Ensemble Dal Niente teams up with Limerick Rhythms, a new collective featuring Douglas R. Ewart (composer, reeds, percussion, George Floyd Bunt Staff); Renee Baker (composer, violin, viola); Lou Mallozzi (composer, live electronics); Rin Peisert (choreographer and dancer); and Cristal Sabbagh (choreographer and dancer). The opening half of the program will feature Dal Niente soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett performing a combination of open-score and improvised works. This is the second in a series of shared programs between Dal Niente and other respected Chicago artists, supported by a DCASE Chicago Artists Recovery Program Grant. This will be the first appearance by all of these artists at the Kehrein Center for the Arts, a beautifully restored auditorium on Chicago’s West Side that Air Chicago Magazine has called “ A shining example of Austin's community revitalization.”
Set I : Ensemble Dal Niente
Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, Soprano
(works for voice and electronics by Amanda Feery, Liz Gre, Amanda DeBoer Bartlett)
Set II: Limerick Rhythms
Renee Baker, Composer, Violin and Viola
Douglas R. Ewart, Composer, Reeds and Percussion and George Floyd Bunt Staff
Lou Mallozzi, Composer and Live Electronics
Rin Peisert, Choreographer and Dancer
Cristal Sabbagh, Choreographer and Dancer
About the artists
About Douglas R. Ewart
Best known as a composer, improviser, sculptor and maker of masks and instruments, Douglas R. Ewart creates multi-disciplinary works that encourage artist-audience interactions. Each performance or production by Ewart reflects time-tested structures, but each also incorporates his most immediate experiences of America and the world, and taps his many creative engagements with collaborators such the master musicians as Muhal Richard Abrams, Amina Myers, Beah Richards, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Curran, Anthony Davis, Von Freeman, Fred Anderson, Joseph Jarman, Yusef Lateef, Roscoe Mitchell, Ajule Sonny Rutlin, Rita Warford, Dee Alexander, Robert Dick, George E. Lewis, James Newton, Cecil Taylor, Richard Teitelbaum and Henry Threadgill.
Beyond sound itself, Ewart’s music finds natural extensions (in every sense of the word) in the instruments he makes, which run the gamut from unique wind instruments to percussion instruments. Beyond these are sculptures, sound sculptures, and individually handcrafted masks that have been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Ewart is the winner of the Bush Artists Fellowship (1997), Minnesota Composers Forum/McKnight Foundation fellowships, Jerome Foundation grants, Mayor Harold Washington's Outstanding Artist Award and a Naropa Institute residency among many other honors. To learn more, go to https://douglasewart.com
About Renée Baker
Renee Baker is founder/Director of CHICAGO MODERN ORCHESTRA PROJECT after 26 years as principal violist of Chicago Sinfonietta.Her compositions/film scores grace over 400 films that have screened from Paris to Berlin as well as US festivals. A four year guest artist and consultant to the CHICAGO Symphony, she has proffered clinics, workshops and screenings in global University settings.
From symphonic works to chamber ensembles and far flung creative music as a composer under the venerable AACM mantle, she exhibits an innate and masterful ability to create painted graphic scores that produce a multitude of styles. Renee Baker has created operas, symphonies, chamber works juxtaposed with some of the most creative open form compositions ..all that defy the laws and rules of composition..
About Lou Mallozzi
Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines relationships between presentation, representation, knowledge, and site, taking the form of installations, performances, fixed media works, improvised music, and drawings. During his more than three decades of interdisciplinary arts practice, he has performed, exhibited, and broadcast in a number of venues in the US and Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Randolph Street Gallery Chicago, Ausland Berlin, TUBE Audio Art Series Munich, Bayersicher Rundfunk Munich, New American Radio, Experimental Intermedia New York, Radiorevolten Festival Halle, Constellation Chicago, and many others. In his role as director of Experimental Sound Studio from 1986-2016, Mallozzi coordinated, co-organized, and curated scores of performances, exhibitions, broadcasts, festivals and commissions, presenting the work of over 400 artists to audiences throughout Chicago. Mallozzi is Associate Professor in the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
About Rin Peisert
Rin Peisert is a conceptual interdisciplinary artist who works with bodies, time, and space to instigate disorganization and to cultivate a heightened sense of being alive. Her site-responsive actions use intervention as a tool to consider phenomenological ontologies and to exaggerate the quotidian in pursuit of the profound. Peisert’s work has been seen at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Power Station of Art Shanghai, The Momentary/Crystal Bridges, and Defibrillator Gallery as well as street corners, rooftops, a bomb shelter, and a market for arranged marriages. Peisert has an MFA from School of Visual Arts, NYC. She co-produces a series of instructional scores called, Image of Thought. She is Artist-in-Residence Residence at The Momentary, Bentonville where she will produce and direct her durational performance art series, Relative Intensity Noise.
About Cristal Sabbagh
Cristal Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and Butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. In embodying in her art transformational memories, while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental, she challenges power structures and awakens viewers’ senses. Working both in a solo capacity and with collaborators, Sabbagh is equally attuned to individual perspectives and collective structures. In various configurations, these collaborators have regularly engaged in improvised performances, opening up new avenues for Sabbagh’s material and conceptual exploration. She is the creator and curator of Freedom From and Freedom To events that are improvisational performance environments which interrogate movement and sound. In 2021 Cristal was awarded a 3Arts / Make a Wave Artist grant, and in 2023 she was awarded an Individual Artists Program grant from DCASE.
About Amanda DeBoer Bartlett
Amanda DeBoer Bartlett is a soprano specializing in contemporary classical music and singer-songwriter based in Chicago, IL. In addition to being a member of Dal Niente, she is the founder and co-director of Quince Ensemble, a treble voice quartet, and Hasco Duo, an experimental improvisation and songwriting project. Recent appearances include the Ecstatic Music Series at the Kaufmann Music Center in New York, Hyde Park Jazz Festival in Chicago, and the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival. Her debut album of original songs, The Bones Still Glow, was released in February of 2023 on Carillonia Recordings. Along with her solo work, DeBoer is featured on albums with Ensemble Dal Niente, Quince Ensemble, Holly Herndon, Deerhoof, Timothy Daisy, Hasco Duo, Kid Millions and more. www.amandadeboer.com