The fourth full season of the Contemporary Arts Center’s groundbreaking Black Box Performance Series opens Thursday night at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, with classical pianist Vicky Chow pairing with 1-bit electronics composer Tristan Perich on his original work Surface Image.
Canadian pianist Chow will be playing piano live while the tones Perich wrote will be amplified from one of 40 individual speakers. Perich wrote the piano and electronics parts.
As Drew Klein, the CAC’s performance curator, says, this will be “the perfect marrying of the traditional and progressive. It’s demonstrative of a composer at the forefront of a specific type of composition and a (classical) piano player who also steps outside the comfort zone to take on music that requires thinking outside the box.”
In that regard, this concert embodies the essence of the Black Box series aesthetic. “The line drawn between all the programs offered here is one of following the contemporary forward-thinking artistic process,” Klein says.
That unites Surface Image, then, with a seemingly wildly different event from last season — Night Tripper — in which Norwegian collaborators Ingri Fiksdal, Ingvild Langgård/Phaedra and Signe Becker brought attendees into mysterious surroundings to become fellow travelers in an exploration of music, dance and performance art. (One night they were outdoors in a wooded area near Batavia, the next in a Camp Washington warehouse.)
The Surface Image concert will thus also be similar in its underlying theme to other performances planned for the 2015-2016 season. There are 11 shows announced; Klein also hopes to book a quarterly (or so) special concert. Some examples of the line-up:
Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman’s Nov. 16-19 Ghostwriting project will feature him composing and recording songs based on personal stories submitted by local fans (followed by a Nov. 20 concert of his own material with MYCincinnati’s Ambassador Ensemble).
Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq will perform with a small group on Jan. 30 while the film Nanook of the North is screened.
Okwui Okpokwasili’s March 2 performance of Bronx Gothic combines theater, dance and visual art to tell of two girls growing up in that borough in the 1980s.
Finding these kinds of shows — or actively putting them together — is what Klein does as a curator. And he’s happy and grateful for his success as the revenue for the 2014-2015 season was up over the past two. (The CAC is in the second year of its second three-year grant from the Haile/U.S. Bank Foundation and relies on it for 95-percent of its funding. It also tries to keep Black Box series tickets affordable.)
But while Klein is reluctant to dwell on this, the CAC often has to market each show anew. There should be more audience carryover. Even though its audience is a progressive and curious one, it doesn’t necessarily see an inherent link between, say, avant-garde bass saxophonist Colin Stetson (who wowed a CAC crowd in 2013) and red, black & GREEN: a blues, a brilliant 2014 hybrid theater performance by Marc Bamuthi Joseph with artful set design by Theaster Gates. Joseph’s show drew fewer than it deserved during two nights at the Aronoff Center’s Jarson-Kaplan Theater.
It would be great if the CAC could count on a sizeable overlap in attendees from show to show — especially if people bought series subscriptions early and provided upfront money.
The CAC tried a subscription package two seasons ago and dropped it. “The breadth of our offerings makes it more problematic to package in a subscription,” Klein explains.
Yet that’s not a problem for visual-art exhibitions. “I think the CAC model for its entirety has been to provide opportunities to experience the breadth of contemporary (visual) artwork — Picasso to John Cage to Shepard Fairey,” Klein says.
I wish those interested in “the shock of the new” in the performing arts (to quote the late art critic Robert Hughes) didn’t compartmentalize the various shows in the CAC’s series into Electronica, theater, spoken arts, performance art, etc. Instead, just view the overall series more holistically and go regularly.
“Anyone who maybe looks at art as something to appreciate form by form will perhaps struggle to appreciate everything included in a season such as mine,” Klein says. “But these are all performances that have contemporary creative thought behind them.”
For more on the CAC’s performance series, visit contemporaryartscenter.org.
CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com
This article appears in Sep 9-15, 2015.