Lincoln Center Festival 2004
Presents
DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
French-literary-theory-meets-Grandmaster-Flash-on-after-hours.
– Rolling Stone
Rebirth of a Nation
New York Premiere
July 23 and 24
~
Transmetropolitan
World Premiere
July 21
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts presents its ninth international summer arts festival, Lincoln Center Festival 2004, July 6 through July 25, celebrating diverse cultural traditions and exploring and challenging artistic boundaries.
Lincoln Center Festival 2004 is sponsored by Bloomberg and Altria Group, Inc.
Since its inception, one of the primary missions of the Festival has been to showcase contemporary artistic viewpoints, non–Western cultural perspectives, and multidisciplinary contexts. Two distinct programs, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation and TransMetropolitan, both created by New York City-based musician, conceptual artist, and writer Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid,” will address these goals as well as make some provocative statements on the influence of our media-saturated culture.
The multi-media works to be presented at the Festival are the latest in Paul Millers ever evolving collection of post-modern sculptures. Practicing in the concept of “Total Media,” Miller believes there are no divisions among art, music, and other aspects of cultural output.
Both programs take place at Alice Tully Hall, 65th Street and Broadway. Tickets for DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation are $35 and tickets for TransMetropolitan are $25. Tickets for Festival 2004 go on sale April 26 for multiple-event buyers via CenterCharge, 212-721-6500, online at www.lincolncenter.org and via mail/fax. Single tickets go on sale June 2 at the Avery Fisher Hall Box Office, 65th Street and Broadway, as well as at all of the above outlets.
DJ Spooky’s Rebrith of a Nation
Friday, July 23 at 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 24 at 8:30 p.m.
Co-commissioned by Lincoln Center Festival, Festival D’Automne, and Spoleto Festival USA.
This live “remix” of D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation is a compelling, uncompromising and controversial examination of race in America, both past and present, and an exploration of how America’s image of itself is filtered through the lens of the media.
Considered a seminal work for its cinematic innovation, artistry, and technical effects, Griffith’s film is also notable for its profound racism and tainted view of American history in which the Ku Klux Klan are the heroes of the Civil War. Rebirth is Miller’s response to the film, both as an African American and an heir to film’s technological influence.
Projected onto three screens, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation combines segments of the film under- and overlaid with graphics and visual effects, including footage of dance legend Bill T. Jones in a hypnotic piece inspired by African American history in the South. DJ Spooky has also composed a soundtrack blending jungle, dub, space rock, ambient, and hip-hop, with an original violin piece composed and performed live by Daniel Bernard Roumain.
Each performance of Rebirth of A Nation will be different, as Miller incorporates and manipulates different audio and vision samples for the work. Through the work, he is attempting to break the cycle of racism and hatred perpetuated with Griffith’s film through a repetition of samples from the work. “America’s favorite pastime is forgetting,” he explains.
At its recent US Premiere at Spoleto USA in Charleston, South Carolina, audiences responded to the repeated loops and visual rhythms with awe, shock, sadness, and feelings of optimism. Most importantly, the piece spurred immediate and passionate discussions on race long after each performance had ended.
While I was expecting something more music-oriented, “Rebirth” is truly an artwork. Through the rhythmic repetition of “samples” D.W. Griffith’s original film – actors in black face, black’s being beaten, and other degrading scenes – Paul Miller hopes to challenge and uproot some of the seeds of hatred and cycles of prejudice the original film planted and cultivated in American culture.
In addition to addressing Griffith’s work in terms of its technique and content, Rebirth serves as a provocative example of the creative use of material in the public domain. The work demands query and discussion of the validation of “reinterpreted” and “revisionist” art and whether there is an ethical responsibility involved in altering an artwork’s context. By “remixing” the film, DJ Spooky is also demonstrating how the esthetics of hip-hop and turntablism have not only been adopted by other art forms, but become part of the modern consciousness as an accepted means of expression and commentary.
DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation was developed in workshops in 2002 as part of the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco and in 2003 at MASS MoCA, Washington Performing Arts Society, and the American Museum of the Moving Image. The completed work receives its New York Premiere at Festival 2004 and will tour throughout the US and internationally through 2005.
TransMetropolitan
Wednesday, July 21 at 8 p.m.
DJ Spooky serves as both artist and curator for TransMetropolitan, an extraordinary, one-night-only live fusion of music, video, spoken word, and theater performance inspired by Duke Ellington’s groundbreaking 1971 release The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.
Ellington drew from the sights and sounds he experienced through his extensive world travels, as well as the writings of 1960s Canadian cultural critic Marshall McLuhan, who proposed that the world was becoming “orientalized” and that no one would be able to retain his or her cultural identity. Ellington’s jazz suite explores rhythmic links between African and Asian cultures and the sounds of the “global village.”
DJ Spooky regards DJ culture as a “new jazz.” With TransMetropolitan, he embarks on a new, but similarly inspired, adventure in further surveying what has become known as the “Fourth World.” The program will take Ellington’s cross-cultural platform further and explore the links between art forms, ideas, and uses of media in an increasingly globalized world.
“Today, we are living in a different America,” he explains of the project. “It is place that we realize has always been hybrid, has always been mixed, and that, through music, has become a global reflection site of hope, change, and transformation.”
A 2002 dialogue with jazz pianist Matthew Shipp offers further insight into the ideas behind TransMetropolitan: “Writer McKenzie Wark talks about how ‘we no longer have roots, we have aerials.’ For him, contemporary life is all about just taking in all the frequencies…I’m into conceptual stuff like that, but engaged in a real world context of actively bring together all the disparate styles….I like to think of it as rhythmic pan-humanism.”
For Transmetropolitan, DJ Spooky will lead-off the evening with a new collaborative work. Colson Whitehead, the award-winning New York-based author of The Intuitionist, will read excerpts of his work accompanied by a new video “backdrop” created by DJ Spooky and live, solo violin performance by Daniel Bernard Roumain. The program also features the music and video work of Japanese technopop pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto; live “mash up” video mixes by London’s Eclectic Method; Sri Lankan artist and activist Tanya Selvaratnam, who created the award-winning multimedia project Alladeen, accompanied by New York South Asian dance music pioneer DJ Rekha; award-winning British-Asian cultural pioneer and cutting edge musician and producer Nitin Sawhney, whose work is influenced by the British pop and traditional Indian music he grew up with, as well as Latin rhythms; New York writer and new media artist Beth Coleman who will read from “Theory of Messages,” commissioned by painter Chris Ofili for his 2003 Venice Biennale exhibition catalogue, as part of a new collaboration with Pakistani playwright and conceptualist Ibrahim Quraishi and Indian-American jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer.
Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician based in New York City. His father, Paul E. Miller, was dean of Howard University’s law school in Washington and an adviser to the Black Panthers and Angela Davis. Since 1966, his mother, Rosemary E. Reed Miller, has run the store Toast and Strawberries, on D.C.’s Dupont Circle, where she sells fabrics from around the world. He studied philosophy and French literature at Bowdoin College in Maine during the late ’80s and early ’90s and hosted a show called “Dr. Seuss’ Eclectic Jungle” on the college radio station. The young DJ created theatrical soundscapes by mixing spoken texts with beats, a technique that has become a signature. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine, among other publications. With legendary African American downtown poet Steve Cannon, Miller is co-publisher of A Gathering of Tribes, a magazine devoted to new works by writers working from a multi-cultural context. Miller was the first Editor-At-Large of the cutting-edge digital magazine, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture. His work as a conceptual artist has been featured in museums and galleries in the United States and overseas, including at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, Vienna’s Kunsthalle, and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. His most recent art project, created for L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is “Errata Erratum” an internet based remix of Marcel Duchamp’s “errata musical” and “sculpture musical” works from 1912-1915. Widely-known as a musician, under the moniker of “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid,” Miller has created an enormous body of music and has collaborated, with, among others, Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. His most recent albums are Optometry, a collaborative jazz project and Dubtometry, a dub remix of Optometry, released in 2002-2003 by Thirsty Ear Recordings. Modern Mantra, a mix CD of the Instinct/Shadow Records catalog was released at the same time. Miller’s book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and multimedia will be published in 2004 by Routledge Press.
Beth Coleman was born in 1969 in New York. She is an artist mixing in text and sound. She has created live sound and installation work for the 1997 Whitney Biennial, P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, the Mirror’s Edge exhibition, and IASPIS Stockholm, among others. Her writing has published in Parkett magazine, as well as various journals, catalogues, and collections for Random House and New York University Press, among others. Painter Chris Ofili commissioned her writing “Theory of Messages” for his 2003 Venice Biennale exhibition catalogue. Coleman is a 2003 Rockefeller New Media Fellow and is currently editing a collection entitled Difference Engines (MIT Press). Since 1995, she has been co-director of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, an electronic-media group, and the label SoundLab Records. She also DJs internationally under the name M. Singe.
Eclectic Method is B.R.K. (Jonny Wilson), Cutswift (Ian Edgar), and Geoff Gamlen, a trio of London-based deejays. In 2002 innovative DJs popularized the “mash-up,” underground remixes that merge two different songs – generally music from one, vocals from another – to forge an entirely new music creation. Eclectic Method takes the same approach and applies it to both audio and video, ultimately creating matching video edits that enhance the music visually. Samples from all visual mediums, from television to feature films, get worked into the musical mix. In 2001, Eclectic Method crafted their inaugural audio-visual remix by cutting up the classic kung fu flick “The Chessboxer.” Overflowing with punches, kicks, and blocks, the film was ripe with sound effects, and the group edited the footage in such a way as to make rhythmic music out of the onscreen fighting. The trio soon tried their hand at music, and the results included new video remixes pairing Britney Spears and N.W.A., Q-Tip and the Wizard of Oz, Dr. Dre/Eminem and Indiana Jones, U2 and the Beastie Boys, and Busta Rhymes with Guns ‘n’ Roses. Eclectic Method’s multimedia live sets are a wildly popular in clubs around Europe. Its artistic vision reaches countless other fans on MTV Europe with the video remix show, MTV Mash, for which Eclectic Method both influenced and continues to provide a great deal of the content.
Born in London, raised in Queens and Westbury, Long Island, Rekha Malhotra, a.k.a DJ Rekha is one of the pioneers of New York’s South Asian music scene. As founder of Basement Bhangra™ and co-founder of Mutiny she has been instrumental in introducing the sounds of Bhangra and British Asian music to North America. Beginning her DJ career while still a student at Queens College, Rekha was drawn to radio through an interest in community activism. Community radio introduced her to filmmaker Vivek Bald who shared an appreciation for music coming out of the UK on Nation records (i.e. Fun da mental, Asian Dub Foundation). In November of 1997 she co-organized a fundraising event for a documentary was assembling on the Asian presence in UK dance music which grew into a monthly event named for the film: Mutiny. By that time, however, Rekha was already well known for her involvement in another monthly event. In November of 1996, a “Dance India” showcase organized by the Ethnic Folk Arts center paired her with Toronto’s Punjabi By Nature, and in February of the following year she opened for the group at SOBs nightclub in Manhattan. The club was so impressed by the hundreds who turned out on a Tuesday night that Rekha and her partner DJ Joy were asked to develop a concept for a regular night. One month later Basement Bhangra™ (named with respect for the basement parties where she got her start) was launched. Considered by Jane magazine to be “among the genre’s most important players in the United States” Rekha has also been pivotal in forging the international network that sustains Bhangra and other contemporary South Asian music. Through her production company Sangament (sangam is Hindi for confluence – a place where two rivers flow together) she has brought artists like Bally Sagoo, Apache Indian and Asian Dub Foundation to some of New York’s best-known live venues. Having always viewed her involvement with music as inseparable from community activism, Rekha lectures extensively at colleges and institutions about Bhangra and South Asian cultural production. In May of 2000 she spoke about the evolution of Bhangra music for the Smithsonian Institute’s first ever South Asian public program. She has also given a talk and demo at the Museum of Natural History on hip-hop and the South Asian music scene and has given numerous DJ workshops to youth nationwide, including the well-known Take Back the Decks. Her latest project, Your Attention Please, is a monthly fundraiser that partners with organizations addressing such issues as human rights, domestic abuse and police brutality and gives her a chance to bring classical, non-dance oriented South Asian music into a club setting.
Vijay Iyer is a pianist and composer based in New York City. The son of Indian immigrants, Vijay draws from African, Asian, and European musical lineages to create music beyond category. His critically acclaimed compact discs include Memorophilia (Asian Improv), Architextures (Asian Improv/Red Giant), Panoptic Modes (Red Giant), Your Life Flashes (with the collaborative trio Fieldwork, on Pi Recordings), and Blood Sutra (Artists House), as well as In What Language? with Mike Ladd (Pi Recordings). Iyer performs frequently in the New York area, and tours internationally with his various ensembles and collaborations. He has also been a featured performer with artists such as Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Amiri Baraka, Imani Uzuri, Butch Morris, Miya Masaoka, Will Power, and Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar. For his own projects, Iyer has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Arts International, Creative Capital, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. He also lectures and publishes on various topics, including improvisation, cognitive science, and jazz studies. Iyer is recipient of the 2003 Alpert Award in the Arts.
Pakistani playwright and conceptualist Ibrahim Quraishi’s works focus on contemporary issues of migration and alienation. During the past three years, Quraishi has directed for the Maryinsky Theater, St. Petersburg; the Samara State Theater, Russia; Dastaan Drama Circle, Pakistan; and, the New York Fringe Festival. His film Dust Upon US was presented in Paris/Lahore in March 2000. Quraishi was born in Nairobi, raised in Tunisia, Karachi, Belgrade and Moscow, and now resides alternately in Paris and New York.
Composer/performer Daniel Bernard Roumain has arrived on the musical scene as an intriguing and innovative artist with his synthesis of musical forms. University-trained and living, composing, performing, and teaching in Harlem, Dr. Roumain represents one of the most exciting developments in contemporary music. Blending classical and hip-hop idioms and styles, he is one of the first new and relevant artists of the 21st century. By the time Roumain had entered high school, he had already performed and collaborated with artists ranging from Ray Charles, to Dizzy Gillespie, to the infamous 2 Live Crew. He has collaborated with DJ Spooky, the conductor/flutist Paul Dunkel, and pianist Christopher Oldfather. Premieres in the 2002-03 season included Dred Violin, Roumain’s new, evening-length solo, String Quartet No. 3, Angelou, commissioned by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. Roumain has recently been named the Assistant Composer-in-Residence at the Grammy award-winning Orchestra of St. Luke’s and is the Music Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
Award-winning composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto has made a career of crossing musical and technological boundaries. As a child, he studied music composition under Professor Matsumoto at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. He is a graduate of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music with a BA in composition and a masters degree with a concentration in electronic and ethnic music. In 1978, Sakamoto formed Yellow Magic Orchestra along with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi. Their second album sold well over a million copies and made them, with Kraftwerk, the kings of technopop. YMO went on to develop a following that continues today and its influence on the rave, techno, and ambient Movements is widely recognized. In 1983, he began what would become a highly successful career composing film soundtracks with music for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. In 1987, his score for Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor won him an Oscar, a Grammy, a Golden Globe, as well as the New York, Los Angeles and British Film Critics Association awards for best original soundtrack. He has also composed soundtracks for Oliver Stone (Wild Palms), Pedro Almodovar (High Heels), and Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes and Femme Fatale). He also wrote the epic “El Mar Mediterrani” for the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games. This diversity has carried over in Sakamoto’s collaborations with, among others, David Bowie, David Byrne, David Sylvian, Iggy Pop, Youssou N’dour, Robbie Robertson, Caetano Veloso, as well as writers William Burroughs and William Gibson. In 1999 Sakamoto’s first opera, “Life,” premiered with seven sold-out performances in Tokyo and Osaka. This ambitious project featured contributions and performances by over one hundred performers, including Jose Carreras, Salif Keita, Bernardo Bertolucci, Salman Rushdie, Pina Bausch, His Holiness Dalai Lama, and members of the Frankfurt Ballet. In 1999 he premiered his first collaboration with Robert Wilson with “THE DAYS BEFORE: Death, Destruction & Detroit III.” In 2004 Sakamoto returns to his electronic roots with Chasm, to be released worldwide in May.
Cultural pioneer and cutting edge musician Nitin Sawhney draws on influences ranging from urban R&B to Indian classical music and the Velvet Underground. His most recent album is the critically acclaimed 2003 release Human. On previous works Spirit Dance (1993), Migration (1995), and Displacing The Priest (1996), Sawhney has explored outward questions of religion, politics and racial identity. 1999’s Beyond Skin looked beyond cultural boundaries, while his last album, the millenial epic Prophesy, involved a trip around the world and spanned the range of human experience – from aborigines in Australia, to a choir of Soweto schoolchildren, to a New York taxi driver alienated by technology. A musical innovator and gifted multi-instrumentalist, arranger and producer, he has merged Indian classical music with jazz, dance beats and electronica, and won a host of awards. In 2000 he was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and received the prestigious South Bank Show Award for Beyond Skin, while he has garnered a MOBO Award and a Boundary Crossing BBC Radio 3 Music Award for 2001’s Prophesy. Born and bred in South East London, Sawhney has become a latter-day Renaissance man. After studying Law at Liverpool University, he teamed up with actor and school friend Sanjeev Bhaskar to create the comedy act “Secret Asians” for BBC Radio, and co-devised the ensuing BBC TV comedy series “Goodness Gracious Me.” He also played acid-jazz with the James Taylor Quartet, formed his own band, The Jazztones, and collaborated with tabla player Talvin Singh in the Tihai Trio, before forging a solo career. He has toured worldwide, written for Sinead O’Connor, remixed for Sir Paul McCartney and Sting, and produced for Algeria Rai maestro Cheb Mami. He’s also composed scores for films such as Dance of Shiva and Anita and Me, and his TV credits include soundtracks for BBC documentary “The Sikhs,” C4’s “Bodily Harm,” and a forthcoming C4 adaptation of “Twelfth Night.” Steeped in Indian and Western classical music as well as rock, he has written for The Proms (2000’s Urban Prophecies), the Britten Sinfonia (2001’s Neural Circuits), and is due to compose an orchestral suite for the English Chamber Orchestra. Last year, Sawhney also recorded “Varekai” the latest offering from Circque du Soleil.
Tanya Selvaratnam was a member of the 10-person Acting Company of the Institute on Arts & Civic Dialogue under the directorship of Anna Deavere Smith in 1998/1999. She has also been an associate of The Wooster Group for six years. Her feature film producing debut, On_Line, recently had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2002 and its European premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival 2002. As an activist, Tanya has been employed by the Ms. Foundation for Women, the United Nations/NGO Forum on Women in China, the World Health Organization. Tanya completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Chinese Legal History at Harvard University. She was born in Sri Lanka, raised in Long Beach, California and has been based for many years in Brooklyn, New York.
Colson Whitehead was born in New York City and grew up on the Upper West Side. After graduating from Harvard University he worked for several years as a writer for the Village Voice. His first novel, “The Intuitionist,” won the QPB New Voices Award and was an Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award finalist, and he received the New York Public Library Literary Lions Award for “John Henry Days.” He is also the recipient of a White Writers’ Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
