Fall 2012

Luke Winslow King

and Esther Rose

Friday Sep 21st

@ 8 PM             $5

Great Lakes Ensemble @ Mexicains Sans Frontieres Aug 25th 8 PM

Great Lakes Ensemble

The Great Lakes Ensemble is an interdisciplinary artistic exploration of the Great Lakes region—its people, culture, history and aesthetics. The ensemble’s work involves collaborations with dance and music, and also includes other artistic elements such as text and projected images. The Great Lakes Ensemble has performed at festivals, in museum and art gallery settings, and site- specific locations such as an outdoor sculpture park.

The Great Lakes Ensemble is developing an ongoing series of programs that is driven by rigorous aesthetic inquiry and expression, as well as research into aspects of this region’s identity that includes the intersections of nature and humanity, its industrial past and present, oral histories, and ways by which its people and locales are imagining how to reinvent themselves as the 21st Century moves forward.

GLE’s dance and choreography, under Lisa LaMarre’s direction, manifests a combination of lyrical spryness and fluid athleticism. The ensemble’s musicians develop sonic textures that explore aspects of the Great Lakes’ dramatic past and present—from the tranquility of a finger lake at dawn, to hulking abandoned factories and the bustle of Chicago’s urban din, to a sonic imagining of glaciers’ southerly movements 16,000 years ago. GLE’s horns and rhythm section can stretch into a languid mode or bust into a densely pointillistic segment, and then change directions again as a performance develops.

GLE uses projected images in its performances—including photographs, paintings, and images from bathymetric maps. Sometimes projections appear on flat surfaces such as video screens or walls, and at other times projections land on uneven surfaces or onto dancers’ bodies in motion. Projected images onto transparent vessels filled with water create a prismatic effect that throws refracted, undulating images across the room.

Great Lakes Ensemble/ Chicago Calling

The program for Great Lakes Ensemble’s performance at Mexicains Sans Frontieres will include the following sources into their multidisciplinary presentation—excerpts of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, text by Jerry Dennis (author of The Living Great Lakes and other books), and photographs by David Schalliol.

Ghost Flute & Dice WSG Mail Order Monsters

May 18th 8 PM
All Ages
5$
Ghost Flute and Dice
With Special Guests..
Mail Order Monsters

Ghost Flute and Ghost WSG Mail Order Monsters

Ghost Flute and Diuce plus Mail Order Monsters
 May 18th
8 PM
with

All Ages 5$
BYOB

Tim Kaiser WSG Wickerbasket

Tim Kaiser

May 11th 8 PM!
5$  All Ages
BYOB

Stephen Rush Trio/ Naked Dance Feb 25

Stephen Rush Trio
8 p.m. Saturday
Mexicains Sans Frontieres (Grand Rapids)
$10 adults, $5 students

Pianist-composer Stephen Rush from the University of Michigan last year sent me a snazzy vinyl copy of his “Naked Dance!” album recorded with percussionist Jeremy Edwards and clarinet whiz Andrew Bishop, and I was immediately blown away. This is experimental jazz at its best with an infectious glow. Rush, Edwards and Bishop will perform in this intimate venue at 120 S. Division Ave. on Saturday, part of a mini-tour of sorts that will also take them to Wisconsin on Sunday. (You can also catch them on the air at 10 p.m. Friday on Blue Lake Public Radio, 90.3 FM)