CONTEXT – March 21st – 22nd San Francisco

I’ve composed the music for a new piece by Jenni Bregman called CONTEXT. The piece is our second collaboration together, the first was a wonderful piece called Intimate City from a couple years ago where I did my first score. CONTEXT is my first opportunity to compose original music for performance.

CONTEXT runs March 21st and 22nd in San Francisco at The Garage – Howard Street between 5th and 6th – at 8pm.

Featuring Jenni Bregman, Sadie Carhart, Marco Chavez, Sharon Gallagher, Hillary Hoffman, Gina Levesque, Seren Pendleton-Knoll, Shawna Seth, Alberto Vajrabukka, Meredith Wilensky. Music by Sunshine Jones.

CONTEXT is a dance performance presented in four parts:

1. BLIND
In 1978, Hughes de Montalembert, a French filmmaker and painter living in New York, was attacked by two men on the way back to his apartment. While struggling with his assailants, paint thinner was thrown into his eyes scarring and blinding him for the rest of his life. BLIND is a piece about organizing chaos, rebuilding the world from what we think we know, and take for granted every day, without the ability to see.

2. OVERSTIMULATION
Human beings are able to mentally block out background noise and distraction effortlessly in order to listen, talk, communicate, and learn. Autistic people do not have the ability to tune out these sounds, and ordinary life is quite stressful and often overwhelming. Autistics will make sounds, bite themselves, bang their heads against walls in order to produce serotonin, distraction, and to block out the sounds of daily life in order to be able to focus, listen and learn. We are learning that these sounds are a part of self soothing, and make learning, speaking, and interacting possible with the ordinary world.

OVERSTIMULATION is a piece on how the sound of Tibetan singing bowls can act as a clarifying sound in order to learn to count to 100 in Italian.

3. STROKE
One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor‘s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”

STROKE is a piece inspired by Bolte-Taylor’s experience.

4. SIGHT
We are all connected together. Like it or not, we are bound irrevocably by chemistry, environment, history, shared experience, stories, desires, and memory. The wonder of our experience is almost lost to us in our day to day chores. We live almost entirely disconnected from ourselves, and the world around us.

SIGHT is a piece about the formation and conjugation of a memory. An expression of wonder and communion through visual memory.


CONTEXT SOUNDTRACK

The soundtrack to CONTEXT is now available in the shop at treehousemuzique.com.
The soundtrack includes the original score – production edits – as well as the original unedited versions of BLIND and OVERSTIMULATION.

Here is a link to the Soundtrack

As Intimate City was a piece about intimacy in an urban environment, where Jenni Bregman found the most beautiful way to express our longing for connection, our struggle with love and relationship, again in CONTEXT she has undertaken more than one might think possible to express in 20 minutes of a dance performance. Jenni’s intuition, love of movement, and story, as well as her inherent faith and trust in the audience once again triumphantly brings us together, lets us be smart, vulnerable, present and beautiful as she weaves this breathtaking story about the cruelty of life, and the hope and inspiration of all we can learn from it.

Links
Here is the facebook event invitation
More about Jenni Bregman

SOLD OUT

As of this writing both nights of the debut presentation of CONTEXT are completely sold out.
There are no guest list spots, no will-call, no standing room.
The performances are 100% sold out.

Based on such a strong and supportive response to this production, obviously we will have to collect our thoughts and produce an encore performance. I’ll let you know more about that when we have organized something.