The Victory Project, coming to Brooklyn’s Roulette on March 22,  is an interactive duet installation between composer/electronic musician, Ryan Ingebritsen and performance/dance artist, Erica Mott. Victory Project presents a series of trans-disciplinary performances that incorporate interactive image, sound, text, movement and sculptural objects to dismantle allegories that confuse and conflate patriotism and perversity. Beginning with the inquiry into whether or not the concept of ‘victory’ is a gendered notion, the performances examine the female body as tool, symbol, bounty, and weapon during and post conflict.

The Victory Project takes place Friday, March 22nd at 8pm at Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NYC (On the corner of Atlantic & 3rd Aves)
. Tickets are $15/$10 Students/Seniors/Members. For more information visit roulette.org or purchase tickets online.

Structurally, the performance cultivates interdependency between movement and sound, allowing the body to become musical instrument both dictating musical composition and moving in ways to serve the sonic score. The touring version of the Victory Project features choreography, object design and performance by Mott, sound composition and performance by Ingebritsen, interactive video design by John Boesche, light design by Todd Clark, and dramaturgy by Ginger Farley.

Erica Mott is a performance/dance artist engaged and enlivened by the conversation between movement, sound, video and object. She has been called “ingenious” by the Chicago Reader’s Laura Molzahn, and “a vibrant performance-maker, object designer and choreographer engaged with distinctive creative research and methodology, effectively complimented by articulate and generous teaching skills, mentoring, community and audience building, and public discussion about her work” by CJ Mitchell, Deputy Director, Live Arts Development Agency, UK Erica’s recent performances were featured at Audio Art Festival (Krakow, Poland), Free Fall Festival (Toronto, Canada), Ingenuity Fest (Cleveland), NES (Skagastrond, Iceland), Museo del Ferrocarril and CASA (Oaxaca, Mexico), CAD Special Exhibitions Space/Artopolis (Chicago). Erica has collaborated nationally with Tim Miller, Eighth Blackbird, Sharon Bridgforth, Coman Poon/re[public] in/decency, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. She works with Gomez-Pena’s collective, La Pocha Nostra, as a core troupe member. Erica is a recipient of several awards including Amnesty International’s Patrick Stewart Human Rights Fellowship (to teach performing arts South Africa), The Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Ragdale Foundation Residency, NES Artist, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Fellowship, MetLife New Stages for Dance, the City of Chicago CAAP program and the Neighborhood Arts Program (NAP).
http://www.ericamott.com/

Composer, sound designer, and electronic performer Ryan Ingebritsen‘s music and sound art focus on the multi-dimensional aspects of sound while attaining a degree of clarity and lyricism to permeate and reveal the musical structures he creates. His music challenges performers to extend beyond themselves into the realm of interaction with visual, electronic, and natural experience providing audiences a window to observe our multi-dimensional universe through the interplay and interaction of sound. A graduate of St. Olaf College and the University of Cincinnati, he won a Fulbright scholarship to Poland where he studied under Zbigniew Bujarski and Marek Choloniewski. He has collaborated with and been commissioned by artists such as Todd Reynolds (bang on a can), International Contemporary Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, Beta Collide, Firewire, Till by Turring, Gold Sparkle and Stars Like Fleas. As a sound designer and engineer, he has worked with groups such as Grammy award winning ensemble eighth blackbird, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and has premiered works by Steve Reich, David Lang, Julia Wolf, Michael Gordon, and Steve Mackey. He has designed sound for the Tune In festival at the Park Avenue Armory including the New York premier of John Luther Adams’ Iniksuit as well as for the 2011 Reich 75th birthday celebration in Millennium Park.
http://wcawm.com/site/

Composer/Choreographer Series is part of Dance Roulette. Dance Roulette is made possible by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Based on the book of the same title by Jaap Polak and Ina Soep Polak, STEAL A PENCIL FOR ME, a new opera with music by Gerald Cohen and libretto by Deborah Brevoort, will have its premiere in Scarsdale and New York City, NY in late April, 2013.

STEAL A PENCIL FOR ME is a love story set in two concentration camps during World War II. It is based on the true story of Jaap and Ina Polak, whom the composer has known for the last 25 years, and who just celebrated their 100th and 90th birthdays.

The Polaks, who live in Eastchester, NY, will be in attendance at each performance. In 2007, STEAL A PENCIL FOR ME was made into a compelling and award-winning documentary feature film by Academy Award® nominee Michèle Ohayon. The Polaks have dedicated their lives to teaching about the Holocaust and fighting prejudice. Jaap was one of the founders of the Anne Frank Center USA, and now serves as Chairman Emeritus.

These semi-staged concert opera performances will take place on:

-Sunday April 28, 2 p.m. at Shaarei Tikvah Congregation, Scarsdale NY

-Tuesday April 30, 7 p.m. at Feinberg Auditorium, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, NY

Shaarei Tikvah Congregation is located at 46 Fox Meadow Road, Scarsdale NY. Individual tickets are $30 at the door; $25 in advance; $15 for seniors and $10 for students. Please contact (914) 472-2013 or [email protected]. Jewish Theological Seminary is located at 3080 Broadway (at 122nd st.), New York, NY. Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) is located at 3080 Broadway (at 122nd st.), New York, NY. Tickets, available at www.jtsa.edu/stealapencil, are $25 in advance, $30 at the door; $15 for seniors; free for students with valid ID.

New York-based composer Gerald Cohen (www.GeraldCohenMusic.com) is equally at home in the composition of chamber music, choral music, opera, and liturgical music, for all of which he has won awards and praise, and for which Gramophone Magazine noted his “linguistic fluidity and melodic gift”. His operas Sarah and Hagar, a two-act opera based on the story from the book of Genesis, and Seed, a one-act opera about love and choices for a post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve, have been performed in concert form. Cohen received a B.A in music from Yale University and a D.M.A in composition from Columbia University.

New York-based librettist Deborah Brevoort (www.DeborahBrevoort.com) is formerly from Alaska.  An award-winning playwright and librettist, she moves easily between the worlds of theatre, musical theatre and opera.  Her plays and musicals are produced regularly to enthusiastic reviews, including Time Out London who noted her “gift for high poetry.”  Deborah holds a B.A. from Kent State University and MFA’s from Brown University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

More biographical information about the composer and librettist is at the end of this release.

The action of the opera takes place in Amsterdam, at Westerbork Transit camp, and at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp between the years of 1943-1945. Thirty-year old Jaap Polak is unhappily married to Manja, a social butterfly with a sharp tongue. He falls in love with twenty-year old Ina Soep, whose boyfriend, Rudi Acohen, has been seized and deported to Poland by the Nazis. When the husband, his wife, and his new girlfriend are deported to Westerbork, they actually find themselves living in the same barracks. Jaap’s wife objects to the relationship and Jaap and Ina resort to writing secret love letters, which sustain them throughout the horrible circumstances of the war. As Jaap says: “I’m a very special Holocaust survivor. I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend; and believe me, it wasn’t easy.”

Although friends and relatives of theirs, including Rudi, perished in the camps, Jaap and Ina survived the Holocaust. They have been married for over 65 years and now live in Eastchester, NY. A distinguishing feature of their book of letters is how they allowed the story to unfold; unedited; their shortcomings and faults are just as easy to see as their nobility, and their honesty makes the story compelling and real. The Village Voice wrote that their story “offers a corrective to the sentimental prevailing notion that the Shoah only happened to saints.”

The cast and a small instrumental ensemble will be conducted by Ari Pelto and with stage direction by Beth Greenberg. This production will star Ilana Davidson and Robert Balonek as Ina and Jaap, and the cast will also include vocal soloists Toby Newman, Nils Neubert, Cherry Duke, Ricardo Rivera, Matthew Singer, Miloslav Antonov, and Enrico Lagasca. Cori Ellison serves as dramaturg and artistic consultant.

Composer Gerald Cohen’s recent honors in composition include an Artist Residency in American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program, the 2008 Borromeo String Quartet Award of the Aaron Copland House, a 2007 Aaron Copland Award, the Westchester Prize for New Work, the American Composers Forum Faith Partners residency, and the Cantors Assembly’s Max Wohlberg Award for distinguished achievement in the field of Jewish composition. Cohen has received commissioning grants from Meet the Composer/National Endowment for the Arts and from the New York State Council on the Arts/Westchester Arts Council; residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Yaddo; as well as Yale University’s Sudler Prize for outstanding achievement in the creative arts. He is Cantor at Shaarei Tikvah Congregation in Scarsdale, N.Y. and is on the faculty of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

Librettist Deborah Brevoort is best known for The Women of Lockerbie, which is performed throughout the US and internationally after winning the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award and the silver medal in the Onassis International playwriting competition. She wrote the opera libretto for Embedded (composer: Patrick Soluri), which was commissioned by the American Lyric Theater. It will be presented in the Ft. Worth Opera’s Frontier Festival.  She is a two-time winner of the Frederick Loewe Award in musical theatre for King Island Christmas with David Friedman and Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing, with Scott Richards.  Other works include: Crossing Over, an Amish hip hop musical with Stephanie Salzman; Blue Moon Over Memphis, a Noh drama about Elvis; The Poetry of Pizza,  a comedy about love; The Comfort Team, about military spouses, The Blue-Sky Boys about NASA’s Apollo mission. Deborah was a resident artist in the Composer Librettist Development Program at the American Lyric Theatre. She teaches at Goddard College, Columbia University and NYU.

San Francisco Baroque Ensemble Musica Pacifica will tour to Hawaii in April 2013 with the following appearances:

April 25, 2013: Hawaii Concert Society; 7:30 pm Hilo, HI

April 27, 2013: Early Music Hawaii; 7:30 pm Honolulu, HI

Musica Pacifica has, since its founding in 1990, become widely recognized as one of America’s premier baroque ensembles, lauded for both the dazzling virtuosity and the warm expressiveness of its performances. They have been described by the press as “some of the finest baroque musicians in America” (American Record Guide) and “among the best in the world” (Alte Musik Aktuell). At home in the San Francisco Bay area, the artists perform with Philharmonia Baroque and American Bach Soloists, and appear with many other prominent ensembles nationally and abroad.