Music performances and installations at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden
Begin your experience with the magnificent multimedia performance by the New York Times-celebrated flutist and performer Margaret Lancaster, telling a story of pandemic during which her instrument/voice became weaponized. In the garden gazebo’s Breath of Death Pavilion, Lancaster will ‘safely’ present a carefully crafted program of contemporary compositions selected from an international call, including those by Dorothy Hindman, Alex Lough, Elizabeth Adams, Christopher Cerrone, Yi Ding, Moritz Eggert, Elizabeth Hoffman, Anne LeBaron, Eric Lyon, Milica Paranosic, and Jacob TV. Alex Lough will accompany Lancaster on electronics.
Enter Rachel Weiss’s Rudimentary Voyage, an open roof meditation pavilion designed as an individual reflective space. Weiss writes: “Imagine a journey—a voyage to a quiet desert. In the pavilion, the spectator will experience a relaxing ambient audio-visual installation.” Created after an ancient Sukkah tent, the experience will feature experimental video art and sounds of voice, breathing and nature.
Then, immerse yourself in the garden sprinkled with four of Juraj Kojš’s Orchid Music sound and media installations. Hear music based on the DNA sequence of ten Florida native orchid species. Navigate through a small maze fashioned from plastic orchid pots. Try performing a virtual synthesizer that generates more sonifications of orchid DNA sequences. Experience a memorial board populated with name tags of deceased orchids.
The experience will conclude with a festive gathering at the garden’s canal promenade, where Troy Rogers will float on his magical pedal-powered boat. His automated sousaphone and glockenspiel will project a dadaist musical calls, making him the first robotic gondolier on the city’s canals. Joined by Alex Lough, Juraj Kojš, Rachel Weiss and Margaret Lancaster in an improvised happening, this outdoor carnival promises to stir a celebration of life, art and garden through exploration and experimentation.
Thursday, Friday and Saturday, December 3-5, 2020
1-2PM: Guided Walk through the installations, Margaret Lancaster performing music of Dorothy Hindman and Troy Rogers performing on a boat at the canal
3-4PM: Guided Walk through the installations, Margaret Lancaster performing music of Alex Lough and Troy Rogers at the canal and Troy Rogers performing on a boat at the canal
5-7PM: Guided Walk through the installations, Margaret Lancaster performing works by Elizabeth Adams, Christopher Cerrone, Yi Ding, Moritz Eggert, Elizabeth Hoffman, Anne LeBaron, Eric Lyon, Milica Paranosic, and Jacob TV; Troy Rogers performing on a boat at the canal
FREE ADMISSION.
Supported by the FETA Foundation, Miami Beach Botanical Garden, the City of Miami Beach, University of Miami and Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.
The Breath of Death Pavilion Program
featuring Margaret Lancaster, flute with Alex Lough, electronics
About the artists:
“New-music luminary” (The New York Times), Margaret Lancaster ((flutist/performance artist/actor/dancer) has built a large repertoire of interactive, cross-disciplinary solo works that employ electronics and mixed media. Performance highlights include Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Santa Fe New Music, Art Basel/Miami, Edinburgh Festival, NIME/Copenhagen, Tap City, and the 7-year global run of OBIE-winning Mabou Mines Dollhouse (Helene). She has recorded on New World Records, World Edition, Naxos, Innova, Tzadik, New Focus, and Mode. Ongoing collaborations include projects with FETA Foundation, Stockhausen’s KLANG cycle, and with Either/Or touring Morton Feldman’s 5 hour epic For Philip Guston…
Troy Rogers is deeply involved in the creation, performance, and dissemination of early 21st century semi-nomadic robot herder’s music. His Robot Rickshaw is a human-driven cart full of musical robots designed for all-terrain performance scenarios ranging from guerrilla drive-by rapid-fire black-MIDI-burst-spewing dadaist street interventions to extended duration drone therapy sessions. His instruments and performances joyfully teeter between mind-bending wonder and catastrophic failure, underscoring a firm belief in humans as amplifiers of low probabilistic states, as well as the seeming unlikelihood of our species surviving its technological adolescence, all the while reveling in the humor to be found in such contradictions. Recognized with a Minnesota Emerging Composer Award by the American Composers Forum, Rogers is a committed independent educator, regularly presenting lectures and offering Making Music with Robots and STEAM education workshops at universities, galleries, community art centers, makerspaces, and schools throughout the US.
Rachel Weiss is a Miami-based composer, opera singer, vocal artist, interdisciplinary artist and an educator. As a composer, she has created original music that meditates a strong connection to philosophical discourses and contemporary technologies. Her work expands the conventional composition to dedicated explorations of extended vocal techniques, micro-tonal scales, multi-cultural dimensionalities, and interdisciplinary art. Rachel puts great emphasis on creating new techniques for original vocal improvisation performances. Her creative practice spans across a wide range of genres and disciplines, experimenting with spaces on the border between traditional western-eastern music and multidisciplinary art forms such as sound installation, performance art and interactive multimedia.
My name is Juraj Kojš, and I am an artist from Slovakia and USA, exploring the fields of music, sound art, theater, poetry, mixed media, multimedia, bioacoustics and technologies as a maker and performer. Collaborating with artists and scientists, producing other people’s works, doing scholarly research and teaching also give me joy, as does living in Miami, FL. Miami New Times described my muscle-powered multimedia Neraissance as “striking and unforgettable,” MiamiArtzine called Signals “enthralling and immersive,” and Miami Herald praised Bang for the Train as “the most profound…unexpected and enjoyable.” www.kojs.net
Alex Lough is a composer, performer, and sound artist. His work focuses on implementing experimental technology in order to discover new performance contexts with particular attention given to the body and the physicality of sound. His research is primarily concerned with the new taxonomic distinction of “performed electronics” and embodied performance practices as an electronicist. He is currently a PhD candidate at UC Irvine in the new Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology program where he studies with Mari Kimura, Nicole Mitchell, Simon Penny, and Chris Dobrian.