ERIKA TSIMBROVSKY
MINOTAUR
photos by Aleksey Bochkovsky
Minotaur
Conceived by Erika Tsimbrovsky (choreographer), Vadim Puyandaev (artist), and Alexander Sigman (composer), Minotaur was selected for the Dresher Ensemble Artists Residency Center (DEAR) fellowship in 2012. The project was developed in part during DEAR in collaboration with composer Alexander Sigman, light/video artist Lucas Krech, visual artist Vadim Puyandaev, and choreographer/artistic director of Avy K, Erika Tsimbrovsky.
In 2015, Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev / Avy K reimagined Minotaur through new collaborations, featuring live music by Ken Ueno and Matt Ingalls, and live video by Stanislav Groz.
Minotaur is an ongoing series of multimedia installation-performances merging dance, music, and visual art. Originally conceived by Erika Tsimbrovsky as a re-casting of the Greek myth, the project is filtered through the philosophical lenses of Jorge Luis Borges and Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. At its core, Minotaur unfolds within a plexiglass-walled labyrinth where movement, sound, and imagery intertwine.
This project responds to a defining yet dangerous aspect of our time: the illusion of limitless desire and its unsettling ease of fulfillment. The Minotaur embodies a mutated figure of our urban world—driven by insatiable cravings, mirroring our own restless existence. Through a labyrinth of sensation and sound, the audience is drawn into a tangled world of spirit and flesh, encountering the Minotaur as a reflection of themselves.
“…he danced his advance, and she danced her retreat, he his penetration, and she danced her embrace. They danced, and their reflections danced, and he didn’t know that he took the girl, and he also didn’t know that he was killing her…” — Friedrich Dürrenmatt
audio-visual-kinetic installation/performance
work-in-progress 2015
Minotaur, March Fri & Sat 13th, 14th at 8 pm
NOHspace 2840 Mariposa Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Tickets:$20 in advance and $25 door
Dance: Erika Tsimbrovsky
Live Music: Ken Ueno and Matt Ingalls
Live Painting&Installation: Vadim Puyandaev
Live Video: Stanislav Groz
tickets HERE: brownpapertickets.com
ARTISTS BIOS
Erika Tsimbrovsky is an innovator in the field of improvised dance performance. Born in Kazakhstan, she studied modern and contemporary dance is Belarus, Moscow, and Amsterdam. In Israel, where she lived for twelve years, she co-founded the award-winning experimental performance group EVM Laboratories to research the interaction between diverse media structures and to develop specific improvisational performance techniques. Avy K Productions is the San Francisco-based incarnation of her and visual artist Vadim Puyandaev’s 18-year collaboration, featuring their signature “audio-visual-kinetic” approach, which brings together contemporary dance, live painting, evolving material installation, video projection, and live music to create unique and vital performances
A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist who is currently an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. As a vocalist, he specializes in extended techniques (throat singing, multiphonics, circular breathing). Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, BMOP, the Del Sol String Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, and Frances-Marie Uitti have championed his music. His music has been performed at such venues and festivals as MaerzMusik in Berlin, Warsaw Autumn, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Spoleto USA, and Lincoln Center. The Hilliard Ensemble featured Ken’s Shiroi Ishi in their repertoire for over a decade. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by eighth blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. Over the past six years, he has performed his vocal concerto as a soloist with orchestras in Boston, New York, Poland, Lithuania, and Thailand. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. http://kenueno.com
Reviled for his “shapeless sonic tinkering” by the Los Angeles Times, Oakland musician Matt Ingalls is a composer, clarinetist, concert producer, and computer music programmer. His composed and improvised music is heavily influenced by his long involvement in computer music, often exploring extended instrumental techniques and combination tones that interact with the acoustic space. Matt is the director of sfSound, a new music series, ensemble, and internet radio station devoted to new ideas and traditions of experimental music, performance art, live electronic music, Bay Area composition, and the various facets of contemporary improvisation. www.mattingalls.com
Vadim Puyandaev has worked as a painter, sculptor, and designer for over twenty years and has been participating in multi-media installation-performances since 1994. His fine art has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Russia, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, France, Spain, Canada, and the US. Puyandaev had also produced numerous pieces of monumental art, including a commission to design a bridge over the Red Sea in Israel. With Tsimbrovsky, he is a founding member of the creative collectives EVM Laboratories (Israel) and Avy K Productions (US), dedicated to investigating what emerges in performance at the nexus of different genres. http://vadimpuyandaev.com
Born in 1973, in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad), Russia, Stanislav Grozstudied in School at the Academy of Fine Arts, and at Saint Petersburg State University. He worked in computer graphics beginning in the middle of the 1990s and was the lead graphic designer for expositions of biggest Russian museums. Stanislav developed as a painter and began exhibiting his works at the end of the 1990s. In 2011 he moved to San Francisco, where he now lives and works. In 2014 he worked as a stage designer for the Russian State Academic Bolshoi Drama Theater. www.grozart.com
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photo by Aleksey Bochkovsky
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Minotaur was performed as work in progress LAByrinths: Audio-Visual-Kinetic 1, Friday, 26 July, 7:30 PM @ the Center for New Music in SF 2013!
For this rare engagement, Bay Area artists Erika Tsimbrovsky (dance/movement), Vadim Puyvandaev (live painting/sculpture), and Lucas Krech (video/lighting design) join Korea-based composer Alexander Sigman for an immersive audio-visual-kinetic performance. As an installment in their evolving multimedia Minotaur project, LAByrinths integrates dance, sculpture, live painting, live video, electronics improvisation, and audio design into a continuously expanding feedback loop of intense sensory stimuli and associations.http://centerfornewmusic.com/calendar/labyrinths-audio-visual-kinetic-i/