New music-theater works by writer-composers Rick Burkhardt and Gelsey Bell, including the world premiere of Burkhardt’s PASSOVER, and new scenes from Bell’s Rolodex. Both composers explore the vocalizing instrumentalist in disjointed modes of storytelling.
Sun. Jul. 17, 2016, 8pm
JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
Rick Burkhardt – PASSOVER
Gelsey Bell – Rolodex
Rick Burkhardt – The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving
Gelsey Bell, voice
John Murchinson, bass and voice
Paul Pinto, percussion and voice
Erin Rogers, percussion and saxophone
Rave Duder, clarinet and voice
Commissioned by thingNY, PASSOVER is a performance-ritual for six singing/speaking performers, seated at a dinner table on which there lies a double bass. Each performer relates the story of a friend’s escape: from a bad marriage, from an unfair situation at work, from a run-in with a traffic cop, from an ethically compromising opportunity, from an awkward family dinner. Ultimately, it becomes clear that all of these friends form one collective identity.
thingNY’s own Gelsey Bell will lead the ensemble in new songs from her evolving game-piece opera Rolodex. Praised by the New York Times as “imaginative,” with work that is “uncomfortably powerful,” “virtuosic,” and “haunting,” Bell draws on techniques across music and theatre to create a disjointed storytelling with a score in the form of a rolodex.
Also on the program, another of Burkhardt’s table-top music-theater piece from 2003, the award-winning The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, for three speaking percussionists. Time Out New York declared that Hymn “has taught us to listen to the conversation in several keys, and the virtuosic performers play them all—the troubling bassline of violence, the abrasive tenor of self-righteousness, and, every now and then, the clear, bright treble of a really funny joke.”
http://www.thingny.com/events/dr-sandwich-bellthingnyburkhardt