On Saturday, November 23rd at 8pm at the Church of St. Luke & St. Matthew in Brooklyn, BlackBox Ensemble presents a series of works unified in their explorations of physicality and duality. Featuring works by Anthony Cheung, Annie Nikunen, Bekah Simms, Baljinder Sekhon, James Diaz, Brittany J. Green and Reilly Spitzfaden, we traverse dialogues between present and memory, sound and silence, structure and freedom, clarity and complexity, propulsion and resistance, unpredictability and certitude, chaos and smoothness, magic and science. This program features the US premieres of Simms’ Stygian Pulse and Diaz’s mil cuartos en linea recta as well as the NY premieres of Nikunen’s all mass is interaction and Sekhon’s Divination, commissioned for BlackBox to perform at University of South Carolina’s Southern Exposure New Music Series last month. From pitchwheel motions and chronic pain to physics and a thousand white rooms in a straight line, each of these composers expresses their own unique avenue in which to see, hear, and feel these physicalities and dualities through sound.

TICKETS

BlackBox presents an eclectic program of works by Jessie Cox, George Lewis, Brittany J. Green, and James Diaz.

The Sound of Space Between Us - a film of our performance at the Clark Art Institute - is premiered at the Fête de la Cite in Paris, France.

Director of Production and Cinematography: Kevin Chiu

Choreography: Annie Nikunen & Joelle Santiago

Dancers: Peter Cheng, Annie Nikunen, Liana Zhen-ai

Music: Feldman, Fujikura, Nikunen, figgis-vizueta

Performed at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, October 1, 2023

BlackBox performs the premiere of What We Owe to Birds, a multimedia cycle meditating on bird migration and conservation by the Consonance Collective, at the New Jersey Audubon Society’s annual Cape May Spring Festival.

BlackBox workshops and performs new works by composition students at the Special Music School, the music magnet high school of the Kaufman Music Center.

BlackBox performs new works by New York University graduate composition students.

BlackBox performs new works by University of Michigan composition students in a public composition seminar.

The ensemble presents a reprise performance of Dai Fujikura’s Borrowed Landscape, a play by the German playwright duo tauchgold with original music by prominent composer Dai Fujikura. Conceived by tauchgold as a “narratorio”—a dramatic play based on the musical structure of an oratorio—this piece was originally broadcast as a radio play in Germany in 2022. The BlackBox Ensemble presented the staged premiere of this new English translation at New York City’s Noguchi Museum in November 2023.  

The narratorio tells the story of three special instruments: a famous Stradivarius walled up for years in a cellar in Budapest, a double bass left behind by a Jewish orchestral bassist fleeing Poland in 1939, and a Baldwin upright piano silenced after the Hiroshima bomb killed its young owner. As the musicians of a trio approach these instruments, which for decades were considered lost, they uncover the stories, secrets, and histories these objects contain.

The performance will begin with Dai Fujikura’s Being As One.

The ensemble begins our series at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art with a companion program to Thursday evening’s performance of Borrowed Landscape, featuring works by Angélica Negrón, Tristan Murail, Baldwin Giang, and George Lewis.

The BlackBox Ensemble closes out our festival with a special New York performance of The Sound of Space Between Us, an interdisciplinary, live-Art-infused performance experience connecting sound and movement through and within physical space. Conceived and co-curated by our flutist - composer, dancer, choreographer and Annie Nikunen - space is used as a meeting place for music and dance to converse from both ecological and interpersonal perspectives; our public place in the ecosystem and our private paths with(in) it.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Ró

Tristan Murail: Paludes

Angélica Negrón: Espacios, objectos, sonidos y tiempo

Seth Cluett: Interference is partial/afterimage

Morton Feldman: Dance Passage from Piano and String Quartet

Dai Fujikura: Being As One

Annie Nikunen: The Sound of Space Between Us

TICKETS

Stick around after our festival opening concert for a late night electroacoustic show featuring solo and chamber performances by members of the BlackBox Ensemble!

Brittany J. Green: Thread and Pull

Nina Shekhar: Vocalise

Kaija Saariaho: Cendres

Lucy McKnight: fated joy

Additional works to be announced

TICKETS

Our 2024 Festival begins with a program of works by new and frequent BlackBox collaborators, featuring an expanded roster of the BlackBox Ensemble in full force.

Paul Novak: Somatic Interludes (World Premiere)

Bobby Ge: Pupil of Light

Jessica Meyer: The dappled light just beyond her skin…

Baldwin Giang: butterfly, posthumously

Yaz Lancaster: Gender Envy

TICKETS

The BlackBox Ensemble premieres new work by University of Florida student composers in a special collaborative program with the UF Department of Dance at the HARN Museum of Art.

The BlackBox Ensemble performs Erich Barganier’s “Flyover Country,” an evening-length multimedia work premiered by the ensemble in 2022, as part of a residency at the University of Florida.

The Sound of Space Between Us is a site-specific, Live-Art-infused, interdisciplinary performance experience connecting sound and movement through and within physical space. Conceived and co-curated by our flutist - composer, dancer, choreographer and Annie Nikunen - space is used as a meeting place for music and dance to converse from both ecological and interpersonal perspectives; our public place in the ecosystem and our private paths with(in) it. Stationed around the serene reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute, overlooking the Berkshire mountains, the musicians become choreographic agents, responding to each other, the dancers, and audience, and the surrounding landscape, working as individual parts in a predetermined map or improvising as a unit. The program traverses a spectrum of notated scores, sonic maps and choreographic exercises by Annie Nikunen, Meg Stuart, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Dai Fujikura, Morton Feldman and inti figgis-vizueta with choreography by Annie Nikunen and Joelle Santiago.

PROGRAM

Seth Cluett Interference is Partial / Afterimage

Meg Stuart Choreographic Exercises

Anna Thorvaldsdottir Spectra

Morton Feldman Clarinet and String Quartet (excerpt)

Dai Fujikura Being as One

Annie Nikunen The Sound of Space Between Us

inti figgis-vizueta Form the Fabric

BlackBox performs works by composition students in the Mannes School of Music Pre-College Division as part of an end-of-year workshop.

BlackBox premieres new works by the Nevermind the Noise Collective, NYU’s graduate student composers collective, as their spring 2022 ensemble-in-residence.