Tawil & Khoury: "Atlas" / Lord Tang
7:30pm Doors / 8:00pm Performance
$15 Guests / Free for members
Reserve seats:
guest registrationWeight of the world.
We crack.
Atlas presents an urgent sonic experience where silence is as meaningful as the nervous but minimalist vocabulary raining down. Atlas is concerned with the negotiations of burden – who holds what. It teases assumed agreements between performer and audience – using immersive physical sonic states to press weight upon the room. Atlas is a score of disorientation that places the performers at the mercy of their own doing.
Atlas was developed at TAC (Oakland) and Movement Research (NYC). Atlas premiered at New York Live Arts/Live Ideas 2016 and shortly thereafter was presented at the After the Last Sky Festival (Berlin). This is the duo’s first bay area appearance. Dominic Cramp’s Lord Tang will open.
"disturbing, uncompromising, and awe-inspiring" – American Theater Magazine
“crushing relevance” – TanzRaum Berlin
"extraordinary"– New York Times
TAWIL & KHOURY is the duo of Leyya Mona Tawil and Mike Khoury. They work with sound and movement practices and are community leaders in the field of Arab Experimentalism. Tawil & Khoury operate within the diaspora; narrating identity on their own terms. They began collaborating in Detroit in 2006, and have since toured nationally and internationally with their performance scores. tawil-khoury.tumblr.com
LEYYA MONA TAWIL (b. 1975) is an artist working with dance and music practices. She is Syrian, Palestinian, American; engaged in the world as such. Her articulation of Arab Experimentalism embeds political sub-narratives and cultural confusions into the performance fabric. Tawil is the director of ELIXIR / TAC – which supports transdisciplinary arts on a local and international level. Her work has been presented in 16 countries and throughout the US, including engagements at The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), TransDance Festival (Cairo), YBCA(San Francisco), Museum of Nonconformist Art (St. Petersburg), Bimhuis (Amsterdam) and the National Opera House of Syria (Damascus). Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Theater Magazine and PAJ: Journal for Performance and Art. danceelixirlive.org
MIKE KHOURY (b. 1969) is an improvising violinist, researcher, and economist. His primary work involves the application of quantitative methods from the social sciences to improvisation. Khoury has performed or recorded with Faruq Z. Bey, Dennis Gonzalez, Wolfgang Fuchs, Simply Saucer, and Alex Cline. He currently performs with The Redford Civic Symphony Orchestra, Inscribe, in duo with Leyya Tawil, in duo with Ben Hall and as a member of the group Devotional. Khoury is the author of a chapter in an anthology of the Arab Avant-Garde and is the curator of the Entropy Stereo label and performance space. He currently records and produces artists from his Redford, MI studio, and laboratory. mikekhoury.com
LORD TANG is a warm descent into a dub fueled frenzy of color and light. Dancing inside the vividly colorful abstract narratives created by artist Kelly Porter, Lord Tang, in a white tuxedo with a white painted face, creates a moving canvas that mirrors the kaleidoscopic surrealism of his sound. It is a sound dredged from the depths of Jamaican dub and spun into a new form that incorporates the many influences on Lord Tang’s creator, Dominic Cramp: soundtracks, vintage science fiction, British dark comedy, dirty electronics, modular electronic music, abstract tone clouds. It is a sound and sight that fills a room and transforms it into a ship set sailing into parts unknown.
Dominic Cramp has taken Lord Tang to several venues on the West Coast of the United States and all over Europe. He is currently involved in the Talking Book, an abstract instrumental project with Jared Blum and Bill Gould from Faith No More; that more recently has taken him down to Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. He has an ongoing collaboration as a composer and performer with dance artist Leyya Tawil and her company Elixir / TAC. lordtang.com