More Alaska Pics

We’d like to share some more pictures from our recent trip to Alaska. Enjoy!

Performing Angélica Negrón’s “What I’m Trying To Say Is…” with Eileen Mack deftly handling the mini megaphone

 

Matthew Welch’s “Ulrikke” with Native Alaskan dancers, led and choreographed by Stephen Blanchett.

After Daniel Wohl’s “Insext,” with another great dance collaboration.

Our green room was festive (see the smoked salmon, bottom left), both in food and in dress! It’s totally appropriate our performance of Matthew Welch’s piece followed a Scottish Highland pipes and drums band!

And sled dogs! Lots of them!

Yes!!

We had a fantastic time at the Native Alaskan Heritage Center! Big thanks to Steven Alvarez for organizing this amazing event! We’ll be posting pictures, but here are a couple to get started.

The amazing Shokoto

 

Dancers during Shokoto’s set

TRANSIT in Alaska!

This week, TRANSIT heads North–really North!–for an exciting performance at the Multicultural Drumming and Dance Celebration at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage.

This unique program pairs TRANSIT-commissioned pieces by emerging composers from around the world with native tribal dance. We are thrilled to be collaborating with Alaskan Native Dancers, who will perform along with us. We’ll be posting updates about this partnership, along with pictures of beautiful Anchorage.

If you happen to be in the Anchorage area–maybe before you strike out on the Iditarod–please come join us for what promises to be a thought-provoking amalgamation of the ancient and the cutting-edge.

CONCERT DETAILS:

Saturday, March 3

Alaskan Native Heritage Center
8800 Heritage Center Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99504
ph. (907) 330-8000

11 AM – 7:00 PM (TRANSIT performs at 2:45PM)

Admission FREE presented by Target

TRANSIT will perform previously commissioned works by:

Jason Cady (Three Quintets)
Fung Lam (Remembering Dowland)
Angélica Negrón (What I’m Trying to Say is…)
Daniel Wohl (Insext)
Matthew Welch (Ulrikke)*

 
*Considering this festival is focused on “drumming and dancing and the drum and its central role in indigenous cultures,” it is going to be awesome to see how Ulrikke, a gamelan piece for percussion and cello (with Scottish undertones) fits with Alaskan Native Dance! We can’t wait!!

Spotlight Series Rocked!

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Kent Gallery last week! The night was a great success. Here are some pictures…

Angélica Negrón, introducing “Panorama”

 

Phyllis Chen and Rob Dietz

We love music boxes! “Mobius” by Phyllis Chen and Rob Dietz, with help from Andie and Evelyn.

Breaking news:
Spotlight Series show @ Kent Gallery

TRANSIT is very excited to announce an upcoming Spotlight Series show at the Kent Fine Art Gallery in Chelsea on Thursday, February 2 at 7 PM featuring Phyllis Chen and Evelyn Farny. The Spotlight Series is a platform for innovative musicians to present solo performances of new and experimental music from the cutting edge.

We are thrilled to present Phyllis Chen, who will be joined by multimedia artist Rob Deitz. Fresh off the success of her newly-founded UnCaged Toy Piano Festival, unconventional virtuoso Phyllis Chen will perform original works for toy piano, music boxes, bowls, and electronics that exemplify her unique capacity for creating immersive musical experiences with unusual sounds.

TRANSIT co-founder Evelyn Farny will present a program exploring contemporary developments in solo cello writing, including the world premiere of “Panorama” by rising-star composer Angélica Negrón. She will also perform pieces by Alexandra Gardner, Caroline Shaw, and György Ligeti.

For this very special event, TRANSIT joins forces with the Kent Fine Art Gallery and its Mind the Gap exhibit, which takes its inspiration from Lise Patt’s description of W.G. Sebald:

If there is a Sebaldian method, in Austerlitz we are given the opening line: “mind the gap” between words, between and in images and text, but most significantly, mind the gaps in (not only between) signs. Look at the spaces between seeing and not seeing (where you’ll catch a glimpse of “the phantom traces created by the sluggish eye”). Notice the gaps between cards being dealt of pages of a book flipping by. Don’t turn away from the visual magma, after-images that “leak” out from their moving sides. Pay attention to the momentary arrest of language required by a period, a comma, an “aside.” Don’t ignore the “whispered” secrets of the last spoken syllable hanging in the air, or the last written word of a paragraph stranded on its own line. Study those photographs created in slips of the shutter or captured in concert with bodily sighs. These are the gaps that open the way to the production of thought itself, to awaking, not anesthetizing, the creative mind.

-Lise Patt, “What I Know for Sure,” in Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald (Los Angeles: Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007), pp. 81-82.

The artists featured in this exhibit are Dennis Adams, Joseph Beuys, Fernando Bryce, Heide Fasnacht, Charles Gaines, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Mark Lombardi, Antoni Muntadas, and Walid Raad. 

Kent Fine Art Gallery: 210 11th Avenue, 2nd floor (at 25th St.), NYC 10001

Map + travel info here

Public transit: A to 14th St; L to 8th Ave; C, E to 23rd St; M11 bus to 25th St

ph. 212-365-9500

The Mind the Gap exhibit opening will begin at 6:00, and our show will begin at 7:00. Admission is free and open to the public.