photo: Courtesy of the Artist

Saturday, May 5, 2012 at 12:00 PM (According to the Birds)
Redcat – Los Angeles, CA

Saturday, May 12, 2012 at 3:00 PM (Azza)
Redcat – Los Angeles, CA

According to the Birds
The morning dawn reveals a great grey owl. With his arrival the birds awake, filling the woods with their sounds and movement. Their little rituals make the forest a rich and powerfull place. But as with all things, it only lasts for a moment.

Linde Faas (1985) graduated in Animation at Sint Joost Art academy (Breda) and received the Sint Joost Academy Award for her graduation film According to Birds (Volgens de Vogels), which also won first prize at the Holland Animation and Film Festival (HAFF) in the student competition. She’s fascinated with the concept of silence, which she tries to explore in her films and drawings. Also nature is a very important theme in her work.

Azza
A self-confident and buoyant 12-year-old, Azza is at a crossroads, about to make an important decision. Will she be loyal to her family’s culture or follow her Dutch classmates?

Saskia Gubbels has studied at the University of Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts, Photographic and Audiovisual Design and audiovisual programming at the Academy of Fine Arts St. Joost, Breda. She lives in Amsterdam. Since 1997, she has worked on eleven films, mostly documentaries and shorts.

Trailer

Songs at the End of the World, Photo: courtesy of the artist

Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 8:30PM & Sunday, April 29, 2012 at 7:00PM
REDCAT – Los Angeles, CA

Friday-Sunday, May 4-6, 2012 at 7:00PM
Fusebox Festival – Austin, TX

Explosively inventive Dutch theater ensemble Wunderbaum merges with rock trio Touki Delphine to create a theatrical superband in this absurdly fantastical concert event inspired in part by imagery from Werner Herzog’s Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. In oversized snowsuits and a variety of more fanciful costumes, six performers present a funny and rhythmic song-cycle based on their childhood dreams and hopes. One dreams of flying, another fantasizes about living with jellyfish under the sea. Each imaginary life-choice is illustrated with humorous and touching lyrics, performed in English, and imaginative musical compositions.

“A fragile, poetic ode…sparking chemistry between theater and music.” Knack Belgium

“Fresh and original…[Wunderbaum] is political and raw, its actors also rockers.” Los Angeles Times

A recurring theme in Wunderbaum’s repertoire is the tension between ideologies and the difficult transition thereof to the actual daily reality. A theme that was maybe most evidently presented in the performance Welcome in my backyard (2006), which was about a group of highly educated Westerners who are confronted with asylum seekers in their own backyards. The play triggered off the feature film Maybe Sweden (2007), which relates the same story in a new context and was shown on television and in many film theatres. In Venlo (2009), Wunderbaum staged the unveiling of an artwork in the public space, which excites the emotions and the ideological viewpoints of the local inhabitants. Wunderbaum collaborated with Joachim Robbrecht, who wrote the text for Venlo during the rehearsal process. As a continuation of this working method, Wunderbaum’s next piece Rail Gourmet (2010) was written in collaboration with Annelies Verbeke. In Rail Gourmet, four modern-society ‘lost souls’ are briefly interfering in each others’ lives. After that, Wunderbaum created Natives (2010). It’s a performance about the crisis, created and shown on location in an abandoned apartment building in a suburb of Rotterdam. For the theatre tour, Wunderbaum made a new version of Natives, Natives II (2010), for which they adapted interviews with local inhabitants about the crisis’ effect on their lives. Songs at the end of the World (2011) was made in collaboration with music theatre group Touki Delphine and is a theatre performance with the energy of a pop concert, about dreams, choices, possibilities. Wunderbaum’s most recent production is Our pope (2011), written by Arnon Grunberg. It’s the first time the collective is working with an already existing theatre text.

Wunderbaum’s actors are Walter Bart, Wine Dierickx, Matijs Jansen, Maartje Remmers and Marleen Scholten. They studied together at the Drama Academy in Maastricht, and then they were taken under the wings of Johan Simons’ ZTHollandia and NTGent / Rotterdamse Schouwburg with whom they performed on location for the last seven years. Moreover, the actors also perform in other director’s productions and in television series and films. In addition to the actors, the crew of Wunderbaum consists of Maarten Van Otterdijk (designer), Jeroen Versteele (editor), Maartje Van Doodewaard (business manager/production), Josine Gilissen (sales, planning and communication), Carry Hendriks (production manager) and Eva van den Hove (office manager). For each project Wunderbaum starts a form of cooperation with different fellow artistic workers, often from various disciplines: music, visual arts, film and architecture.

Rotterdam (Rotterdamse Schouwburg) is Wunderbaum’s operating base. The theatre group can also often be found in Ghent (NTGent), Antwerp (Monty) and Amsterdam (Frascati). Wunderbaum is a regular guest at foreign festivals such as in Graz, Odessa, Istanbul, Teheran, Santarcangelo, Budapest…

Frances-Marie Uitti, Photo: courtesy of the artist

Friday, March 23, 2012 at 8:30PM
REDCAT – Los Angeles, CA

Dutch cellist Frances-Marie Uitti makes a rare Los Angeles appearance for the debut of Michael Jon Fink’s new cello concerto, written especially for her pioneering technique of playing with two bows simultaneously, and chamber ensemble. Known for a prodigious career of dismantling longstanding musical boundaries, Uitti follows with another world premiere by Greg Moore, and works by Lisa Bielawa, Jonathan Harvey, Giacinto Scelsi, Karen Tanaka, and Ken Ueno, most written for Uitti’s incredible interpretations.

“The spectacularly gifted cellist Frances-Marie Uitti has made a career out of demolishing musical boundaries. She has developed new techniques (most famously, playing with two bows simultaneously), collaborated with a who’s who of contemporary composers, and pushed the cello into realms of unexpected beauty and expression…. Uitti showed why she might be the most interesting cellist on the planet.”  Washington Post 2011

Frances-Marie Uitti, composer/performer, pioneered a revolutionary dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. Using two bows in one hand, this invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting 4-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato vs articulated playing. György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Horatio Radulescu, Lisa Bielawa are among many who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her.

Collaborating significantly over years with radicals, Dick Raaijmakers, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi, she has also worked closely with Iannis Xenakis, Elliott Carter, Brian Ferneyhough and countless composers from the new generation.
She tours as solist extensively throughout the world having played for audiences from New York City to Mongolia and appears regularly in such festivals as the Biennale Di Venezia, Strasbourg Festival, Gulbenkian Festival Ars Musica, Holland Festival and for radios and televisions in Europe, Japan, and the United States. She premiered cello concerti dedicated to her by Per Norgaard, Dick Raaijmakers, Jonathan Harvey, James Tenney, Peter Nelson and gave the first performance of the cello concerto of William Jeths in 2000. She premiered the newly discovered concerto by Giacinto Scelsi in 2008.

She’s collaborated with pianist Rolf Hind, classical pianist Alwin Bar, filmmakers Frank Scheffer and Frans Zwartjes, avantgarde guitarist Elliott Sharp, accordionist Pauline Oliveros, DJ Scanner, DJ Low, and Stephen Vitiello and video master Ferenc van Damme.

Her compositons can be heard on ECM records, Cryptogrammophone, JdKrecords, Seraphin, Etcetera, and BVHaast.