New York Live Composing Festival Opens This Thursday!

Irondale, Brooklyn's leading theatrical and artistically ambitious think-tank theater ensemble, together with the Walter Thompson Orchestra, presents The New York Live Composing Festival, June 16-18.

A three-day event that puts the Soundpainting and Conduction live composing sign languages into the spotlight to create music, theater and movement, the festival brings together multi-disciplinary New York artists hailing from all over the world to explore the language of real-time composition.

A globally recognized live composing sign language comprised of more than 1,500 gestures, Soundpainting was created by composer and pioneer Walter Thompson in 1974 as a way to create a composition in real time with a group of artists. When executing this technique, the Soundpainter stands in front of a group of performers to communicate a series of signs using hand and body gestures indicating specific or aleatoric material to be performed by the group, yielding a real-time composition. Like Thompson, composer Butch Morris created Conduction, a sign language to explore similar concepts within the music landscape. Conduction utilizes a conductor's baton and works with a vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct a real-time musical composition. Though different creative languages, both Soundpainting and Conduction share the concepts of transmitting generative information for interpretation by the individual and the collective, to provide instantaneous possibilities for altering or initiating harmony, melody, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, or form. Celebrating both methods and the creation of spontaneous works, the Festival features the Walter Thompson Orchestra and other ensembles working in and exploring these mediums. From the subversive Jazz quartet Sexmob to the Brooklyn based Letter of Marque Theater Company, the politically charged and provocative Strike Anywhere Ensemble Project to Medeski Martin & Wood drummer and composer Billy Martin and more, audiences will experience three days of original, unrepeatable live composed work for audiences of all ages.

"In the last several years there have been few opportunities for people using different forms of live composing such as Soundpainting and Conduction to get together and share creative exchanges," notes Walter Thompson, the Festival's co-producer. "This festival is a special occasion to experience the diversity of ways that compositional sign languages are being used in wide ranging directions. Though Butch Morris, creator of Conduction, and I never collaborated artistically, we became dear friends in the last years of his life, and this festival represents an important dialogue between our compositional languages and the ways that other musicians, performing artists, and composers are continuing to explore new paths for real-time composition."

"Walter Thompson is one of the true musical innovators of our time," says Irondale's Executive Director, Terry Greiss. "He has been a friend and collaborator for over thirty years, and Walter's work has been a strong influence on our own," he continues. "I believe that his work with the Irondale company has informed the development of Soundpainting. It is with great pride that we welcome him "home" to the Space at Irondale."

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Thursday, June 16, 2022

7:30 p.m., Sexmob

8:30 p.m., Walter Thompson Orchestra

9:30 p.m., Letter of Marque Theater Company

Friday, June 17, 2022

7:30 p.m., Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble

8:30 p.m., Walter Thompson Orchestra, featuring Sarah Weaver

9:30 p.m., Pedestrian, conducted by Will Shore

Saturday, June 18, 2022

7:30 p.m., Subconscious Sampler Collective

8:30 p.m., Billy Martin and Friends

9:30 p.m., Walter Thompson Orchestra

TICKET INFORMATION

General admission is $20, students, senior and working artists, $10

All tickets are available at https://irondale.org/on-stage/new-york-live-composing-sound-painting-festival/

Proof of vaccination is required for all who are eligible to enter the building. Masks must be worn at all times, regardless of vaccination status.

The Space at Irondale is located at 85 South Oxford Street in Brooklyn, New York. The theater is accessible by Subway: C to Lafayette; B, D, M, N, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, or 5 to Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street; and G to Fulton Street.

Irondale is a theater located in the heart of the Downtown Brooklyn Cultural District. It is a theatre ensemble, a performance think-tank and a laboratory for collaborative theatre- making. Irondale's unique and transformational theatre space has gained much attention as a place for both established and emerging artists to premiere major projects and showcase developing work. The Irondale Ensemble Project was founded in 1983 by Jim Niesen, Terry Greiss, and Barbara Mackenzie-Wood and is one of the longest established permanent ensemble theaters in the country. The ensemble has created over 60 Off-Broadway productions ranging from intimate chamber productions of Shakespeare to original, epic, company-devised works. Irondale's learning programs for students and community provide high quality, cutting-edge workshops and residencies designed to encourage and develop the artist in each individual and to make the skills derived from participating in making theatre a valuable contribution to successful, daily living.

Walter Thompson, Soundpainter, Composer, Piano, Woodwinds and Educator - has been Soundpainting for the past 47 years. He conceived the Soundpainting language in Woodstock, New York, in the early 1970s. To date, Thompson has developed Soundpainting into a multidisciplinary live composing sign language comprising more than 1500 gestures. Thompson has composed Soundpaintings with many contemporary orchestras in many cities and countries around the world including Barcelona, Paris, Bordeaux, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Oslo, Berlin, Bergen, Lucerne, Singapore, Copenhagen, Reykjavik, among many others, and has taught Soundpainting at the Paris Conservatoire; Eastman School of Music; Columbia University, Iceland Academy of the Arts; University of Michigan; Grieg Academy in Bergen, Norway; University of Iowa; Oberlin College-Conservatory of Music; and New York University, among many others. Thompson is founder of and Soundpainter for The Walter Thompson Orchestra based in New York City.

The Walter Thompson Orchestra was founded in 1984 as a vehicle for Thompson's Soundpainting compositions and adaptations of works by Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Anthony Braxton, among others. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in nature, The Walter Thompson Orchestra brings together world-class musicians, dancers, actors and visual artists and stretches the boundaries of composition and the lines between disciplines through the use of Thompson's live composing sign language called Soundpainting. Some of the venues the Orchestra has performed include Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, the Knitting Factory, The Stone, Bowery Poetry Club, Roulette, HERE Arts Center, Brooklyn Museum, Eastman School of Music, National Public Radio, Le Petit Fauchaux (Tours, France), BimHuis (Amsterdam), among many others.

Irondale's programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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