CU Boulder Theatre and Dance is proud to welcome avant-garde Japanese musician TATSUYA NAKATANI and the NAKATANI GONG ORCHESTRA to the CU Loft Theatre of the University Theatre building on December 7th for a very special Live performance of gong music and Butoh dance-theater.
Nakatani is renowned in the world of avant-garde music for his radical, transformative approaches to playing East Asian GONGS. He effectively utilizes double bass bows and homemade adapted bows in order to play various configurations of cymbals and gongs, creating intensely visceral and hypnotic soundscapes reminiscent of strings, horns, and electronics, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can also recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in the traditional Japanese music of Nakatani's homeland....
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CU Boulder Theatre and Dance is proud to welcome avant-garde Japanese musician TATSUYA NAKATANI and the NAKATANI GONG ORCHESTRA to the CU Loft Theatre of the University Theatre building on December 7th for a very special Live performance of gong music and Butoh dance-theater.
Nakatani is renowned in the world of avant-garde music for his radical, transformative approaches to playing East Asian GONGS. He effectively utilizes double bass bows and homemade adapted bows in order to play various configurations of cymbals and gongs, creating intensely visceral and hypnotic soundscapes reminiscent of strings, horns, and electronics, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can also recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in the traditional Japanese music of Nakatani's homeland.
For this event, Nakatani will perform an improvised musical score accompanied by a dance piece in the style of Japanese Butoh choreographed by PhD student Iván-Daniel Espinosa, creating an immersive exploration of sound and movement! Afterwards, Nakatani will conduct his 17-piece NAKATANI GONG ORCHESTRA, featuring several student performers from the CU College of Music and CU Theatre & Dance.
This is a rare artistic presentation not to be missed! RSVP required.
This event is FREE and made possible by The Roser Visiting Artist Endowment Program.
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ABOUT THE MUSIC:
TATSUYA NAKATANI is an avant-garde sound artist, composer, and master percussionist from Osaka, Japan. Since the late 1990s, Nakatani has released over 80 recordings in the USA and Europe and has toured extensively; performing solo, in collaboration with other artists, and with his large musical ensemble project: the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. He presents master classes, workshops, and lectures across the USA and around the world. Nakatanis primary music activities include solo percussive performance, his Nakatani Gong Orchestra (NGO), and collaborations with musicians and dancers both in live performance and recordings. Nakatani has spent the last 20 years traveling and performing extensively throughout the United States, Japan and beyond. His constant touring fosters the raw and fresh quality in his music which can only survive through an open willingness to share energy, culture, music and self on a global human scale.
Tatsuya Nakatanis approach to music is visceral, non-linear and raw, expressing a strong spirit while resisting genre. He creates sound with both traditional and extended percussion techniques. Utilizing his adapted bowed gong, drums, cymbals, mallets, singing bowls, metal objects and bells, as well as various sticks, kitchen tools, and his breath, he manifests an intense and organic music that represents a very immersive sonic world. His approach is steeped in the sensibilities of free improvisation, experimental music, jazz, and noise music, and yet retains the sense of space and quiet beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music. His percussive instruments can imitate the sound of a trumpet, a stringed instrument, an electronic deviceto the extent that it becomes difficult to recognize the source of the sound. He has devoted himself to a musical aesthetic where rhythm gives way to pulse, often in a way that is not always audible or visible, in currents that incorporate silence and texture.
ABOUT THE CHOREOGRAPHER:
Iván-Daniel Espinosa is a Latino performance artist, choreographer and artistic scholar that specializes in Butoh, an avant-garde dance form born in post-WW2 Japan. Iván-Daniel has presented both stage performances and installation art nationwide at venues such as New York University (NYU), Seattle International Butoh Festival, Houston Fringe Festival, La Mama Experimental Theatre in NYC, the historic Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and numerous academic conferences. Iván-Daniel holds a Master of Arts degree in Performance Studies from NYU's highly renowned Tisch School of the Arts and is currently a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at CU Boulder.
The choreography and aesthetics of Iván-Daniel's performances are highly influenced by his extensive studies of Butoh. He has trained with numerous Butoh master teachers including Hiroko and Koichi Tamano, Natsu Nakajima, Eiko Otake of Eiko & Koma, and Seattle Butoh pioneer Joan Laage. Iván-Daniel is the co-founder and co-director of the Salish Sea Butoh Festival, an annual festival that takes place on the Olympic Peninsula to celebrate and deepen the study of Butoh with artists from all over the world.
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