Screen Play by Christian Marclay

Time: Wednesday, October 22nd at 7:30 pm
Location: Xujiahui Park (Metro Line 1), Shanghai
Performers: Elliott Sharp, Wu Na, Wang Li Chuan, Ben Houge, Yan Jun, Bruce Gremo and Top Floor Circus

Presented as part of Final Cut of the Shanghai eArts Festival 2008. A PERFORMA production.

Screen Play is a video score by artist Christian Marclay in which found film footage is combined with computer animation to create a visual projection interpreted by live musicians.

As Marclay says, “Moving images and graphics gives musicians visual cues suggesting emotion, energy, rhythm, pitch, volume, and duration. I believe in the power of images to evoke sound.”

Screen Play was first presented in New York in 2005 as part of Performa 05, the city’s first biennial of new visual art performance. Since then, it has traveled, as part of Performa’s international touring program, to Paris, Berlin, Portugal, Denmark, and Mexico City, among other locations.

For its Shanghai premiere, which is organized by Defne Ayas and Davide Quadrio, for Shanghai eArts Festival 2007, and to also mark the first-ever Performa event in China, Screen Play will be interpreted by three different ensembles comprised of Chinese and international musicians. Elliott Sharp, Marclay’s long-time collaborator and fellow member of the New York avant-garde music scene, will join him to play with award-winning guqin player Wu Na and Chinese opera percussionist Wang Li Chuan, both from Beijing.

Shanghai-based composer and videogame audio guru Ben Houge will next perform his own interpretation of the score, exploring the various layers of digital information present in the video together with Yan Jun, a found-sound spinner and master of ambient soundscapes, and Bruce Gremo, a veteran improviser performing on his custom-made electronic flute controller, the Cilia. The opening act will be performed by Top Floor Circus, a Shanghai-based folk-cum-art-cum-punk band, which plans to explore the emotional subtexts of the score by sampling from their repertory.

“Having combined excerpts from Hollywood films to cacophonous effect in previous work, Mr. Marclay leapt back in film history, making a demonically spliced silent movie whose visually noisy pulsing black and white sequences were complicated by computer animations of bright, jumpy abstract dots, stripes and shapes reminiscent work by John Baldessari… It was an extraordinary evening of looking and listening.”

–Roberta Smith on Screen Play, The New York Times, 2005

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Christian Marclay

Born in 1955 in San Rafael, California and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel, Marclay is a New York-based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound and vision. Since 1979, Marclay has been experimenting with sampling both visual and audio elements, experimenting with composing and performing to create his unique “theatre of found sound.”

As a musician he has collaborated with many other performers including Butch Morris, John Zorn and Sonic Youth. He has shown and performed his work internationally, including solo shows at Tate Modern in London, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and the Venice Biennial.  He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and White Cube in London.

Wu Na

Wu Na is an award-winning guqin player who began her training at the China Conservatory in 1991 at the age of twelve. In 1997, when she was eighteen, she was invited to perform with the Taipei Folk Orchestra, the youngest guqin player from China ever to perform in Taiwan. That same year she entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing where she majored in guqin while studying the cello and double bass as well, and in 2004, she became the first musician in China to receive a Masters degree in guqin performance.

Ms. Wu’s dual education in both Chinese and Western music has inspired her to seek a new voice for the guqin in contemporary music, and she has performed and recorded with jazz, rock, and classical musicians. In 2005, she performed with China’s foremost rock star, Cui Jian, in his solo concert at the Capital Gymnasium in Beijing, and in 2006 she collaborated with the distinguished composer Liu Sola in the production of a contemporary opera, The Fantasy of the Red Queen, at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Ms. Wu has made several brief performance tours in Asia and Europe. This year, Wu Na received a scholarship from the Asian Cultural Council to live in New York for five months to research contemporary art and music in America.

Eliott Sharp

Eliott Sharp is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer who has personified the avant-garde experimental music scene in New York City for over thirty years. He has released over 200 recordings spanning the musical spectrum and leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included the Ensemble Modern;  Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry, computer artist Perry Hoberman;  blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Sonny Sharrock, Arthur Blythe, Oliver Lake, and Billy Hart; turntable innovator DJ Soulslinger; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jahjouka from Morocco. Sharp’s work was featured in the 2008 New Music Stockholm festival with the premiere of Sidebands and at the Hessischer Rundfunk Klangbiennale in May 2007 with the premiere of his orchestral work On Corlear’s Hook for the Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt, Howlin’ At The Wolfgang for The Baermann Trio, and his solo performance Momentum Anomaly. His music-theater work EmPyre was premiered at the 2006 Venice Biennale.

Top Floor Circus

Formed in 2001, Top Floor Circus is an underground avant-garde art band whose members are whimsical and full of energy. Their distinctive punk rock style has been influenced by the late scuzzy-rock freak, GG Allinhas. The band’s songs are always in the Shanghai dialect, telling the stories of back-alley life.

Bruce Gremo

Bruce Gremo is a composer-performer instrument-maker. He has been writing interactive computer music since 1997, and is the inventor of a new instrument, the Cilia, an electronic flute controller (patent pending). A classical flutist, he also specializes in extended technique and improvisational formats using the silver flute, the Japanese Shakuhachi, the Chinese Xun and others. He has been a soloist at the Lincoln Center Festival with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society; Wien Modern in Vienna as soloist with the Austrian Radio Orchestra; the BBC Proms Festival at the Royal Albert Hall in London as soloist with the Scottish BBC Symphony Orchestra; the Knitting Factory Jazz Festival under Ornette Coleman’s direction as a soloist in Skies of America; the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival as soloist with Butch Morris.

From 1990 to 2000, he frequently collaborated with Chinese composer Tan Dun as improviser, music director, synthesizer programmer, soloist and orchestra conductor. He toured over 14 months as synthesizer programmer and EWI soloist with the Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion. He has a Masters degrees in Composition (a student of Martin Bartlett) and in Philosophy (a student of Reiner Schurmann), and has taught at the New School, NYC. He now resides in Beijing where he works as a composer, orchestra flutist featured with the new Beijing orchestra XinKongQi, studio musician and teacher.

Yan Jun 

A sound artist and poet, Yan Jun was born in Lanzhou in 1973, now based in Beijing. He received his B.A. in Chinese Literature. Yan’s live performance engages space feedback, loop and voice/language to make hypnotic noise. He also creates sound art works, which related to field recording, installation, image, video, publishing and multiple forms. Formerly known as a well-known music critic and organizer in China’s underground music and sub-culture scene, in recent years, he has shifted his focus on contemporary music and sound. Yan has run the label Sub Jam since 1998. It released essential underground music and independent films. In 2004, he co-founded KwanYin Records for experimental music and sound exploration. He runs Waterland Kwanyin, a weekly event of experimental/improv music and sound art since 2005, and the annual outdoor festival Mini Midi. He also curates sound projects for DIAF Art Festival since 2004, as well Get It Louder 07.
He has published 6 books on the topic of Chinese new music and 3 poetry anthologies.

Wang Lichuan

Born in 1981, Wang Lichuan is a Peking opera percussionist, and works with the China National Peking Opera Company.
Over the years he has participated in many CCTV recording programs, such as the ans club and Avenue of Stars and House of Flying Daggers premiere, Shenzhen Folk Festival in 2006, 2007 Midi Music Festival, as well as the 2008 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

Ben Houge

Shanghai-based American composer and sound artist Ben Houge has been working at the intersection of digital art, videogames, new music, and experimental performance for years. As a videogame audio designer, he spent seven years at Sierra Entertainment and four years at Ubisoft, contributing to games as wide-ranging as Tom Clancy’s EndWar, Arcanum, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and Leisure Suit Larry 7.

As a composer, he has written for solo instruments, small ensembles, string orchestra, chorus, and electronic media, and his music has been performed on four continents. As a performer and presenter, he was a founding member of the Seattle School composers’ collective and founded the Sound Currents concert series in Seattle, providing a forum for local composers to present their works. Since moving to China in 2004, he has performed at the 2 Pi Festival, Zendai MOMA, and various NOI Shanghai events, as well perpetuating the Sound Currents series locally. More information about Ben’s various activities on all fronts is available here.

ArtHub is delighted to host Christian Marclay in Shanghai, and to enable the first PERFORMA presentation in the city.

About PERFORMA

Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization established by art historian, curator, and critic Rose Lee Goldberg in 2004. The organization is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. Performa launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, to tremendous critical and popular acclaim. In 2007, the second biennial, Performa 07, was an even greater success than the first. The next biennial, Performa 09, will take place in New York from November 1st to the 22nd, 2009, featuring the work of over 100 artists at more than 80 venues across the city.