Renée Fleming, Paola Prestini, Du Yun & More to be Featured in CONTEMPLATIONS FROM NATIONAL SAWDUST

Since its inception in 2015, National Sawdust has pushed the boundaries of the artistic experience for curators, creators and audiences alike; challenging established compositional and performative power structures and upturning presumed hierarchies of genre and form. Over the past half decade, National Sawdust has presented thousands of live performances, dozens of full-length recordings, and provided financial and creative support to tens of thousands of practicing artists.

Now, in celebration of the organization's belated five year anniversary, National Sawdust and The WNET Group's ALL ARTS present Contemplations from National Sawdust, a six-episode retrospective presenting an overview of National Sawdust's impressive past, ambitious present and hopeful future. Composers and artists featured in conversation and performance throughout Contemplations include Philip Glass, Renée Fleming, Nico Muhly, Nadia Sirota, Theo Bleckmann, Du Yun, Laura Ortman, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Ellen Reid, Helga Davis, Tania León, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Chris Grymes, Terry Riley and many more.

Curated by the composer and National Sawdust co-founder Paola Prestini, Contemplations documents the many facets of National Sawdust, from its inception to its current role as an innovator within the digital space, with a selection of past events and in-depth interviews by Paola with artistic leaders and creative luminaries.

Individual episodes explore the process of the organization's founding, its engagement with diverse and socially aware programming, how National Sawdust has provided artists and audiences with support throughout the pandemic year, and a presentation of new work specially commissioned for this program.

Following their premiere, all episodes of Contemplations will be available to stream free of charge nationwide via The WNET Group's ALL ARTS app and allarts.org. New York metro area viewers can also watch on the ALL ARTS television channel (channel listing) beginning with the first program of newly commissioned works, 21 c Liederabend, op. WORLDWIDE on June 27, 2021.

CONTEMPLATIONS FROM NATIONAL SAWDUST

Episode 1: The Future - 21c Liederabend, op. WORLDWIDE

Premiering on Sunday, June 27 at 8pm

Co-Produced with Beth Morrison Productions - Funded by The Toulmin Foundation

Featuring Interviews with Renée Fleming, Beth Morrison, Paola Prestini

New Music by Holland Andrews, Amyra León, Lido Pimienta,

Paola Prestini, Theodosia Roussos and Diana Syrse

For this inaugural Contemplations episode, National Sawdust presents an entirely new work, created in the spirit of the 19th century German Romantic tradition of the Liederabend musical salon. 21c Liederabend unites a diverse collective of women and top-flight talents in the fields of composition and poetry, instrumental and vocal performance, fine art and video art. Featured creators include new work by the rising performance-artist, vocalist and composer Holland Andrews in collaboration with Katrina Reid and Paul Notice of The Notice Blog; multi-hyphenate musician-author-director-activist Amyra León with filmmaker Bradley Credit, musicians David Frazier and Darian Thomas and dancer Paris Marcel; the Canadian-Colombian singer and multimedia artist Lido Pimienta with percussionist Brandon Valdivia and video artist Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea; a collaboration between the composer-series curator-National Sawdust co-founder Paola Prestini, librettist Royce Vavrek, mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti and painter Natalie Frank in a short film by animator Erin Pollock; multi-instrumentalist Theodosia Roussos in collaboration with the musical group Wild Up (music direction by Christopher Rountree) featuring Adrianne Pope, Andrew McIntosh, Derek Stein, Jiji, and Michael Day, as captured by designer and videographer Hana Kim; and composer/vocalist/pianist Diana Syrse's new work with musicians Conrad Harris, Pauline Kim Harris, Lev Zhurbin and Jeffrey Zeigler as documented by filmmaker Mathilde Lavenne. Interviews with the soprano Renée Fleming, Beth Morrison and Paola Prestini on the future of the songwriting form and in-depth features about all of the creative participants round out the program.

Episode 2: Opening Night

Premiering on Sunday, July 4 at 8pm

Featuring Interviews and Music with Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, Nadia Sirota and Theo Bleckmann

Music by Tanya Tagaq, Paola Prestini, Glenn Kotche and Chris Thile

The foundations of National Sawdust can be traced back to years before the doors opened at their Brooklyn venue, to early conversations between co-founders Paola Prestini and Kevin Dolan on their shared aspirations to create a headquarters for a new force within the NYC composition and performance ecosystem. Built with the intention of providing new opportunities for young composers, space for new performers to grow and great live sound for audiences, National Sawdust has since blossomed into full fruition. We follow these creative impulses from their germination up to National Sawdust's October 2015 opening night, featuring music from the composer-performers Philip Glass, Nico Muhly and Chris Thile. Together, these concerts and reminiscences shed light on how an artistic movement begins.

Episode 3: Origins

Premiering on Sunday, July 11 at 8pm

Music, Art & Interviews with Du Yun, Laura Ortman, Kevork Mourad and Anthony Roth Costanzoi??

Music by Du Yun's OK Miss, Sophia Brous' Lullaby Movement Abraham Brody and JOJO ABOT

In National Sawdust's third season, the organization took a deep dive into the diverse and multivalent matrix of influences and experiences that make up the tapestry of contemporary composition, embracing the roots of culture itself through great artists' musical interpretations. The result of that year produced a world of new work including Du Yun's PanAsia Sounding festival, Tanya Tagaq's creative curation with The Winterreise Nights Festival, Lithuanian Abraham Brody's vocal and violin explorations, Ghanian artist JOJO ABOT's interdisciplinary spiritual dance and film set, and British pop diva Bishi's sitar piece on the nature of the mythical "good immigrant." Viewed now as a complete work, this season offers a direct response to the fear-driven currency exchanged in the media landscape, an insistent return to empathy, a celebration of the multicultural and the borderless, and a closer look at the musical origins and wide-reaching influences National Sawdust brings to its listeners.

Episode 4: Voices of Today

Premiering on Sunday, July 18 at 8pmi??

Featuring Interviews and music with Ellen Reid, Helga Davis and Daniel Bernard Roumain

Music & Dance by Samora Pinderhughes, Young People's Chorus of NYC, Angélica Negrón,

Reggie "Reg Roc" Gray, Yuka Honda, J Hoard, Justin Kangmin Kim, Lucia Lucas and more

National Sawdust's mission to overturn the established power structure of contemporary composition and musical creation means that the political is necessarily an inherent part of the organization's DNA. With its focus on mentorship and an ever evolving group of curators, National Sawdust prides itself on socially responsible and socially responsive action. Through the words and performances of some of the leading thinkers and artists within the National Sawdust community - including vocalist and advocate Helga Davis, dancer and choreographer Reggie "Reg Roc" Gray and the operatic countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo - this episode illuminates the organization's active and ongoing intersectional engagement with issues of race, class, age, gender, ethnicity and human rights.

Episode 5: Leading Voices

Premiering on Sunday, July 25 at 8pmi??

Interviews and Music with Chris Grymes, Joan Tower, Tania León and Terry Riley

Music by Joan Tower, Terry Riley performed by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street,

George Crumb, Meredith Monk, Tazwell Thompson and Jeanine Tesori, John Zorn,

Nels Cline and Julian Lage, Ryuichi Sakamoto and more

This episode presents an in-depth look at a few of the many giants of contemporary music that are part of the foundation of National Sawdust. One of the goals with the creation of Sawdust's world-class performance space was to portray the commonalities of deep conceptual thinking, craft and flow that exist across genre, formal education and personal experience. Rather than applying false hierarchies or limiting greatness to an archaic standard, Sawdust's guiding principle has been to search for greatness across the creative spectrum. In that spirit, we present interviews and music from some of the great minds of our era, including Tazwell Thompson and Jeanine Tesori, Tania León, George Crumb, Terry Riley and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Episode 6: Digital Discovery

Premiering on Sunday, August 1 at 8pmi??

Featuring an interview with Damian Woetzel

Music and Interviews with Kyle Abraham, Delune, Joel Ross, Conrad Tao, Molly Joyce,

Amy Hall Garner, Angélica Negrón, Joan La Barbara and Allison Loggins-Hull

Like almost every arts organization impacted by COVID-19, National Sawdust entered March 2020 in need of a sharp turn toward urgent care. The question quickly became clear: how could National Sawdust continue to support artists and stay vital to audiences in a period of social distancing? In only a few months, the organization rapidly sent out internet-oriented audio-visual technology to artists, provided training on how to best record from home and commissioned nearly 100 programs for the Digital Discovery Series, one of the most comprehensive first-response livestream concert offerings of the pandemic. Once zoom fatigue became a reality in December, the renewed question became how to best expand the form to reimagine the digital stage as a space for organic creation and improvisation. National Sawdust's 2021 Artistic Season, BODY / SPACE, with its emphasis on dance, celebrated online creative and intellectual innovation, rethinking the boundaries of online performance for the virtual theater. With a focus on the body as a site of expression and social change, the 2021 season has interrogated the roles of race, gender, disability, community, and artificial intelligence.

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