The Reade Festival of Alternative American Music begins its exploration of unconventional performance art tonight with Patricia Repar's "Studies in Survival: del taller de compositiores."
The festival, which is free to students as well as the public, involves three presentations ranging from a solo production portraying Ecuadorian artists to a concert fusing jazz, classical and heavy metal styles.
Repar offers two performances of "Studies in Survival: del taller de compositores Ecuatorianos" beginning at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Her presentation celebrates the talent and tenacity of Ecuadorian artists who continue in their work despite difficult circumstances.
Unlike the other productions, "Studies in Survival" relies little on technology thus enabling performance in Ecuador and other developing countries.
What began for Repar in 1994 as a collection of visual, literary and sonic pieces in book format evolved through her collaboration with Ecuadorian artists into a multilayered presentation.
Featuring vocals, modern dance, instrumental and electronically enhanced music, English and Spanish text, and projected images of Ecuador, "Studies in Survival" transcends both cultural and performance boundaries.
Friday night at 9 p.m. the duo Twisted Tutu, comprised of composer Eve Beglarian and pianist Kathleen Supove, promise to breach the limits of conventional music. Their negotiation of live musical performance, recorded sound, electronic remastering and spoken text bombards the audience with sound and sensation.
Reworking music from the twelfth to twentieth centuries, Twisted Tutu creates an entirely new experience. In their piece "Hildegurls," Beglarian and Supove reverently sing the Latin chants of Hildegard von Bingen before a taped background of violin music and samples of harp, ukulele and rattle snake.
A piece about AIDS activist David Feinberg, "Spontaneous Combustion" combines music symbolic of the 1970s gay culture, such as Gloria Gaynor's "Don't Leave Me This Way" and Thelma Houston's "Never Can Say Good-bye." Altering the tempos and the keys of the songs until they are identical, Beglarian creates the effect of five bands playing simultaneously though each intermittently fades in and out.
To complicate the already intricate nature of Twisted Tutu, the duo transitions their pieces, allowing them to run continuously. The audience is sometimes left uncertain where one song ends and the next begins. Nevertheless, Twisted Tutu's combination of imagination and technology give rise to radical yet engaging contemporary music.
Collis Common Ground hosts rock band Doctor Nerve Saturday night at 10 p.m. the closing performance of the Reade Festival. Their name reflects what they seek to strike in their audience: nerves. A seven-man progressive rock band, Doctor Nerve stirs trumpets, saxophones, vibraphones, drums and guitars into a jarring, frenzied medleys of raw energy.
Combining jagged chords of heavy metal with contours of harmony, Doctor Nerve leans toward the dissonant.
Although they often rely on improvisations, the band avoids improv solos in an effort to distance their music from jazz. In a series of controlled improvisations, Doctor Nerve reinvents fragments of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" through unpredictable, spiky shifts in their playing.
Tickets for all three performances are available at the Hopkins Center Box office. While the Festival is free, ticket holders will be seated up to ten minutes before the scheduled start of the program. After that, those without tickets will be offered any remaining seats.
