Date
Copresented with The Andy Warhol Museum and the University of Pittsburgh’s Office of the Provost and Humanities Center
UPDATED: We've added a second show! Choose between 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. when you click the ticket link.
Two acclaimed Pittsburgh artists—composer/pianist Amy Williams and video artist Aaron Henderson—have teamed up to create a unique performance piece with live music and video. Cineshape is an innovative collaborative performance made up of five compositions by Williams, each inspired by an existing film, and five new video pieces inspired by the original music. Williams invented the word, Cineshape, back in 2003 when she wrote the first piece in the series (now there’s an app to add a “shape overlay or mask to a video for social networks”— which didn’t exist in 2003!). The word refers to musical compositions that draw structural inspiration from films.
Along with live video processing, Cineshape will be performed by a dream team of contemporary music experts, including the JACK Quartet, flutist Lindsey Goodman, percussionist Scott Christian and the composer at the piano.
Henderson and Williams have been working for over a year on this collaboration—the culminating project for Williams’ year as a Guggenheim Fellow. The visual imagery is taken from sources as diverse as NASA footage and highly magnified chemical reactions. The source films for Williams’ compositions are Chunhyang, Time Code, The Lives of Others, Run Lola Run and Rope. Cineshape will provide Pittsburgh audiences with an unforgettable performance experience: stellar performers playing exciting new works that fuse the visual and sonic.
Tickets are available through the University of Pittsburgh Stages Box Office, by calling 412-624-7529, or visiting music.pitt.edu/tickets. Tickets in advance: general admission is $15; students and seniors are $10. At the door: general admission is $20; students and seniors are $15. (No free student tickets at the Warhol.) Purchase tickets.
Critical praise for the performers:
The JACK Quartet ties “impeccable musicianship to intellectual ferocity and a take-no prisoners sense of commitment.” (Washington Post)
"Mind-blowingly good...it was impossible to anticipate the primal emotions that the JACK...could create..." (Los Angeles Times)
“Their interpretations bristle, sparkle, and ache." (Baltimore City Paper)
“...flutist Lindsey Goodman appears to know no fear in tackling the most demanding music.” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
“...Goodman played with a power I would have thought impossible on the instrument.” (Charleston Gazette)
Williams “has a great ear for fresh, varied, and incisive fields of sonic events.” (Fanfare)
...[her] music is simultaneously demanding, rewarding, and fascinating...This is cerebral music, to be sure, but of impressive warmth and wit... (The Buffalo News)
“Each of Henderson’s exhilarating pieces offer delicious, small revelations….” (The Hook)
"Aaron Henderson’s vivid projection design… [multiplies] images into kaleidoscopic patterns.” (The New York Times)