Name: A Time For Action: Curated by Jake Sandridge
Start: 2021-05-27T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2021-05-27T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Blaffer Art Museum

A Time For Action: Curated by Jake Sandridge

Blaffer Art Museum

An experimental inter-disciplinary micro-festival running for six nights at Blaffer Art Museum between May 23—June 5, 2021.

A Time for Action is necessary and now, confronting urgent political circumstances with an expansive performative language. This survey of performance across dance, theatre, music, spoken word, visual art, and trans-disciplinarity is organized by six intrepid guest curators: Aisha Tida Abbassi, Outspoken Bean, Rivkah French, Julia Barbosa Landois, Jake Sandridge, and Sixto Wagan.A Time for Action: Curated by Jake Sandridge on Thursday, May 27 features performances by Badie Khaleghian, Douglas DeVries with Dwain Travis, Austin Lewellen, Pushback Collective (Alexandra Smither, soprano, and Ben Roidl-Ward, bassoon), Anthony Almendárez, Lisa Harris and Rory Pabon. Music and sound by Mason Bynes, Allison Loggins-Hull, Yi-Ting Lu, Judy Jackson, Lisa Harris, Anthony Almendárez, Badie Khaleghian.

Visitor Information:This event is FREE and open to the public. Occupant capacity is limited, register to reserve your FREE tickets. Visitors are required to complete a <a href="https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=vboLF_CikEytSw6PDwxCWYdnonvwGO1PvF5eJZ9ewPNUQk9US0VVNDY3V1A3NzZFWFRJSlZFVFlBWS4u" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">COVID-19 Screening.</a>

About the Curator:Jake Sandridge is a composer, installation artist, and performer based in Houston, Texas. His works often allow for the performer or audience to gain agency over their experience of the work. Memory, community, and nature are common subjects explored in his work. Projects that engage with these ideas include work with performer-computer improvisation systems (Artificial Spring and future projects), and an interactive sound installation (Each step) in which participants explore a space where their movement has an effect on processes that generate the sound in the space. jakesandridge.coffeecup.com

About the Performers:Douglas DeVries is Solo Flutist of the contemporary music collective Loop38 and a guest performer with the Houston Symphony, the San Antonio Symphony, the Louisiana Philharmonic, Musiqa Houston, and the Texas New Music Ensemble. He is an Adjunct Flute Professor at Houston Community College, a Young Artist for DaCamera of Houston and is a regular musician of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra in Los Angeles. Performance highlights from past seasons include guest solo appearances for Mozart’s D Major Flute Concerto, Bach’s Complete Brandenburg Concerti, and Ibert’s Flute Concerto, in addition to guest performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Florida Grand Opera, and the New World Symphony, and concert tours to Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry, and Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms. Originally from Los Angeles, Mr. DeVries received his Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School and his Master of Music degree from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.Dwain Travis is a Houston native and began training at the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington DC at age 12. His professional career began with BAHBT in Houston, where he spent four years as Principal and Artist in Residence under Luis Fuente and Lynette Mason Gregg. Other credits include: Houston Ballet, Jacob&#x27;s Pillow Dance Festival, the Joffrey Ballet&#x27;s JKO School, the Harid Conservatory, and Nunamaana Immersive Dance Theatre. In 2017, Dwain joined Houston Met Dance, where he performed works from Mario Zambrano, Katarzyna Skarpetowska, and Dominic Walsh among others. In 2018, he co-founded Juxtapose Arts Collective in South Houston. His first piece of choreography, Dearly Departed, was selected for the RDA/SW Dance Festival and the 2010 Craft of Choreography Conference, and further awarded the RDA Choreography Connection. His second, Pulse, was chosen for the 2012 RDA National Festival in Montreal, Canada. Other choreographic credits include: Barnstorm Dance Fest (2016), Austin Dance Project (2016 &amp; 2017), blank/SLATE (2018 &amp; 2019), and Houston Choreographers X6 (2019). He is a founding member of the Houston Contemporary Dance Company and this is his 2nd season. @dwizzlestickPushback is a modular contemporary music ensemble founded in 2018 by Ben Roidl-Ward (bassoon) and Ally Smither (soprano). Our objective is to commission and present a new body of work featuring bassoon and soprano that addresses, interacts with, and exposes social and political issues within our communities. This goal arose from a growing frustration with what we see as an unnecessary and harmful dislocation of our artistic practice from the realities of our lives. Pushback was formed from the impulse for a close collaboration between two unusually paired voices; this spirit of collaboration expands to a desire to form meaningful relationships with composers of our generation and to actively participate in the creation of new work that challenges performers and listeners alike.Anthony Almendarez is an artist working in music composition, sound, noise, improvisation, performance, fixed media, and moving image. His work challenges the hierarchy between audio and visual stimuli confronting their respective stereotypes in relation to identity. Almendarez ultimately seeks to inject new modes of storytelling that are inclusive of histories and collective memories of those thriving along the margins of society. His works have been performed at various events and venues including: Antenna.Works, New Orleans, LA; Wheaton Biennial, Norton, MA; Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX; EchoFlux 19, Prague, Czech Republic; Conservatoire Maurice Ravel, Paris, France; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Alabama Song, Houston, TX; Nameless Sound + Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX; SPLICE, Kalamazoo, Michigan; and the Florida School of the Arts. He received a BA in Music Education at CSU Dominguez Hills, an MA in Music Theory and Composition at Marshall University in WV, and is currently a candidate for the MFA in Sound Art at Bard College.The music of Iranian-American composer Badie Khaleghian has been called a “well-crafted, attractive modern score” (ARTS ATL). His compositions are wide-ranging in influence and inspiration, encompassing solo, chamber, orchestral, and electro-acoustic works. Khaleghian’s music is influenced by his Middle Eastern background, his social justice activism, and his passion for collaboration. His recent works explore the idea of defining self-identity through close collaboration with musicians, artists, and scientists. Khaleghian’s music has been performed in Iran, United States, Austria, Italy, and Canada. Due to his religious background, he was banned from public higher education in Iran, but he studied, taught, and created a music major for persecuted Bahá’ís in Iran. In 2014 he came to the US as a religious refugee. In the US, he received his bachelor&#x27;s and master’s degree in music composition from the University of Georgia, and is currently pursuing his DMA in music composition at Rice University.Austin Lewellen -- &quot;What makes “classical” music? The cleanest delineation I can find is in the act of composition: the explicit writing-out of all the parts to be played. At its core, this act is a careful consideration of each element of one&#x27;s creation, a winnowing-down of the unnecessary and inefficient in the pursuit of plain language. This quality instills within my technical practice a desire to transcend the idiosyncrasies inherent to the structure of the double bass. The closer I can get to a sound that is fundamentally clear, simple, and free of artifice, the more versatile a collaborator I become.This viewpoint shapes my tastes as well. If our practice aims for clarity of expression, then we as interpreters must closely examine the sentiment we are tasked with conveying. Does it tangle with our lived experiences, or does it seek to ignore them, to provide an escape? The works of art I find most arresting are those which don’t shy away from reality, no matter what complications it may impose. It is through such confrontation that one may discover a truth both simple and earnest.My interests lie primarily in the creation of living music, through active collaboration with composers. I am most at home in small ensembles, though my technique has a firm grounding in the orchestral tradition of the Common Practice Era. I take these skills both as a basis of communal understanding and as a point of departure.&quot; www.austinlewellen.com

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A Time For Action: Curated by Jake Sandridge

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