Volumes for Sound: Voice
Saturday, December 16, 7pm
Admission $5
This event brings together experimental vocalists Odeya Nini and Tatyana Tenenbaum to explore the possibilities of Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson’s Volumes for Sound as conduits for the voice. When hooked up to microphones and electronic instruments, Davidson and Dubbin’s sculptures capture, amplify, torque, and reshape emitted sound. In this new collaboration, Tenenbaum and Nini will exchange improvisations in response to the Volumes and the space of The Kitchen’s black box theatre, broadening the artists’ investigations of sound and its interactions with the performing and listening body.
Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson’s work has been described as addressing “processes of transmission and reception, interference and transference” often seeking to materialize immaterial or ephemeral states of matter. They have co-authored a body of works producing forms, objects, images and experiences, equally incorporating the mediums of photography, video, sound, performance, sculpture and artists books since they began working together in 1998.
Odeya Nini is a Los Angeles–based experimental vocalist and contemporary composer. At the locus of her interests are performance practices, gesture, textural harmony, tonal animation, and the illumination of minute sounds, in works spanning chamber music to vocal pieces and collages of musique concrète.
Tatyana Tenenbaum is a choreographer and composer exploring the phenomenal space of the singing body. Within this, she considers the canon of “American musical theater,” and how its embodied history shapes contemporary, cultural narratives.
Organized by second-year graduate students at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
Music programs at The Kitchen are made possible with endowment support from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; annual grants from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., Howard Gilman Foundation, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Photo: Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, Volumes for Sound, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 2012. Courtesy of the artists.