Part of an ongoing series of "postcard" pieces, Postcards: Manitou Ave. was conceived during my two-month stay on Manitou Avenue, situated in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, CA. The piece is dedicated to Jeff Cain, Christopher O'Leary and Michael Kontopoulos.

Postcards: Manitou Ave. (2015)

Sound design for 'The Dryway' by Emma Zakes Green.

Text: Emma Zakes Green
Voices: A'raelle Flynn Bolden, Emma Zakes Green, Megan Therese Rippey

'The Dryway,' a merfolk opera written and directed by Emma Zakes Green was presented as part of Son of Semele Company Creation Festival 2016.

Loosely based on the ancient myth of Melusine, the half-serpent and/or half-fish woman widely popularized in the late medieval tales of Jean d'Arras, The Dryway tells the story of three mermaid sisters cursed to exile on land by their mother.
Prose, poetry, and original music follow the sisters’ banishment from the ocean to a motel bar in the desert, linking a mythic past with a gritty, humble present.

Credits:

Written and Directed by: Emma Zakes Green
Assistant Directed/Choreographed by: Kestrel Farin Leah
Performed by: A'raelle Flynn Bolden, Emma Zakes Green, Megan Therese Rippey.
Musical Direction: Paul Fraser
Set Design: Drew Foster
Costume Design: Kate Fry
Sound Design: Yiannis Christofides
Lighting Design: Alexander Le Vaillant Freer


Review:

"One of the four pieces incubated at Son of Semele’s Company Creation Festival this year is The Dryway: A Merfolk Opera. On the small blackbox stage, three women speak, enact and sing a tale of a mermaid queen’s three daughters, who are banished from the sea.
(...)
They tell their tale in poetry and song. The spoken words are sometimes choral, sometimes monologs; the songs (backed by varied instruments) are sometimes trios, sometime solos, and often ironic. The complex sound design (by Yiannis Christofides) holds all of this together. Simple, effective choreography (by Kestrel Farin Leah) keeps the story in constant motion, and the spare costumes (Kate Fry) shift easily to mark changes." - Theater Ghost


Mother (2015)

This live stage work for 13 actor-vocalists is lead by performer-director Kestrel Leah and composer Yiannis Christofides—aka PHYSICAL PLASTIC—in collaboration with choreographer Brigette Dunn Korpela and visual artist Dasha Sur.

We conceived Alarm while living in Bed-stuy, Brooklyn, where nightly we experienced a security alarm from a nearby building. Its violent disruption and the physical response it created inspired our initial exploration of the sonic character of alarms in relation to movement. Since, the project has become for us a questioning of boundaries, ownership and power as observed both locally and in the geopolitical scene. Alarm performs ideas of need, limit and transgression (i.e. stealing or trespassing) in the context of capitalist society and its ongoing crises. A full-length choral score by Christofides that uses extended vocal textures and the opposition of silence and its disruption, will be staged with a choreographed vocal ensemble portraying the bystander, the trespasser, and the alarm—and evoking the mythological sirens.

We bring forth the acoustic event of the security alarm as a rupture—an event which signals the current state of affairs, and in doing so, presents us with the possibility for the emergence of new social order. The alarm, as a public performance of danger, sets an example for the violating body and its desire to transgress, to disrupt and renegotiate the limits of its existence. Once it sounds, the divisions between self and other, between public and private, previously hidden in the background, are revealed, as are the networks and infrastructures protecting those boundaries. Alarms implicate us in questions of difference, of desire, and law. For us, Alarm is a rebellion, a cry of conscience from amidst the urban viscera concealing systems of protection, fear and power in infinite webs of wires and cables: an alarm in and of itself that gives physical voice to our unease at witnessing the rapid gentrification of and complicated racial relations in a struggling neighborhood as once neighbors, outsiders and “gentrifiers”.

Our newly formed company is founded upon theater’s inherent capacity to make immanent issues of universal concern. In response to racial and economic segregation, and rising tendencies of nationalism, we make a conscious effort towards international collaboration and a breadth of cultural perspectives, so as to better shed light upon issues both at home and abroad, and confront cultural differences directly, as part of our creative process.

In March 2017, we have been invited to develop this work in residency at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center.

This work has been selected for a 2017 New Music USA grant.

More information about this project: 

https://www.newmusicusa.org/projects/alarm

http://www.physicalplastic.com

Voices: Kestrel Leah, Nathan Nonhof

ALARM vignette 1 (excerpt, 2017)

Who wants to be my horse?
by Julie Béna
Video installation (32’)

Courtesy of the artist, Production Les Ateliers de Rennes – 2018 With the support of Ars Ultima – Stein & Guillot Art Foundation

Who wants to be my horse? (2018) is presented in the form of a small pocket theatre hidden behind metal bars which the viewer walks into. What is enacted behind the thick velvet curtains is a series of tableaus in which, accompanied by other protagonists, J. Béna works her way through several sexual female identities, their representations and their narratives. Among them, Madison Young, a militant figure within the “pro-sex” movements advocating the occupation of the porn industry by women and sexual minorities, delivers a monologue to the camera. It is interspersed with poetry by the American artist and musician Jamika Ajalon, and by the bawdy Czech jokes mischievously told by Dita Lam and Shanta Rao, while the artist shares a few moments which have marked her own sex life.

Who Wants To Be My Horse? (excerpt from Julie Béna's video installation / Title Music)

Have you seen Pantopon Rose?
Video installation by Julie Béna
Credit: Original Music & Sound Design

French artist Julie Béna’s project Have you seen Pantopon Rose? takes roots in theater, antiquity, mythology, literature, nightlife. The character of Rose is defined in relation to her place of existence and the people around.

Have you seen Pantopon Rose?’s scenario is composed by objects, texts, gestures, musics which follow two entities: Rose Pantoponne, and the Chorus. The Chorus is the main, explicative voice, the one who sets the tone. Rose Pantoponne, a quasi-mute character embodied by the artist herself, is the gestures, the manipulations, the cocktails, the dance.

Originally, Rose Pantoponne appears in the last chapters of Beat Generation’s famous novel Naked Lunch through the wanderings of mind of an old junky. Have you seen Pantopon Rose? was constructed from this appearance, escaped from William S. Burroughs’ text, towards the incarnation of Rose. At the same time, Julie Bena begins reading Homer’s Odyssey and get back to reading Greek tragedy. For her, it’s a bit like if Jack Kerouac crossed Homer On the Road. Thus the Beat Generation meets the Ancient tragic. Have you seen Pantopon Rose? it is a mix between a cabaret, a performance and a musical. Rose Pantoponne is not a patchwork but rather a surprising, sweet-salt, sour and bitter cocktail. The recipe is progressively generated. Elements are added, mingle to constantly complexify and lengthen the taste. The project for Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain is the final opus of five research years during which Rose and the Chorus were created and performed in London, Montreal, New York or Los Angeles.

Have You Seen Pantopon Rose?  (excerpt from Julie Béna's video installation / Title Music)

Ένας άνθρωπος επιστρέφει στην πατρίδα του πιστεύοντας ότι θα τον σκοτώσουν και τον σκοτώνουν
by Ioli Andreadi & Aris Asproulis (adaptation of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral)
Dir. Ioli Andreadi
Credit: Original Music & Sound Design

Presented at Greek Art Theatre Karolos Koun, featuring Roula Pateraki and Yiorgos Nanouris.

For Thomas Becket (cello: Alexandros Kasartzis)

YOUNG LEAR
by Ioli Andreadi & Aris Asproulis (adaptation of William Shakespeare's King Lear) 
Dir. Ioli Andreadi
Credit: Original Music & Sound Design

Athens and Epidaurus Festival
July 17-18, 2016

Theseum - A Theatre for the Arts
October 1-30, 2016

Can the language of Shakespeare serve as a substitute
for what cannot be talked about at the family table?
Can poetry return what was never fulfilled?

The sold out show of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2016 directed by Ioli Andreadi. Based on William Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Concept - Direction - Translation - Movement: Ioli Andreadi
Text: Ioli Andreadi & Aris Asproulis
Set & Costume Design: Dimitra Liakoura
Original Music & Sound Design: Yiannis Christofides
Lighting Design: Christina Thanasoula
Constructions: Pericles Pravitas
Photos: Panos Michail & Kiki Papadopoulou
Video Trailer: Diamantis Karanastasis
Production Design: Art Minds

Cast (in an alphabetical order): 
Christina Garbi, Eleana Kafkala, Thimios Koukios, 
Maria G. Proistaki, Nektarios Smyrnakis, Miltiadis Fiorentzis

The performance was supported by the Michael Cacoyiannis Foundation.

The play can be found at selected bookshops by Kappa Publishing House.

Father

Materials
Sound installation (51'48" loop)

Commissioned as part of the exhibit "An Armenian, a Turk and a Greek | Materiality, Affect and Power" curated by Despo Pasia and Antonis Hadjikyriacou, on view at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC) from April 7 to July 29, and from September 5 to November 25, 2017 as part of the exhibition 'Terra Mediterranea: In Action,' curated by Yiannis Toumazis.

Curators: Despo Pasia & Antonis Hadjikyriacou
Architectural design: Yiorgos Hadjichristou. 
Sound installation: Materials / Υλικά, Yiannis Christofides
Translations: Lora Megerditchian (Armenian), Gülseren Duman & Yener Koç (Turkish)
Special Thanks: Tasos Alexiou, cotton producer, Karditsa, Greece | Güneş Işıksel, Historian.

Materials / Υλικά (excerpt)

Director: Kestrel Farin Leah
Composition + Sound Design: Yiannis Christofides
Text fragments (in order of appearance): Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space, Alain Badiou - Ahmed the Philosopher, André Breton and Philippe Soupault - The Magnetic Fields (Greek trans. Lydia Kouvatsou), Yiannis Christofides - The Traveller
Lighting concept: Katelan Braymer

Performers: Bailey Edwards, Lisa McNeely, Lizi Watt, Cristina Fernandez Allen, Dominique McDougal, Joseph Alfred Baca III, Kestrel Farin Leah.

A live recording of the performance of a vignette from our work in progress ALARM.

ALARM is an original work by PHYSICAL PLASTIC in collaboration with choreographer Brigette Dunn-Korpela and visual artist Dasha Sur. Initial development took place in residency at The Watermill Center with the support of New Music USA.

Los Angeles Nomadic Division
FRAME RATE: WILD ART PARTY

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Blue Roof Studios
7329 S. Broadway Ave.
Los Angeles, CA, 90003

ALARM by PHYSICAL PLASTIC (Recorded live at Blue Roof Studios, LA, October 20, 2018)

LULU XX
by WaxFactory
Dir. Ivan V Talijančić
Credit: Original Music & Sound Design

At the turn of the 20th century, German playwright Frank Wedekind imagined Lulu, an elusive heroine as puzzling and indestructible as his relentless search for quintessence of the “other” sex. As complex as the pandemonium of female archetypes invented throughout history, she manifested herself as the definitive embodiment of the eternal strife to reconcile the worlds of male and female genders.

At the turn of the 21st century – in 1999 – having just co-founded WaxFactory, Ivan Talijancic and Erika Latta, turned their attention to LULU, as their first formal collaboration. While their initial investigation was presented as a work-in-progress in New York, the work had officially premiered and toured overseas only.

In 2019, WaxFactory celebrates its 20th anniversary with LULU XX, a new cross-media performance, devised by the company's co-founders. Our production, inspired by Wedekind's timeless female protagonist, challenges the idolatry and misogyny of the male gaze in artistic representation of women, exposing its conflicting tendencies. Inspired by the momentum of feminist protest, we revisit the unapologetic heroine, asking new questions about agency, representation and violence in the contemporary world.

CREDITS

co-creators | Ivan V Talijančić + Erika Latta
performed by | Erika Latta
directed and designed by | Ivan V Talijančić
costumes | Miodrag Guberinic
music and sound | Yiannis Christofides
video | programming+engineering: Jason Batcheller
video | cinematography+editing: Skye Morse-Hodgson
video | additional cinematography: Tasja Keetman
lights | Paul Hudson

associate producer + performance coordinator | Sandy Cleary

media contact / press representation | John Wyszniewski / Everyman Agency, john@everymanagency.com, 347-416-3881

photography by Tasja Keetman

Memory Dance (excerpt)

A multichannel sonic environment that explores a sense of place through listening, ritual and the condition of darkness. 

Presented as part of solo exhibition and series of events at Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia Cyprus (31 October - 29 November 2014).

Duration: 145 minutes (loop)

'Experiencing this work involves a process of being oriented and of disorienting. Where is the horizon? Can its existence be stipulated in relation tao some sort of centre? To this latter question, 'The blind ear' seems to allow us to answer both yes and no. In navigating this space, one may possibly pulled, by the ear, towards a centre - the 'sweet spot' that is the Holy Grail of audiophiles. Here, standing (or sitting) still allows one to be constituted as disembodied acoustic subject. This quasi-Oedipal gesture can be thought of as 'blinding' one's bodily ear. More importantly, however, there are also other trajectories to be followed in the spaces of this work, ones that resist various pulls towards centres or subjectifications.' - Andreas Vrahimis

The blind ear (2014, excerpt)

Madame de Sade is an experimental opera layering extended vocals and movement against a repetitive electro-acoustic score. The work draws inspiration from spoken-word and voguing to drive the narrative with dueling musical, vocal and gestural motifs, using the characters’ passionate debates to create dialogue between modern philosophical and feminist movements.

Using motifs created by the actors themselves in response to Sade’s work, Christofides has created an original melodic theme for each character, to be performed through a combination of extended vocals, live instrumentation and electroacoustic recordings. This in-progress sketch is for Montreuil’s Theme.

Director: Kestrel Leah
Composer: Yiannis Christofides

Cast:

Renée – Lizi Watt
Montreuil – Kestrel Leah
Anne – Emma Green
Saint Fond – Megan Rippey
Simiane – Bailey Edwards
Charlotte – Lisa McNeely

Mme De Sade - Montreuil's Theme (voice: Kestrel Leah)

Yiannis Christofides combines practices in electronic music, soundscape composition, creative sound design and field recording and has a background in media theory and cultural studies.

His music and soundscapes for art installations, performance, and curatorial projects have been presented at leading venues and institutions throughout Europe and the U.S including Centre Pompidou (FR), Lincoln Center (US), The Watermill Center (US), The Athens & Epidaurus Festival (GR), La Triennale di Milano (IT), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (US), Queen Elizabeth Hall | Southbank Centre (UK), Municipal Theatre of Piraeus (GR), Fonoteca Nacional de México (MX), Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain (FR), Berlin International Sound Art Festival (DE), Cyprus Theatre Organisation (CY), International Festival of Ancient Greek Drama (CY), 3LD Art & Technology Center (US), The Invisible Dog Art Center (US), Point Centre for Contemporary Art (CY), the wulf. (US), Metamatic: The Art Foundation (GR), The Ethnological Museum (CY), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (US), Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (CY).

Much of his personal work investigates our experience of place through the use of field recordings as principal material. His particular interest in field recording relates to the contextual aspects of sound and the intersensory experience that it affords.

Yiannis is co-founder of PHYSICAL PLASTIC, a Los Angeles based composer-director partnership with actor/director Kestrel Leah.

He is based in Los Angeles, Athens and Nicosia and works internationally.

Yiannis Christofides

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