Real Art Ways | Independent Cinema | Contemporary Art | Live Art

Colleen Fitzgerald: ndemeh

An autobiographical multimedia solo performance portraying memories of strong, beautiful and black women. Colleen explores her personal diasporic identity by revisiting tidbits passed on to her from her grandmother, mother, sister, and other strong female influences. Her performance is informed by their cultures, stories, foods, dances, clothes, hair, songs and words.

The work is informed by the family recipe she is desperate to learn, the dances she watched her sister do her whole life, or simply the way these women carry themselves. Colleen “carves a space for us to celebrate black women.” She says, “Putting the body on stage is an act of protest. The work serves as an urgent declaration that black women are important, beautiful and magical.”

This work was made possible by artist residencies at Brote Residencia Creativa (ARG), Denmark Arts Center (US), and Casa Muñecas (ARG). Also thanks to the support of OiHoy and Fabiana Castro.

Idea and performance: Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald
Assistance: María Esther Mejia
Collaborators: Kukily Colectivo
Music: Jojo Abot, Mehkamu Wayson
Photos: Jasmin Sanchez

Instrument Portrait Series: DRUM – Kaoru Watanabe

Real Art Ways presents three concerts that explore distinct types of drums. Each concert includes a discussion with the performing artists.

Kaoru Watanabe’s Néo featuring Fumi Tanakadate

“Néo is so ethereal that words to describe it skip like a breeze on water. It encompasses time and space from a culture that remains elusive and exotic, yet is audibly accessible in this presentation.” – James Nadal, All About Jazz (Full review here.)

Kaoru Watanabe is a composer and musician, acclaimed for his innovative approach to powerful Japanese drums and the texturally rich melodies of the Japanese flutes. Joined by percussionist Fumi Tanakadate, the duo will play selections from their newly released album Néo.

Read an article about this concert in the Hartford Courant.

About Kaoru Watanabe
Kaoru Watanabe is a Brooklyn based composer and musician, who has a passion for cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary collaborations, working with such artists as National Living Treasure Bando Tamasaburo, Jason Moran, So Percussion, Adam Rudolph, directors Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese and was a featured guest on Yo-Yo Ma’s Grammy Award-winning album Sing Me Home.

Watanabe was a performer and artistic director of the internationally acclaimed Japanese taiko performing arts ensemble Kodo for close to a decade. Watanabe has performed his compositions at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Kabukiza and in Minamiza, has performed in all 47 prefectures in Japan as well as across the North, Central and South Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia.

About Fumi Tanakadate
Fumi Tanakadate is a taiko artist and pianist based in New York, who has a unique combination of an expertise in European Classical music and a background in traditional folk dance and music from Japan. After studying extensively with Kaoru Watanabe, Fumi now performs frequently with Watanabe, often in a duo setting where she plays taiko and piano and sings, sometimes doing all at once. She has performed at such venues as Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, Pioneer Works, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art, Super Deluxe in Tokyo and at PASIC, Percussive Arts Society International Convention. Fumi has collaborated with Shane Shanahan of the Silkroad Ensemble, Brooklyn Raga Massive, Chieko Kojima and Yuta Sumiyoshi of KODO, Alicia Hall Moran, Satoshi Takeishi and Kiyohiko Semba.

Fumi also serves as the primary instructor at Kaoru Watanabe Taiko Center, teaching classes and giving educational workshops at local schools and colleges. As a classical pianist, Fumi has performed throughout Japan, tri-state area, Austria, and Spain. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Wesleyan University and a Master of Music degree in piano performance from Manhattan School of Music.

Major support comes from the Richard P. Garmany Fund.

Instrument Portrait Series: DRUM – Sameer Gupta

Real Art Ways presents three concerts that explore distinct types of drums. Each concert includes a discussion with the performing artists.

A Circle Has No Beginning by Sameer Gupta featuring Marc Cary

“The New York-based drummer-tabla player’s own compositions, which fill most of A Circle Has No Beginning, are in the fusion vein, continuing in Weather Report’s trajectory with echoes of ’70s Herbie Hancock and Jean-Luc Ponty. Oriental modes, celestial vibes and muted funk are heard. Not surprisingly, percussion is integral.” – Morton Shlabotnik, Shepherd Express

Sameer Gupta will perform tabla and drumset in selections from his February 2018 release A Circle Has No Beginning that features a fusion of Indian classical music and jazz. Joining Gupta will be Marc Cary (keys), Jay Gandhi (bansuri), Arun Ramamurthy (carnatic violin), Marika Hughes (cello), Pawan Benjamin (sax), and Rahsaan Carter (bass).

About Sameer Gupta
Sameer Gupta is known as one of the few percussionists simultaneously representing the traditions of American jazz on drumset and Indian classical music on tabla. He has performed at Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, Nehru Centre London, Jazz at Lincoln Center, MoMA NYC and Yerba Buena Gardens San Francisco.

His own interests and love of tabla brought him to the great maestro Pt Anindo Chatterjee, of whom he is now a dedicated disciple, though his first few years were spent under the guidance of Ustad Zakir Hussain. Sameer is also a co-founder and an Artistic Director of the non-profit collective Brooklyn Raga Massive.After graduating with a music performance BA, Gupta worked and taught in the Bay Area for 10 years as a jazz drummer, and later also as a classical Indian tabla player.

Today he lives in Brooklyn, NYC and is actively involved in performing, curating, producing and teaching through various institutions including Brooklyn Raga Massive, Carnegie Hall’s Global Encounters and Ragas Live Festival.

Gupta has held workshops on Indian music and cross over drumming styles, at The Jazzschool in Berkeley, California and Berklee College of Music in Boston.

His influences range from Elvin Jones and Tony Williams to Ustad Allah Rakha and Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, and he’s has had the pleasure to play with many great musicians including Falu Shah, Rez Abbasi, Marc Cary, Wallace Roney, Karsh Kale, Pandit Krishna Bhatt, Ravi Chandra Kulur, Mysore Manjunath, Prasant Radhakrishnan, Pandit Chitresh Das, Jason Samuels Smith, Pandit Ramesh Mishra, Pandit Anindo Chatterjee and numerous other luminaries.

Gupta continues to build his career by combining traditional and modern improvisational styles drawing from his dual Indian and American heritage, and has already established himself as an original musical voice in jazz, world, and fusion music.

From his early percussion studies in Tokyo, Japan in the mid 80s, he has consistently placed himself in many challenging musical environments – from bebop to avant-garde jazz, and European classical percussion to North Indian classical tabla. Gupta continues to compose and perform music from a true multi-cultural perspective that bridges several continents.

More at Sameer Gupta’s website.

Major support comes from the Richard P. Garmany Fund.

Andrew Buck: Quarry

Andrew Buck’s sense of the term “landscape” is inspired by the writings of John Brinkerhoff Jackson. “He went back to the source word, the German landschaften, which referred to that which results when ‘man’ reconfigures and uses the land, in essence creating his own landscape on the natural landscape,” says Buck.

Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins says, “Andrew Buck’s work is abstract, specific, tactile and spirited. There is a lot going on in what seems like straight-forward landscape.”

Buck is interested in the documentary aspects of his work, but he also cites abstract expressionism as an inspiration. Says Buck, “The sheer size of the space of most quarries is awe-inspiring in a strange manner. That is, that these spaces are man-made, not natural. Many of them are otherworldly in both appearance and in actual experience. The overwhelming silence enhances the experience.”

About Andrew Buck
Andrew Buck lives and works in Farmington, Connecticut. His work is included in many public and private collections, include the Yale University Art Gallery and the New Britain Museum of American Art. He has shown both his Rockface and Tobacco series at Real Art Ways. Buck is a recipient of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in both 2016 and 1995 as well as a Berkshire Taconic Foundation Artist Resource Grant in 2010.

To see more of Buck’s work, visit his website.

Quarry Panorama 5 (Stony Creek Granite Quarry); 2014; 85″ x 25″
Click to enlarge.

Quarry Panorama 9 (Trap Rock Quarry, Plainville, CT); 2017; 324″ x 40″
Click to enlarge.

ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS

This hour-long video program will be shown continuously in RAW’s Video Gallery and continued daily through December 31.

Premiering on World AIDS Day 2017, and showing at over 100 museums, galleries and cultural institutions across the world.

ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS is the 28th annual iteration of Visual AIDS’ longstanding Day With(out) Art project. Curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett for Visual AIDS, the video program prioritizes Black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic, commissioning seven new and innovative short videos from artists Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye & Ellen Spiro, Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia Labeija, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Brontez Purnell.

In spite of the impact of HIV/AIDS within Black communities, these stories and experiences are constantly excluded from larger artistic and historical narratives. In 2016 African Americans represented 44% of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States. Given this context, it is increasingly urgent to feature a myriad of stories that consider and represent the lives of those housed within this statistic. ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS seeks to highlight the voices of those that are marginalized within broader Black communities nationwide, including queer and trans people.

The commissioned projects include intimate meditations of young HIV positive protagonists; a consideration of community-based HIV/AIDS activism in the South; explorations of the legacies and contemporary resonances within AIDS archives; a poetic journey through New York exploring historical traces of queer and trans life, and more. Together, the videos provide a platform centering voices deeply impacted by the ongoing epidemic.

Rearrange Me

An evening of musical contrasts and creative surprises as eight Connecticut artists play songs by each other, rearranged in their own characteristic performance styles.

Each of the eight Rearrange Me artists will be secretly assigned one of the other artists. They will then choose a song and perform it as though it was their own. This means that a folk artist, if assigned a hip-hop artist, will rearrange and perform a song by the hip-hop artist in folk style… and so forth.

Each artist will only know their own Rearrange Me assignment, so the audience and the other performers will hear the pieces for the first time together.

Produced in cooperation with Julie Beman.

Participating Artists:

Kate Callahan | Lys Guillorn & Her Band | Angela Luna | The Sawtelles

Self Suffice | That Virginia | Charmagne Tripp | Zoo Front

Hartt @ RAW

World Premieres of Electroacoustic and Acoustic Music

Hartford composers and Hartt School faculty Lief Ellis and David Macbride will present music involving winds, voices, percussion, and piano interior. Audio spatialization will be featured and audience members will be an integral part of the music making. Come experience music in a new and exciting way!

Program

Leaves and Cicadas – Lief Ellis

Fighting Futility – Lief Ellis

Selections from Sri Yantra – David Macbride:
Yantra 7 (2017) – Charles Huang, Ling-Fei Kang, Janet Rosen – oboes; Bradley Karas, Shane Rathburn, Perry Roth – soprano saxophones.

Yantra 5 (2017) – Angelica Ansbacher, Saerom Kim, Alex Kollias – bass clarinets; Connor Baba, Krissia Molina, Joseph David Spence – baritone saxophones.

Yantra 9 (2017) – Genevieve Clements, Anna Koogler, Andersen White – voices; Devon Cupo, Christopher Natale, Yudong Wang, Benjamin Yuscavage – percussion.

Lief Ellis has a diverse career that encompasses music composition, electronic performance, collaborator and educator. His works have been performed all over the country as well as having premieres in Iceland and Greece. As a collaborator, he has worked with choreographers, dancers, composers, media artists, actors, and musicians in a variety of roles that include videography, interactive programming, and tech support. He has been awarded prizes for his music composition as well as his teaching. For more information please visit LiefEllis.com.

David Macbride has written numerous works, ranging from solo, chamber and orchestral music to music for film, TV, dance and theatre, with particular emphasis on music for percussion and musical landscapes. His works have been performed extensively in the United States and abroad. Solo CDs are available on Innova Recordings and on Albany Records. As a pianist, Macbride was invited to give a recital tour of Peru by the Instituto Cultural Peruano NorteAmericano, and has performed recitals in Spain and in Mexico. Macbride is Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. See davidmacbride.com.

Peter Edlund: Names on the Land

ARTIST TALK: Saturday, January 27 | 4 PM

Peter Edlund explores the contradictions in utopian American landscape imagery. Taking aesthetic and visual cues from the work of artists ranging from the Hudson River School to Ansel Adams, Edlund’s paintings employ allegorical imagery to investigate contemporary issues. His landscapes reference the mythic images of Manifest Destiny while shedding light on the “actual social and political reality of racism and genocide in our country.”^{^[1]}

In 2005, Edlund began researching Algonkian languages to understand the meanings of Native American place names in the Northeast, adding the Oneida language indigenous to central New York State in 2013. His research has informed his paintings since. Says Edlund, I am attempting to “address the collective amnesia of American society by using the ‘landscape’ as my means of expression.”^{^[2]} Edlund’s work raises compelling questions. Why is there generally a lack of cultural understanding of the meanings and significance of native words that are the names of rivers, mountains, lakes and towns?

Through appropriating the aesthetics of historic landscape painting, Edlund’s work takes aim directly at colonialism and the forces that created the rifts in understanding and knowledge that we live with today. Edlund uses traditional allegory as a tool to investigate contemporary issues, while simultaneously connecting us with the history we come from.

Picking the most contentious battle states from the 2016 Presidential Election, Edlund investigates contemporary social issues each state faces that are deeply rooted in historical events and practices. He utilizes idyllic landscape painting to create imagery that evokes breathtaking sunsets while embedding deep allegorical meaning. For example,

The Battle of Wisconsin shows a swan and her hatchlings being threatened by a fox, raccoons and an eagle. The imagery “evokes the conflicts of Wisconsin’s history from the displacement and relocation of indigenous peoples to the current conservative agenda of social cutbacks, racial inequalities and voter suppression.”^{^[3]} Edlund crafts his imagery in the Battle States paintings by taking place names from respective states and translating their original Native American meanings into English — Waukesha meaning fox, Waubesa meaning swan, Kanabec meaning snake, and so forth.

Read the article in the Hartford Courant.

Here’s a review of the exhibition in Art New England.

About Peter Edlund
Edlund studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has shown nationally and internationally, and has received honors incluing MacDowell Colony Residencies, a Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery, among many others. Edlund is originally from West Hartford, Connecticut. His work has been exhibited at Real Art Ways on mulitiple occastions, including a solo exhibition in 2000, Majestic America.

^{^[1]} Artist Statement, Peter Edlund, http://www.peteredlundart.com/artist.html

^{^[2]} Artist Statement, Peter Edlund, http://www.peteredlundart.com/artist.html

^{^[3]} The Battle for Wisconsin artist statement card, Peter Edlund, 2017

Featured image: Weatogue (Hut-Land), 36″x46″, oil on canvas, 2007

Thanks to the College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture at University of Hartford for assistance in creating laser-cut stencils used to produce several works in the exhibition and public art works in various locations around Hartford.

Ann Z. Leventhal: Among the Survivors

Tuesday, October 10 | 2:30 PM

The author will discuss, sell, and sign copies of Among the Survivors, her new novel.
She will talk about her 56 years in Greater Hartford plus the joys and torments of a writer’s life.

About Ann Z. Leventhal
Ann Z. Leventhal is the author of Life-lines, a novel about a wife who runs away with her husband’s mistress. Her short stories, articles, poems, and reviews have appeared in Vignettes, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Christopher Street, The New York Times Book Review, and Publishers Weekly.

See Ann’s website.

About Among the Survivors, A Novel
Though twenty-one-year-old Karla Most manages to bag Saxton Perry, a virtual prince thirty years her senior, she has no idea how to live happily ever after, with or without him. Karla cannot get past her anger at having been deceived by her single, now-dead mother, Mutti, who―supposedly a “Holocaust victim,” complete with tattooed numbers―was in fact a German Christian who got into the United States by falsifying her background. So what does that make her daughter? Before she can answer that question, Karla must track down the actual story of her own existence.

Pinned to the Wall: Panel Discussion

Join us for an informative and lively panel discussion, delving into a variety of subjects suggested by the exhibition, Stewart Crone: Pinned to the Wall.

Panelists

Peter Waite: Curator / Moderator
Marty Baron: Art collector
Stewart Crone: Artist
Peter Good: Designer / Artist
Chris Passehl: Designer
Kelly Walters: Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, UConn

Discussion Topics Include

Fine Art vs. Applied Art
Tradition vs. Innovation: can traditional techniques be used in innovative ways?
Where are lines drawn between commercial print and design and fine art?
Who is the client for fine art?
How does print democratize art? Does print devalue art?

About the Panelists

Peter Waite is the curator of the show. Peter is an accomplished painter whose work has been shown nationally and is included in the collections of the Benton Museum, The Wadsworth Antheneum, NASA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name a few. http://www.peterwaite.com/

Marty Baron is a financial planner and art collector living in West Hartford. He and his wife Nancy participated in Artspace New Haven’s “House Salon” tour in September of 2016, where their collection was on display and guests were given a tour by painter Deborah Dancy.

Stewart Crone is the artist of the show, Pinned to the Wall. He has a wealth of knowledge and insight into the topics surrounding his work.

Peter Good is a designer and artist, and co-founder of Cummings-Good. His work is included in the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, NY; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Museum fur Kunst und Gerwerbe, Hamburg; Neue Sammlung MuseumMunich; and the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan. https://www.cummings-good.com/

Chris Passehl founded his design firm in 1996. His clients include the YMCA of Greater Hartford, The Lewitt Collection, and Real Art Ways, among many others. Chris has taught at the University of New Haven, Eastern Connecticut State University, and UConn as well as advised student interns from Yale, RISD, and others. http://www.passehldesign.com/

Kelly Walters is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut. She is a multimedia designer and curator. Her artistic practice investigates the intersection of black cultural identity, representation, and language in mainstream media. She is also founder of Bright Polka Dot (an independent design studio) focusing on print, digital, pattern and textile design. Kelly has worked as a designer for SFMOMA, the RISD Museum, and Blue State Digital.

Hong Hong: All the Light in a Vivid Dream

Real Art Ways presents Hong Hong’s (b. 1989, Hefei, China) first solo exhibition in Hartford, Connecticut, All the Light in a Vivid Dream. The exhibition features a series of large-scale, hand-poured paperworks recently completed during Hong’s artist residency at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory & Educational Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio. The works in this exhibition are a part of Hong’s multidisciplinary investigation of the temporal parameters of human perception, and its effects on social, cultural, and environmental systems.

Hong has traveled to various sites across the United States to make paper since 2014. During these outdoor explorations, labor has given form and structure to largely intangible events, such as weather and haptic movements. Through the engagement of repetitive processes, Hong sought to punctuate, and to provide cadence to, her experience of existence as one continuous, disorientating interval. Material became an imprint of its own metamorphosis, and a chronology of time passed. In this context, each work is a photographic still of unfolding, momentary progressions, both of the body and of the landscape the body is situated within.

The imagery in All the Light in a Vivid Dream evokes vast stretches of sea and sky, as well as the horizon line where they meet. In the artist’s words, “The horizon is an interesting place. Where does the horizon exist? Does land ever touch sky? Maybe it only does in our dreams. One can argue that the horizon is simultaneously present and absent: it is a constant, and yet, with every passing moment, it changes. I am interested in the natural expanses that we yearn for, as well as the human desire to migrate to them, map them, and with our best efforts, record them. Through land, through the sea, through sky, and through the stars, we seek and find our own coordinates.”

Ultimately, the works on view in All the Light in a Vivid Dream attempt to harness the momentary, such as the passing of a single hour, to allude to the eternal, like the dissolve of dusk into night.

Read the article in the Hartford Courant.

About the Artist
Born in Hefei, China, Hong Hong is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans papermaking, sculpture, installation, and performance. Hong earned her MFA in 2014 from the University of Georgia and her BFA in 2011 from the State University of New York at Potsdam. Her work has been exhibited across the United States in shows at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Madison Museum of Fine Art, New Mexico History Museum, and Georgia Museum of Art.

Hong is the recipient of grants and commissions from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University, the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation, The Greater Hartford Arts Council, and Artspace New Haven. In 2017, she will complete artist residencies at PLAYA, Morgan Conservatory, and I-Park.

Hong currently lives in Connecticut, where you can find her making paper in empty parking lots and working on a yearlong, site-specific project called Everlasting Ephemera.

Image: All the Light in a Vivid Dream, hand-poured kozo, 2017

Stewart Crone: Pinned to the Wall

Pinned to the Wall: Panel Discussion
Thursday, September 14 | 6:30-8 PM
More information here.

Curated by Peter Waite

Stewart Crone has been collecting paper – and experimenting with text and images – inspired by commercial printing, since he began working in the trade in 1971. The effort has been motivated by a desire to escape the daily challenge of catching errors and instead to celebrate the occasions of error, chance, disorder and misbehavior of ink and paper.

Not all error is interesting of course – we still curse the inkjet machine when the cartridges go empty, and the machine makers for how expensive their little plastic containers have become. Larger paper – bigger error – seems to have a nice way of conferring a higher purpose to these mistakes and disorder. Crone’s own experiments have been directly influenced by this celebration of error – arguments shaped by a desire to keep chance, uncertainty and displacement included in the resulting works.

The flat, razor thin film of ink that lies on the surface of a piece of paper contains a mystery of order and structure that holds out promise of perfect organization, or relative chaos. Thus the expression ‘not worth the paper it’s printed on’ encapsulates the challenge for a printed sheet without error, and the contrary decisions offered in this exhibition stand as examples of paper that remain filled with the awareness of imperfection.

Read the article in the Hartford Courant.

About the Artist
Stewart Crone has over 40 years of printing experience: electronic pre-press, commercial lithography, fine arts editions and reproductions, flatbed press operations, map production, flexography, silkscreen. After participating in the Envirovision show for the NY State Fair in 1972, and in The First All Xerox Show and Language and Photography at La Mamelle in San Francisco in 1975 and 1976 respectively, he turned to the more prosaic tasks of simply making a living and pursuing other interests in film and politics. He has continued to work on paper both formally and informally. Pinned to the Wall is the first ever show of his interest in both collecting and making works on paper.

Crone holds an M.A. in Education and an M.A. in Geography, both from the University of Connecticut and a B.A. in Political Economy of Industrial Society from the University of California, Berkeley.

RAW JAZZ: Tyshawn Sorey Septet

Real Art Ways presents RAW JAZZ – A series of four free concerts in June, July and September.

Major support for RAW JAZZ comes from the Evelyn W. Preston Memorial Trust Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee.

“He is the antithesis of the showy, extroverted drummer, as for Sorey the stress is always on the beauty of the collective music made by his groups rather than the chops of the individual players.” – Troy Dostert, The Free Jazz Collective

Tyshawn Sorey is a composer, performer, educator, and scholar working across an extensive range of musical idioms. A 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award recipient, Sorey performs percussion, trombone and piano nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, and artists including Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Coleman, John Zorn, Roscoe Mitchell, Misha Mengelberg, Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lehman, Tim Berne, and Myra Melford.

The International Contemporary Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, and TAK Ensemble have performed his compositions, which integrate African diasporic, Western classical, and avant-garde musical forms. In 2012, he was selected as an Other Minds Composer.

As a leader, Sorey has released five critically acclaimed recordings – most recently The Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi, 2016), which features both classical/contemporary composition and conducted improvisation.

He has taught lectures and courses on composition and improvisation at the Banff Centre, International Realtime Music Symposium (Norway), Hochschule für Musik Köln, Musikhochschule Nürnberg, Rhythmic Conservatory (Denmark), Birmingham Conservatory of Music, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Cité de la Musique (Paris), and Vallekilde Højskole (Denmark).

Sorey’s works have premiered at the Issue Project Room, Walt Disney Hall, the Bimhuis, Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Village Vanguard, the Jazz Gallery, and Roulette.

He received a B.M. in Jazz and Performance Studies from William Paterson University and an M.A. in Music Composition from Wesleyan University. Tyshawn will begin his tenure at Wesleyan University as a John Spencer Camp Professor of Music in Fall 2017.

The septet, called Koan II, will play compositions by Sorey that are inspired by concepts derived from Zen Buddhist practices and nearly imperceptible sound worlds. The ensemble will explore low-range instruments with their characteristic slow sonic waves.

Joining Sorey are Ben Gerstein, trombone; Stephen Haynes, trumpet; Todd Neufeld, guitar; and three basses: Mark Helias, Joe Morris and Carl Testa.

“…he tends to move through his music with a flowing sense of ritual and constant alertness. It involves a lot of silence. It also involves a lot of attack, but in very short and concentrated doses, sometimes as short as one great, purposeful smack on a drum head or a quick crescendo of mallets on cymbals that floods the club’s entire atmosphere.” – Ben Ratliff, New York Times

RAW JAZZ: Mark Dresser 7

Real Art Ways presents RAW JAZZ – A series of four free concerts in June, July and September.

Major support for RAW JAZZ comes from the Evelyn W. Preston Memorial Trust Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee.

Mark Dresser makes music in a vast variety of settings and contexts, but the prolific bassist always seeks to create space for the unpredictable play between form and freedom. On his 2016 album “Sedimental You,” he assembled an astonishingly creative cast that embraced the intuitive and emotionally charged nature of his improvisational imperative. He will bring this same ensemble to RAW on Saturday, September 9 to perform selections from the album.

Riveting and playful, Dresser’s compositions emerge out of an ever-shifting matrix of specific musical personalities and the often dismaying swirl of current events.

The Mark Dresser 7:
Nicole Mitchell-flutes
David Morales Boroff-violin
Marty Ehrlich-clarinets
Michael Dessen -trombone
Joshua White-piano
Jim Black – drums
Mark Dresser-bass & compositions

A prolific composer, Dresser’s developed many pieces for the Arcado String Trio, and Tambastics, while receiving numerous commissions and recording his original scores for several classic silent films, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He moved back to Southern California in 2004 to take a position as Professor of Music at UC San Diego. While he’s maintained creative relationships with many of his New York associates, the move west coincided with his renewed focus on solo bass performance. As well Dresser in 2013 recorded his first quintet CD in nearly two decades to international acclaim Nourishments (2013). (Clean Feed) marks his re-immersion as a bandleader.

Dresser tours and records with celebrated collective Trio M with pianist Myra Melford and drummer Matt Wilson. He performs solo bass recitals, and with his sonically inspired new-music trio featuring flutist Matthias Ziegler and Denman Maroney on hyperpiano. And he maintains a East and West Coast quintet dedicated to the Nourishments repertoire. His most recent project, a septet featuring Nicole Mitchell, Marty Ehrlich, Michael Dessen, Joshua White, David Morales Boroff, and Kjell Nordeson perform and record his new compositions to be released on Clean Feed.

Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Dresser has been a creative force since he first started gaining attention in the early ’70s with Stanley Crouch’s Black Music Infinity, a free jazz ensemble that included Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, James Newton, and David Murray (at the same time he was performing with the San Diego Symphony). He earned a BA and MA from the UC San Diego studying contrabass with maestro Bertram Turetzky. Recruited by Anthony Braxton, Dresser made the move to New York in 1986 and spent a decade touring and recording extensively with the reed visionary’s celebrated quartet with pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Gerry Hemingway. At the same time he became a ubiquitous force on the Downtown scene, working widely with masters such as Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Anthony Davis, and John Zorn.

Dresser received both B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, San Diego where he studied with the seminal contrabass soloist, Professor Bertram Turetzky. In 1983, he received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Italy with Maestro Franco Petracchi. He has been awarded two New York Foundation for the Arts grants, Meet the Composer commissions, and fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Civitella Ranieri, Bellagio, and Akrai. He is on the board of the International Society of Bassists, the International Society of Improvised Music, and the advisory board of the Deep Listening Institute, and the new music ensemble, NOISE. He has been a lecturer at Princeton University, faculty at the New School University, and Hampshire College. In fall of 2004, Dresser joined the faculty of University of California, San Diego.

RAW JAZZ: Tatsuya Nakatani Gong Orchestra

Real Art Ways presents RAW JAZZ – A series of four free concerts in June, July and September.

Major support for RAW JAZZ comes from the Evelyn W. Preston Memorial Trust Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee.

“The fluid body of sound grew and waned and then grew again as some players switched from handmade bows to mallets and back again. The music was meditative, the gong vibrations washing over the audience.” – Cisco Bradley, Jazz Right Now

Nakatani Gong Orchestra (NGO), is a contemporary live Sound Art project that tours throughout North and Central America.

NGO is a continuous, growing community engagement project; and the only bowing Gong orchestra in existence in the world today. The rich harmonies produced from multiple layers of bowed gongs are transformative, engaging and inspiring for both players and audiences.

The gong bows and surrounding instrumentation equipment are handmade by Nakatani Kobo.

In addition to Mr. Nakatani, this performance features 14 players from the greater Hartford community.

Nakatani gives a specialized training workshop to gong players in preparation for the performance. Players will also experience Nakatani’s own unique point of view regarding Gong techniques, and will experience undiscovered dimensions while immersed in the vibrations and sounds during a training workshop. Nakatani is the composer and conductor for the evening of the performance.

Nakatani began germinating ideas for NGO in early 2002, and finally took the project on the road in April 2011. Since then he has performed over 100 concerts with NGO internationally. Notable venues include John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., MOCA Cleveland, OH, Tigertail Productions presented at Miami Dade County Auditorium in FL, Bemis Contemporary Art Center in Omaha NE, Columbia Museum of Art in SC, The Issue Project Room in New York City, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.

NGO has been a visiting artist conducting workshops at a number of universities; including the University of Illinois, Smith College, Ohio State University and Wesleyan.

Taiga Records (Minneapolis, MN) released an LP entitled “Nakatani Gong Orchestra” in 2012.

Audience members have described a NGO performance as entirely unlike anything they have ever experienced before, often relating feelings of cleansing or a sort of purification after the event.

Laureates of Connecticut Poetry Reading

Join us as Poets Laureate from around the state of Connecticut and Rennie McQuilkin, State Poet Laureate, read their work, talk about the world of poetry and share insights. A focus will be the new book put out by the Connecticut Coalition of Poets Laureate.

Signed copies of the book, Laureates of Connecticut Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (edited by Ginny Lowe Connors and Charles Margolis), will be available for a donation.

Participating Poets

Rennie McQuilkin, Poet Laureate of Connecticut and Poet Laureate of Simsbury

Ginny Lowe Connors, 2013-2015 Poet Laureate Emeritus of West Hartford and co-editor of the Laureates of Connecticut Anthology of Contemporary Poetry

Susan Allison

Christine Beck, current Poet Laureate of West Hartford

Hugo DeSarro

Tarn Granucci, Poet Laureate of Wallingford

Joan Hofman, Poet Laureate of Canton

Maria Sassi

Paolo Cirio: Street Ghosts

The Public Art component of Nothing to Hide? Art, Surveillance & Privacy has been created in downtown Hartford.

Artist Paolo Cirio and a team from Real Art Ways selected seven sites around downtown Hartford where unsuspecting pedestrians had been caught in Google Street View photos. On Saturday, May 13, the RAW team and Mr. Cirio visited the seven downtown sites to affix life-size cutouts of the anonymous people to buildings at the exact locations where the Street View photos were taken. Like other forms of street art, the Street Ghosts may deteriorate or disappear over time.

The locations are, top to bottom:
1. Starbucks at City Place, Trumbull Street
2. Society Room, Pratt Street
3. Hartford Prints!, Pratt Street (now missing)
4. 81 Asylum Street (now missing)
5, 777 Main Street (now missing)
6. EBK Gallery, Haynes Street
7. Bus Shelter near TheaterWorks, Pearl Street

Cirio has produced versions of this project in more than two dozen cities around the world, including London (see the photo below), Paris, New York City, Berlin, Montreal (see the video above), Sydney and Hong Kong. Cirio says, “It’s a temporary thing. That’s why they are ghosts. They appear and disappear and may come back any time.”

Member Appreciation Event: Reaction Bubble Dance Performance and Panel Discussion

What does the physical distance between us mean?

Reaction Bubble is an installation that includes custom electronics, video, ceramic sculpture, and choreography, and this presentation is the culmination of a four-year collaboration. The artists who worked together to create Reaction Bubble are the team of LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus), choreographer Deborah Goffe and ceramicist Matthew Towers. Real Art Ways introduced the artists to each other in 2012.

Dance Performance
Dancers interact with the Reaction Bubble installation and each other as they explore the impact and significance of Public Space, Social Space, Personal Space and Intimate Space.

The performance is choreographed and performed by Deborah Goffe in collaboration with Safi Harriott, Rosanna Karabetsos, Kate Seethaler and Arien Wilkerson. Sound design by Deborah Goffe in collaboration with Arien Wilkerson, and with music by Kode9, Murcof, Julia Holter and Holly Herndon.

Panel Discussion
After the Dance Performance, LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus), Deborah Goffe and Matthew Towers will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Real Art Ways Visual Arts Coordinator, Neil Daigle-Orians and take questions from members.

Free for Members and their Guests
Please RSVP to Amanda Baker at this link with the number of people attending.

The project received major support from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Important funders include the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, the J. Walton Bissell Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

About the Choreographic Team

Deborah Goffe is a performer, choreographer, dance educator, performance curator, and intermittent video artist. She is founder of Scapegoat Garden, a Connecticut-based collaborative dance theater, driven to create compelling, interdisciplinary performance that goes in through the nose, eyes, skin, ears and mouth to stir those who witness or participate. Scapegoat Garden strives to forge relationships between artists and communities, helping people see, create and contribute to a greater vision of ourselves, each other, and the places we call home. Deborah holds a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of the Arts School of Dance in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from California Institute of the Arts. Since Scapegoat Garden’s founding, Deborah has been devoted to the revitalization of local dance eco-systems and the role of performance curation in such processes. To this end, she recently earned a Professional Certificate from Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. She has been honored by the Connecticut Dance Alliance for Distinguished Achievement in Dance, and has received Artists Fellowship Grants from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and the Surdna Foundation. Deborah has participated as New England Emerging Choreographer at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine and has served as a yearlong Artist-in-Residence at Billings Forge Community Works. As an educator, Deborah has taught dance and related courses in several institutions, including California Institute of the Arts, Wesleyan University, CulturArte—a youth arts summer residency program in Cape Verde, Africa, and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Dance at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where she is excited to expand her experience of dance and place in a new context.

Safi Harriott specializes in dance education and cultural studies. She combines an awareness of her own movement through the world with an evolving understanding of systems of power and their impact on individual bodies. She has served as Visiting Lecturer in Dance at the Excelsior Community College in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also served as adjunct faculty and External Examiner (Repertory, Intermediate Modern Technique, Improvisation) for the Edna Manley College (EMCVPA) School of Dance. Harriott has facilitated workshops and presented choreography for the Kingston on the Edge Urban Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Jamaica Dance Umbrella (JDU) in addition to serving as primary coordinator and assistant to the Curator for the JDU and Junior JDU. Committed to international exchange, she has performed and co- taught in Kingston and New York with collaborators Zita Nyarady (Toronto, Canada) and Nancy Hughes (Buffalo NY, USA). More recently, she has served as Visiting Dance Faculty at the Cambridge School of Weston. In 2014 she received an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Smith College. Harriott has also trained at the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, and is currently an MA candidate in Socio-cultural Anthropology at Columbia University.

Rosanna Krabetsos is a Hartford-based dancer who has studied and performed a wide range of dance forms, with primary emphasis on contemporary, hip-hop and commercial dance. A graduate of the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, she is honored to have worked with artists like Kim Stroud (formerly of the Martha Graham Dance Company); Jennifer Weber (DECAdance); Kate St. Amand and Lynn Peterson (SYREN Modern Dance); Caroline Fermin (Galim Dance); Clyde Evans (Rennie Harris Pure Movement), Deborah Goffe and Leslie Frye Maietta (Scapegoat Garden). During high school, her summers were spent at Earl Mosley’s Institute of the Arts where she worked with Fredrick Earl Mosley, Nathan Trice, Kevin Wynn, Crystal Frazier and Rennie Harris (Rennie Harris Pure Movement), to name a few. Rosanna is currently signed to DFX Entertainment, which performs at the Mohegan Sun, Foxwoods Casinos, and other major venues. She also performs on the dance teams supporting the New England Black Wolves and the Connecticut Sun WNBA team. As an artist, Rosanna focuses locally, and is driven by a love of collaboration and the belief that dance can be a container for all of life. She is a founding member and collaborator with TNMOT AZTRO, having performed in events throughout Connecticut, including the 5×5 Dance Festival at the University of Saint Joseph and an evening length performance at Real Art Ways. Rosanna is also a lead choreographer and puppeteer for Anne Cubberly’s Nightfall, an annual interdisciplinary site-specific performance event in Hartford, and serves as the Creative Director of Hartford’s first and only beauty collective, Tainted Inc.

Based in Northampton, Massachusetts, Kate Seethaler currently teaches dance and movement at Springfield College and the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. She rehearses with choreographers Katie Martin and Whitney Wilson. She also creates her own choreographic work under the newly formed skeleton collaborative, which will launch in the next year through her participation as Artist in Residence at the School for Contemporary Dance in Northampton. Kate earned her MFA in Dance from Smith College in May 2016. At Smith, she focused her interests on performance and compositional improvisation, studying with Angie Hauser, Chris Aiken, and Jennifer Nugent amongst others. Kate has most recently performed in the work of Stephanie Turner, Jennifer Nugent, Stephanie Maher, Joy Davis, and Emily Lukasewski. In 2015, she attended Bates Dance Festival as a collaborator/performer in the work of Kellie Lynch, a BDF Emerging Choreographer. Kate received her full mat and equipment Pilates certification in 2012 at Aldrich Pilates in New Haven, CT. The efficiency and clarity of the body that Pilates training provides continually informs her approach to movement generation. Kate’s choreographic work has been performed at Elm City Dance Festival, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Smith College, Springfield College, The Taft School and The Ethel Walker School amongst other venues. Her most recent choreographic interests lie in the dichotomy of exploring a deeply personal and fiercely internal physiological landscape and dismantling the external hierarchy between audience and performer(s). She earned a BA in Dance, with minors in theater and philosophy, from Springfield College in 2008.

Arien Wilkerson is a choreographer, dancer, and video artist. The Hartford-native began his dance training under the tutelage of Jolet Creary, and has been a student at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, The Artists Collective, Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts, and at the Batsheva Dance Company’s Gaga Intensive in Tel Aviv. In 2008, he was a scholarship recipient for travel to Cape Verde, Africa to participate in CulturArte, a youth arts residency program where he studied with Mano Preto (Artistic Director of Raiz di Polon) and Deborah Goffe (Artistic Director of scapegoat Garden). As a high school senior in 2009, David Dorfman and Nicole Stanton selected his work for inclusion in Wesleyan University’s Dance Masters programming, recognizing his artistic potential as a young choreographer among more established New England choreographers. Since then, he has set choreographic works on EQuilibrium Dance Theater, CONNetic Dance collaborations, and Ruth Lewis Dimensional Dance. He has also performed as a special guest in Doug Elkin’s in Fraulein Maria at the Hartford stage, and choreographed for Anne Cubberly’s Nightfall. In his role as Artistic Director of TNMOT AZTRO, Arien has been commissioned by Hartford’s Town & County Club and Open Studio Hartford to develop iterations of his BLACK BOY JUNGLE and Punching Bag. As an Artist in Residence at The Garden Center for Contemporary Dance (2013-2014), Arien developed three iterations of his work, The Projector Series, and while there, served as co-facilitator for the Invisible City Project Cooperative, an initiative designed to share resources among Hartford-based dance artists. The Projector Series 1.4, the fourth and final installment of the project, was presented to 3 sold-out audiences at Real Art Ways in 2016.

Reaction Bubble Dance Performances

What does the physical distance between us mean?

Reaction Bubble is an installation that includes custom electronics, video, ceramic sculpture, and choreography, and this presentation is the culmination of a four-year collaboration. The artists who worked together to create Reaction Bubble are the team of LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus), choreographer Deborah Goffe, and ceramicist Matthew Towers. Real Art Ways introduced the artists to each other in 2012.

In the Performance component of the exhibition, five dancers interact with the Reaction Bubble installation and each other as they explore the impact and significance of Public Space, Social Space, Personal Space and Intimate Space.

Choreographed and performed by Deborah Goffe in collaboration with Safi Harriott, Rosanna Karabetsos, Kate Seethaler and Arien Wilkerson. Sound design by Deborah Goffe in collaboration with Arien Wilkerson, and with music by Kode9, Murcof, Julia Holter and Holly Herndon.

Admission is Free.

The project received major support from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Important funders include the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, the J. Walton Bissell Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

About the Choreographic Team

Deborah Goffe is a performer, choreographer, dance educator, performance curator, and intermittent video artist. She is founder of Scapegoat Garden, a Connecticut-based collaborative dance theater, driven to create compelling, interdisciplinary performance that goes in through the nose, eyes, skin, ears and mouth to stir those who witness or participate. Scapegoat Garden strives to forge relationships between artists and communities, helping people see, create and contribute to a greater vision of ourselves, each other, and the places we call home. Deborah holds a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of the Arts School of Dance in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from California Institute of the Arts. Since Scapegoat Garden’s founding, Deborah has been devoted to the revitalization of local dance eco-systems and the role of performance curation in such processes. To this end, she recently earned a Professional Certificate from Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. She has been honored by the Connecticut Dance Alliance for Distinguished Achievement in Dance, and has received Artists Fellowship Grants from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and the Surdna Foundation. Deborah has participated as New England Emerging Choreographer at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine and has served as a yearlong Artist-in-Residence at Billings Forge Community Works. As an educator, Deborah has taught dance and related courses in several institutions, including California Institute of the Arts, Wesleyan University, CulturArte—a youth arts summer residency program in Cape Verde, Africa, and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Dance at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where she is excited to expand her experience of dance and place in a new context.

Safi Harriott specializes in dance education and cultural studies. She combines an awareness of her own movement through the world with an evolving understanding of systems of power and their impact on individual bodies. She has served as Visiting Lecturer in Dance at the Excelsior Community College in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also served as adjunct faculty and External Examiner (Repertory, Intermediate Modern Technique, Improvisation) for the Edna Manley College (EMCVPA) School of Dance. Harriott has facilitated workshops and presented choreography for the Kingston on the Edge Urban Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Jamaica Dance Umbrella (JDU) in addition to serving as primary coordinator and assistant to the Curator for the JDU and Junior JDU. Committed to international exchange, she has performed and co- taught in Kingston and New York with collaborators Zita Nyarady (Toronto, Canada) and Nancy Hughes (Buffalo NY, USA). More recently, she has served as Visiting Dance Faculty at the Cambridge School of Weston. In 2014 she received an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Smith College. Harriott has also trained at the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, and is currently an MA candidate in Socio-cultural Anthropology at Columbia University.

Rosanna Krabetsos is a Hartford-based dancer who has studied and performed a wide range of dance forms, with primary emphasis on contemporary, hip-hop and commercial dance. A graduate of the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, she is honored to have worked with artists like Kim Stroud (formerly of the Martha Graham Dance Company); Jennifer Weber (DECAdance); Kate St. Amand and Lynn Peterson (SYREN Modern Dance); Caroline Fermin (Galim Dance); Clyde Evans (Rennie Harris Pure Movement), Deborah Goffe and Leslie Frye Maietta (Scapegoat Garden). During high school, her summers were spent at Earl Mosley’s Institute of the Arts where she worked with Fredrick Earl Mosley, Nathan Trice, Kevin Wynn, Crystal Frazier and Rennie Harris (Rennie Harris Pure Movement), to name a few. Rosanna is currently signed to DFX Entertainment, which performs at the Mohegan Sun, Foxwoods Casinos, and other major venues. She also performs on the dance teams supporting the New England Black Wolves and the Connecticut Sun WNBA team. As an artist, Rosanna focuses locally, and is driven by a love of collaboration and the belief that dance can be a container for all of life. She is a founding member and collaborator with TNMOT AZTRO, having performed in events throughout Connecticut, including the 5×5 Dance Festival at the University of Saint Joseph and an evening length performance at Real Art Ways. Rosanna is also a lead choreographer and puppeteer for Anne Cubberly’s Nightfall, an annual interdisciplinary site-specific performance event in Hartford, and serves as the Creative Director of Hartford’s first and only beauty collective, Tainted Inc.

Based in Northampton, Massachusetts, Kate Seethaler currently teaches dance and movement at Springfield College and the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. She rehearses with choreographers Katie Martin and Whitney Wilson. She also creates her own choreographic work under the newly formed skeleton collaborative, which will launch in the next year through her participation as Artist in Residence at the School for Contemporary Dance in Northampton. Kate earned her MFA in Dance from Smith College in May 2016. At Smith, she focused her interests on performance and compositional improvisation, studying with Angie Hauser, Chris Aiken, and Jennifer Nugent amongst others. Kate has most recently performed in the work of Stephanie Turner, Jennifer Nugent, Stephanie Maher, Joy Davis, and Emily Lukasewski. In 2015, she attended Bates Dance Festival as a collaborator/performer in the work of Kellie Lynch, a BDF Emerging Choreographer. Kate received her full mat and equipment Pilates certification in 2012 at Aldrich Pilates in New Haven, CT. The efficiency and clarity of the body that Pilates training provides continually informs her approach to movement generation. Kate’s choreographic work has been performed at Elm City Dance Festival, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Smith College, Springfield College, The Taft School and The Ethel Walker School amongst other venues. Her most recent choreographic interests lie in the dichotomy of exploring a deeply personal and fiercely internal physiological landscape and dismantling the external hierarchy between audience and performer(s). She earned a BA in Dance, with minors in theater and philosophy, from Springfield College in 2008.

Arien Wilkerson is a choreographer, dancer, and video artist. The Hartford-native began his dance training under the tutelage of Jolet Creary, and has been a student at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, The Artists Collective, Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts, and at the Batsheva Dance Company’s Gaga Intensive in Tel Aviv. In 2008, he was a scholarship recipient for travel to Cape Verde, Africa to participate in CulturArte, a youth arts residency program where he studied with Mano Preto (Artistic Director of Raiz di Polon) and Deborah Goffe (Artistic Director of scapegoat Garden). As a high school senior in 2009, David Dorfman and Nicole Stanton selected his work for inclusion in Wesleyan University’s Dance Masters programming, recognizing his artistic potential as a young choreographer among more established New England choreographers. Since then, he has set choreographic works on EQuilibrium Dance Theater, CONNetic Dance collaborations, and Ruth Lewis Dimensional Dance. He has also performed as a special guest in Doug Elkin’s in Fraulein Maria at the Hartford stage, and choreographed for Anne Cubberly’s Nightfall. In his role as Artistic Director of TNMOT AZTRO, Arien has been commissioned by Hartford’s Town & County Club and Open Studio Hartford to develop iterations of his BLACK BOY JUNGLE and Punching Bag. As an Artist in Residence at The Garden Center for Contemporary Dance (2013-2014), Arien developed three iterations of his work, The Projector Series, and while there, served as co-facilitator for the Invisible City Project Cooperative, an initiative designed to share resources among Hartford-based dance artists. The Projector Series 1.4, the fourth and final installment of the project, was presented to 3 sold-out audiences at Real Art Ways in 2016.

Reaction Bubble Reception

What does the physical distance between us mean?

Created by LoVid, Deborah Goffe and Matt Towers; Tyler Henry – Technical Director. Commissioned and produced by Real Art Ways.

The presentation of Reaction Bubble is the culmination of the artists’ four-year collaboration, inspired by the anthropological field of Proxemics (the study of the impact and significance of physical distances on human interaction). The installation invites audience involvement, forming an immersive installation and performance experience.

Reaction Bubble received major support from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Important funders include the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, the J. Walton Bissell Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Real Art Ways Member Appreciation Event
4:00-5:00 PM
Meet the artists with other Real Art Ways supporters; learn about the conceptual development and the collaborative process.

Public Reception
5:00-6:30 PM
Dance Performance: 5:30 PM
Choreographed and performed by Deborah Goffe in collaboration with
Safi Harriott, Rosanna Karabetsos, Kate Seethaler and Arien Wilkerson.