San Francisco International Arts Festival presents Edward Schocker and the Crossing Ensemble and Shih Yang Lee
Date and Time: Friday June 2 7:00 PM. Shared bill with Shih Yang Lee
Duration: 90 minutes, with intermission
Location: Gallery 308 - Fort Mason Center
Tickets: General Admission $25
More information...The Crossing is a long-term project lead by Edward Schocker that creates a new form of ecstatic group improvisation through investigating ancient Asian musical genres, such as Japanese Gagaku and Korean shamanist ritual music, with the goal reaching a state of communication with a “spirit” world.
This project allows the performers and audience the opportunity to investigate what a “non-material world” means to them. This could be achieved through connecting or remembering ancestors, engaging in meditation/prayer, or allowing the body to physically move as the music takes it. The piece will attract anybody who is seeking to look deeper than our everyday material world. This would include communities that are involved in yoga, meditation and alternate forms of healing/medicine.
The Crossing gives the local community the rare opportunity to see a work that brings together ritual and performance –two elements that have long become separated from each other over the centuries.
“I am interested in creating an environment where work can be created in a collaborative group manner. In the past I’ve worked with various dance and theater companies and always loved the way they created work. Although there was a choreographer or director, the work was built in a group effort by investigating the creativity, virtuosity as well as deficiencies of the people performing the work. It seemed much more exciting and personal than the traditional (sometimes sterile) composer/ensemble relationship.” -Edward Schocker
ARTIST BIOS
Dylan Bolles makes performances with people and environments, many of which involve the design and construction of new musical instruments and the cultivation of co-creative relationships based in listening practice. His activities include a wide range of performance-based collaborations, time-based arts, installations, and sound compositions. These works strive to build communities based in shared temporal experience. Dylan has worked in such venues as the Richmond Art Center, ProArts, SF Exploratorium, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Lincoln Center for the Arts. He holds degrees in music composition from Middlebury College and Mills College, and is a co-founder of, thingamajigs, an Oakland-based performance festival and educational non-profit organization. Dylan was a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at UCDavis. His dissertation project, Myth of Ten Thousand Things, engages the practice and theory of artistic collaboration.
Rigorously trained in court and folk repertories from a young age, Sooyeon Lyuh is known for her masterful performances of new compositions for the haegeum. Lyuh has earned her BA, MA, and Ph.D. with Highest Distinction in Korean Musicology from Seoul National University. Lyuh served as a lecturer at Seoul National University and a member of the National Gugak Center’s creative music troupe (Gungnip gugakwon changjakakdan), a government organization of Korea. For the past 10 years, she has performed numerous ensembles and solo pieces of Korean court music, traditional folk music, and especially contemporary music. Currently she is a visiting scholar at Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley. From 2011-2012, she was a visiting scholar at the ethnomusicology department, University of Hawai’i at Manoa where she performed with foreign musicians and composers at various concerts and workshops.
Suki O'Kane is a classically trained mallet percussionist, composer and instigator working with artists from a wide array of of music, movement, expanded cinema and public art genres. She has composed for Theatre of Yugen and inkBoat, performs in the ensembles of Dan Plonsey, and is a member of Thingamajigs Performance Group with Edward Schocker and Dylan Bolles.
Suki has performed live and recorded with She Mob and its side projects: the mad folk duo Junior Showmanship and its alter-ego speed metal Winner’s Bitch. She has performed in realizations of Jon Brumit’s Vendetta Retreat; with Lucio Menegon in his Split Lip, Soundtrack Instumentals and Strangelet projects; and with Dohee Lee in realizations of her multidisciplinary performance and installation piece Mago.
Kanoko Nishi-Smith is a performer currently based in SF/Bay Area. Though classically trained on piano, receiving a BA in Classical Music Performance from Mills College, her recent interest has primarily been in performing 20th century and contemporary musical compositions for piano as well as for koto (Japanese 13-string zither), and free-improvisation in various different contexts, with musicians, as well as dancers, poets, and visual artists.
Keith Evans is an artist and activist who has been working and performing in the Bay Area for 25 years. A jack-of-all-trades, he makes a living as an art presentation technician, preparator, exhibition designer, massage therapist, and audio-visual technician. Co-creation has been a core element of his own artistic practice, having founded the experimental cinematic trio silt in 1989 and participated in many artist collaboratives, most recently with Thingamajigs performance group. His work has been presented in galleries, museums, and cinemas all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Biennial in 2002. As a volunteer, he has had the honor of taking Oakland youth on backpacking excursions into the Sierra Nevada wilderness. He lives in Bolinas with his wife and young son.
Edward Schocker is a composer and performer who creates music with made/found materials and alternate tuning systems. In 1999 and 2000 Edward was artist in residence at the European Dance Development Center in Düsseldorf, Germany where he took part in and conducted workshops in instrument building, and composer/choreographer collaborations. In 2004 Edward composed music for an UNESCO sponsored work with Echo Arts –a large bicommunal project in Cyprus that helped build understanding between communities in conflict.
Edward’s artist in residence and commissions include Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Stanford Lively Arts, the St. Ignatius Choir directed in San Francisco, Firebird Youth Chinese Orchestra in San Jose, and Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo. In 2006 he was awarded The NEA/Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship to research Japanese musical instruments and tuning systems, and in 2010 received a 6-month residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Recently he was an artist in residence at the Paul Dresher Ensemble’s ARC program.
Currently, Edward is an ensemble member of the Thingamajigs Performance Group. The group recently developed and performed a new work with Pauline Oliveros for the Berkeley Art Museum.