano (2005) and In Place of Arms (2010), two experimental albums, February (2008) and Love Is Just a Crack In the Space of You (2009), and the digital album SCALING, live at Roulette (2012). Her work has been presented internationally in Performa 11 & 13, the Vital Vox festival, the BEAT festival, the LUMEN festival, the SITE festival, the Resonant Bodies festival, Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques in France, and most recently Voice – Creature of Transition in Amsterdam. Gelsey is a core member of thingNY, and Varispeed,. She has worked with numerous composers, choreographers, and performance creators including Robert Ashley, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, Ne(x)tworks, Kimberly Bartosik, Yasuko Yokoshi, Dave Malloy, Rachel Chavkin, Alec Duffy, John King, Chris Cochrane and Fast Forward (as the Chutneys), Kate Soper, Rick Burkhardt, Miguel Frasconi, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, and the Panoply Performance Laboratory. Gelsey recently completed a doctorate at New York University in Performance Studies. She is also TDR/The Drama Review’s Critical Acts Co-Editor.
- Ann Dyer has explored sound and music for over thirty years as a concert/recording artist, student of Indian music, and teacher of yogic sound. Her early career as a progressive jazz artist took her across the U.S., India, Brazil, Mexico, and Canada and produced three critically-acclaimed CDs, including Revolver: A New Spin which received recognition as one of the Top Ten Recordings of the year by the Village Voice. She is Director of the Vak Choir of "Everyday Voices" which premiered fall 2013 in the multi-disciplinary, original work, "Vak: Song of Becoming," commissioned by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Subsequently Dyer was commissioned by the San Francisco Asian Art Museum to create "Sounding Transformation," performed by Vak Choir in conjunction with Smithsonian touring exhibition "Yoga: the Art of Transformation." Dyer's teaching of the yoga of sound draws on Vedic mantra, tantric mantra, bhakti yoga, naada yoga, sanskrit and classical Indian music to support philosophical understanding, skillful practice and direct experience of the power of sound to positively affect our lives. Ann is director of Mountain Yoga in Oakland and is on the faculty of several teacher training programs. Her conviction that we are all born to sing is captured in her TedXTalk "Why Sing?, Why Now?".
- Thingamajigs Performance Group uses unique musical instruments and performance practices, combining traditional Eastern sensibilities with modern American technologies. For tonight's performance TPG includes Dylan Bolles (flutes, voice), Keith Evans (performative cinema, turntables), Suki O’Kane (percussion, electronics), and Edward Schocker (reeds, glass, electric guitar), inspired by their 2014 "Within A Day" project that has convened the ensemble in short, intense residencies with diverse composers to rapidly develop new work, share physical practice, and catalyze new thinking. Using a collaborative process that purposefully blurs divisions between the roles of composer and performer, "Within A Day" has resulted in a new work with composer Robert Moran (b. 1937, Philadelphia) now available on Innova Recordings, a collaboration with yogini Ann Dyer that commenced at dawn and concluded at sunset on a single day, a week-long residency with thingNY in New York that began in a former door factory and culminated in the occupation of an abandoned CitiBank, and the recent premiere of "Whatchamacallit" at BAM/PFA with Pauline Oliveros, a leader in the musical avant-garde for five decades.
Cost: $10-$15 Sliding Scale