Matthew Antaky | Tom Beckett | Lawrence LaBianca | Seungyon-Seny Lee | Elyzabeth Meade | Amy X Neuberg
While pursuing a degree in the fine arts in Southern California Mr. Antaky turned his interests to the performing arts, and in 1983 moved to San Francisco to study visual and theatrical design at San Francisco State University.
Since 1985 Mr. Antaky has created and collaborated on both scenic and lighting designs for all of the performing arts including Theater, Opera, Dance and Music.
His work has been seen though out the United States as well as Europe, Canada, and Mexico.
Mr. Antaky’s recent opera designs include productions of “Don Giovanni”, “Candide”, “Tosca” and “Un Ballo in Maschera” for Festival Opera, Opera San Jose’s productions of “Barber of Seville”, “The Crucible” and “Un Ballo in Maschera”, Plus Ensemble Parallel’s production of the world premier of Lou Harrison’s “Young Caesar”.
He has also designed the lighting for the Utah Symphony’s concert productions of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Peter Maxwell Davies “8 Songs for a Mad King”.
His design history in dance includes many years as resident designer with such companies as Liss Fain Dance, Stephen Pelton Dance Theater, La Tania Flamenco, The San Francisco World Music Festival, Lily Cai Chinese Dance Company, Chitresh Das Dance Company and The Mark Foehringer Dance Project SF.
In addition Mr. Antaky has designed projects for Lines Contemporary Ballet Company, Flyaway productions, Karen Finley, A Traveling Jewish Theater, Word for Word, Li Chiao-Ping Dance and Robert Moses Kin among many others.
Mr. Antaky’s Scenic and Lighting designs for the Cabrillo Music Festival from 1999 to 2001 include full stage productions of Bernstein’s MASS, Copland’s Tender Land, Phillip Glass’s Photographer and Lou Harrison’s Rapunzel.
Additionally he has created all the visual designs for numerous productions of Bernstein’s MASS throughout the country, including Productions with The Promusica Chamber Orchestra, a concert version with the St. Lukes Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s production and with the Oakland East Bay Symphony.
In 1993 he became a founding member of Shadowlight Productions, a company pioneering new techniques and designs dedicated to the exploration and performance of shadows.
Mr. Antaky is a five-time nominee (1999 –2003) and two-time recipient of the Isadora Duncan award for outstanding visual design.
Link to Matthew Antaky: http://www.matthewantakydesign.com
Tom Beckett is the author of Unprotected Texts:
Selected Poems 1978~2006 (Meritage Press, 2006), and
the curator of E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First
XI Interviews (Otoliths, 2007). From 1980-1990, he was
the editor/publisher of the now legendary critical
journal, The Difficulties. On his sixteenth birthday,
the first man supposedly walked on the moon. Things
have been going downhill ever since. He lives in
Kent, Ohio.
http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/
http://voice-noise.blogspot.com/
www.thecontinentalreview.com
I want to be blacksmith of the future.
I sculpt metal, ceramic, wood, and glass into iconic and at times enigmatic forms that explore humankind’s relationship with nature from a technological standpoint. My work is influenced by a childhood spent split between rural Maine and New York City, an experience that inspired a profound interest in the dichotomy between communities in which people work close to nature, and the alienation of an urban, technological society. My sculptures explore and illustrate the parallels and interactions between these two worlds. Tree limbs, which are an example of a material I use in many of my sculptures, illustrate this schism, for the word “dichotomy” means to “split into two branches.” I combine natural, organic materials such as wood with manufactured materials such as glass, leather, steel and ceramic to create new hybrids.
Many pieces reference the human body to explore a variety of human emotions. Tree branches and trunks may be cut into discs and separated with blown pieces of glass to resemble a column of vertebrae, the natural sections of this structure being supported and augmented by the manufactured glass like prosthetics. In other pieces, steel supports will contain and extend the organic wooden components of the structures, in much the same way that braces or crutches support and stabilize human limbs.
Some of my finished artworks also acquire the form and function of tools. Tools are essential to a complete discussion about the process of making sculpture. They are the extensions of the human hand through which materials are manipulated and shaped, and they are the vehicles through which information can be unearthed. The tools we apply to nature, in order to contain it, shape it, understand it and categorize it, also have a profound affect upon it. It is this impetus to measure, understand, contain and manipulate nature that I enact through my work.
Seungyon-Seny Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. She studied with Jonathan Harvey, Chris Chafe, and Brian Ferneyhough at Stanford University (DMA 2002). She was a composer in a yearlong course in composition and computer music at IRCAM in 2000-2001. As an active composer, her instrumental pieces and collaborating multimedia projects were performed in the US, Europe, Cuba, and Korea at major festivals such as the Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Agora Festival at IRCAM, Seoul International
Computer Music, Internatonal Computer Music Conference in Sweden, Primavera en la Havana in Cuba, Florida Electroacoustic Music, XIII CIM l’Aquila, Centre de cultural Franco-Japonais, and Centre Acanthes. She has received many grants and awards such as from the Korean Culture & Arts Foundation, Acanthes, Asia/Pacific Scholars Program, and honorary mention in Luigi Russolo International Computer Music Competition. As a resident artist, she has been at Cite Internationale des Arts program in Paris, at Art OMI International Music Residency Program in NY, and at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, CA, where she received the Oshita Fellowship award. Recently she is a lecturer at
The Korean National University of Arts in Seoul, Korea.
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~senylee/
Introduction:
Composes 4 elec/digital/audio, acoustic instruments, found objects for her own performance works; dance/video; acoustic ensembles (perc, orch, chorus, chamber), as well as her amazing voice.
Biography:
Illustrious institutional training: Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Illinois.
Unusual Performances: from Yosemite National Park; Vasco Gama Tower, Portugal; Seattle’s Space Needle; Theatre Artaud, SF; to Theatre S, Boston, MA.
http://www.c-alanpublications.com/composers/meade-elyzabeth.html
"A one-woman musical hurricane."
Otago Times (New Zealand)
Amy X Neuburg is best known for her wildly entertaining "avant-cabaret" performances for voice and live electronics, in which she uses an electronic drumset, a real-time looping machine, and an array of sounds and samples to construct complex, emotionally intense songs and stories. In live performance she uses the looper to build up thick vocal harmonies and rhythms one layer at a time, and controls all loops and samples by hitting drum pads, stomping on foot pedals, and grabbing faders; there are no canned or pre-recorded tracks. Amy's songs are diversely influenced and sung in various styles -- from rock to bel canto to avant-garde -- over a nearly four-octave vocal range.
A resident of Oakland, California, Amy has performed at clubs, theaters, festivals, schools and museums nationally and internationally, with frequent appearances in the Bay Area and New York. Highlights include the Other Minds Festival (Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco), the Berlin International Poetry Festival, arts festivals and universities throughout New Zealand, New York venues (Bang on a Can Marathon at Symphony Space, Roulette, Joe's Pub, etc.), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Chicago Arts Club, and college residencies and electronic music festivals throughout the U.S. She has also staged her own multimedia one-woman music-theater show Songs About Life & Death & Love & Insects at EXIT Theatre in SF.
Recently Amy has been expanding her looping experimentations to include chamber ensembles. She has received commissions from Present Music (Milwaukee) to compose for voice and ensemble with live looping of all the instruments, the San Francisco Jewish Music Festival for a song cycle for seven looped vocalists, the Christchurch Arts Centre (New Zealand) for a site-specific work for 15 "traveling" vocalists, and Santa Cruz New Music Works for chamber ensemble with looped voice and flute, among others. Her current project is an evening-length song cycle for voice, three cellos, live looping and electronic percussion (to premiere December 2006, San Francisco).
A classically trained singer, Amy has been featured in numerous contemporary works and recordings. She toured the U.S., Europe and Japan with Robert Ashley's opera ensemble, performing in three operas from his Now Eleanor series, and sang on the Nonesuch recording of Ashley's Improvement. She also sang and drummed with Culture Clash in their long-running musical comedy The Birds at the Berkeley and South Coast Reps, and she performed the leading role of Simone Weil in Anne Carson and Guillermo Galindo's opera Decreation: Fight Cherries at CCAC San Francisco. Other vocal performances include a recital of Marc Blitzstein songs (with tenor John Duykers) at Other Minds' Blitzstein centennial concert (Yerba Buena, SF), and a recent concert of songs and short operas by New York composer Jeffrey Lependorf.
For modern dance, Amy's composing and sound-designing credits include work with AXIS Dance Company, Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Nina Haft, Thaïs Mazur, Claudine Naganuma, ODC, Randee Paufve, Terry Sendgraff and Ellen Webb. Often Amy performs on stage with the dancers, creating live electronic and vocal scores. In other media, Amy has composed for filmmakers Owen Land, Lynn Hershman, Andrew Silver and Searchlight Films, as well as for local theater productions and for interactive installations by Xerox/PARC researchers (most notably Nightfall at Yerba Buena Center). In 2000 and 2001 Amy was ongoing composer for Mondomedia's popular Piki & Poko in Starland web animations.
As collaborator, Amy spent 10 years singing and drumming with her electronic band Amy X Neuburg & Men, who performed up and down the west coast and staged multimedia happenings such as the Virile Vednesdays at Venue 9 series and the occasionally annual Irish April Fool's Passover. Before that she was a core member of the experimental music-theater ensemble MAP, with whom she co-wrote and performed in the one-act musicals Walk Out and The Point, played in clubs, and staged socially relevant guerilla street theater.
Amy is a general partner of IS Productions, with whom she has produced numerous experimental music and theater events, including the 2002 Electric Words festival (with the SFEMF), and large-scale theater performances by MAP and Amy X Neuburg & Men.
Amy received undergraduate degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (Voice) and Oberlin College (Linguistics), and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music from the Mills College CCM. Awards and honors include Phi Beta Kappa, Pi Kappa Lambda, Oberlin Conservatory Honors, the Wieland Prize for Vocal Excellence; residencies with Music Omi, Nautilus Composers & Playwrights, Djerassi Resident Artists, and the Arts Centre of Christchurch (New Zealand); and grants from Arts International, the US Embassy New Zealand, Meet the Composer, the East Bay Community Fund, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In 2005 Amy was featured in the book The Art of Digital Music: 56 Visionary Artists & Insiders Reveal their Creative Secrets (Backbeat Books), and she has been interviewed about her recording and looping techniques in Electronic Musician, Guitar Player, and other national and international music and industry publications.
Her most recent CD Residue (2004) is on Other Minds records. Three previous CDs were released on the Racer label.