Serving the San Francisco Bay Area New Music Community

Thu, Oct 17 2019 8:00 PM


8:15 pm DeepSkatch
Christina Braun - movement Tom Nunn - Original Inventions
9:00 pm Samas/Leonard/Gotwald
David Samas, Cheryl Leonard, Dan Gotwald - Natural Objects, Inventions, Voice


Christina and Tom have performed together in Bay Area festivals since 2012. They have co produced two evening length performances in the last year SkatchDance and DeepStates.
Christina Braun is a lifelong dancer and prolific choerographer. Her choreographic work with director, David Samas, has been recently presented by the LAB, the Oakland Museum of California and the Asian Art Museum. As SF Butoh LAB, Christina has produced Butoh dance symposia, performances, and workshops. SF Butoh LAB's mission is to strengthen community and deepen a culture of peace through dance and collaborative art practices.
Tom Nunn has designed, built and performed with experimental musical instruments since 1975, always with a focus on recycled/re-purposed materials, to create a unique voice in improvised music.

Cheryl E. Leonard is a composer, performer, and instrument builder whose works investigate sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her projects cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments, and often feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments and field recordings from remote locales. She uses microphones to explore the subtle intricacies of sounds and develops compositions that highlight these unique voices. Her music has been performed worldwide and is available on multiple record labels including 23 Five, Eh?, NEXMAP, Unusual Animals, Ubuibi, and Great Hoary Marmot Music. Leonard has been commissioned to create instruments and compositions for Kronos Quartet, Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project, the La Jolla Historical Society, Illuminated Corridor, and Michael Straus. Her awards include residencies at Djerassi, Kunstnarhuset Messen, the Arctic Circle, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, the Paul Dresher Ensemble Studio, Engine 27, and Villa Montalvo, and grants from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, New Music USA, ASCAP, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, Meet the Composer, the Eric Stokes Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Leonard has contributed to several publications about music and sound art, and her instruments, installations, and graphic scores have been exhibited in art galleries in the U.S., Norway, Australia, Mexico, and Argentina. In addition to her individual works, Leonard has produced installations and multimedia works with visual artists and scientists; composed for film, video, dance, and theater; and designed sounds for museums.

David Samas is a composer, curator, conceptual artist, instrument inventor, and social sculptor with a background in shamanism and magics. A queer, native San Franciscan from mixed immigrant/refugee roots, David got his a BFA from the SF Art Institute in conceptual art in 2000 and studied poetics at the New College of California and Naropa. He performed with the SF Boys Chorus, SF Opera and SF Symphony, receiving a GRAMMY in 1994 for Best Choral Performance. His artworks hang in the Di Rosa collection and showed at the Diego Rivera Gallery,Canessa Galleries and the SF Asian Art Museum. He has performed at the Exploratorium, Grace Cathedral, YBCA, Cal Shakes, Bing Hall, the Asian Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, CCRMA, the Lab, and Center for New Music, where he also curates the Window Gallery for Invented Instruments. He served as artistic director of the Turquoise Yantra Grotto (a house concert series of free improv and ethno-modernism), the Meridian Composers in Performance series, MicroFest North, Thingamajigs Festivals, and is the director of Pet the Tiger Instrument Inventors Collective and the Harmonic Series Gamelan. He gives back to his communities by teaching math and physics through inventing workshops with Thingamajigs (Oakland) and advocating for the legal personhood of all sentient beings.

Dan Gottwald is a sculptor, sound artist, instrument builder, composer and musician. He thinks it’s funny that someone asked him for a bio and that it’s unlikely it makes someone think “oh that sounds interesting. I’ll go to that show because of his credentials”. He’s genuinely happy to make some sounds with his friends though.

Cost: $8-15 sliding
Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:
Videos featuring musicians playing at this event
Invented Instruments , at the High Zero festival September 22nd 2012 , Baltimore Maryland