The San Francisco Girls Chorus Present RITES AND PASSAGES Featuring Joe Goode Performance Group, Kanoko Nishi, and Sarah Cahill, 6/14

The five-time Grammy-winning San Francisco Girls Chorus will close its2013-2014 35th season with a special concert of music by Eastern European composers and guest artists Joe Goode Performance Group and pianists Kanoko Nishi and Sarah Cahill Saturday, June 14, at 8 pm at Nourse Theatre in San Francisco. The program, entitled Rites and Passages and conducted by Girls Chorus Music Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe, will feature Bartók's Three Village Scenes performed as a suite with original dance interpolations created by Joe Goode and performed by members of his acclaimed Joe Goode Performance Group. The Chorus will be joined by guest pianists Kanoko Nishi and Sarah Cahill for Nishi's new two-piano arrangement of Scenes 1 and 3 from Stravinsky's Les Noces and will go a cappella for Stravinsky'sFour Russian Peasant Songs. Completing the program will be Smetana's Three Choruses for Female Voice. [Editor Note this program is a change from the program of Stravinsky, Poulenc and Fauré originally announced for this date in August, 2013.] For information and tickets, visit www.sfgirlschorus.org .

Lisa Bielawa, Girls Chorus Artistic Director commented, "These three Eastern European composers offer us vivid "scenes" through these evocative pieces. From village life to bird migrations to domestic rituals of a bride and her family, these are richly-painted musical canvases of daily life in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century."

Tickets are priced $18-$36 and are available for purchase through City Box Office; by phone at 415-392-4400; online atwww.cityboxoffice.com; or in person at City Box Office, 180 Redwood Street, Suite 100, San Francisco (Monday - Friday, 9:30am-5pm).

About the Guest Artists

Joe Goode Performance Group (JGPG) promotes understanding, compassion and tolerance among people through the innovative use of dance and theater, as interpreted by the artistic vision and work of Joe Goode. In Goode's words: "We want to be a site for innovation, to take dance theater out of the traditional theater setting and to place it in a more living, breathing relationship to the viewer."

History: In 1979, Joe Goode began synthesizing a genre of dance theater that combined text, gestures, and humor with deeply physical, high velocity dancing. In 1986, JGPG incorporated with the mission of providing a support structure for Goode's artistic work. Over the past 26 years JGPG has performed annually in the San Francisco Bay Area and has toured throughout the U.S. JGPG has appeared in Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Africa, including the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater in 1999.

Joe Goode has been recognized nationally and internationally as an innovator in the development of contemporary dance theater. Goode's signature work, 29 Effeminate Gestures, was produced by PBS and aired nationally on "Alive from Off Center." In 1995, Goode was one of the first ten choreographers to receive a prestigious National Dance Residency Program grant.

Joe Goode was named a United States Artists Fellow for 2008, one of only five national dance artists so honored. Goode was selected for his unflagging commitment to innovation and experimentation in dance/theater. In 2007 Goode received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Goode has a 26-year history of creating new work. During the past several seasons he has been alternating between proscenium work and walk-through, multimedia performance installations as a way to open audiences' minds to the limitless potential of where and how dance theater can be experienced. Humansville(2007) was an installation in which the audience was able to proceed through multiple rooms, encircled by video, dance and music, which wrapped around them in an exploration of the flailing, absurd condition of being human. The highly theatrical piece played to near sell-out houses for 12 performances.

Wonderboy (2008) was a collaboration with world renowned puppeteer Basil Twist. It was an unexpected tale of a peculiar superhero isolated by his gift of super sensitivity, in which Goode integrated yet another art form into his innovative cross-disciplinary work. 2009 saw Goode's most ambitious undertaking to date - a site-specific installation at the Old San Francisco Mint. Traveling Light was a critical success, played to near-capacity audiences, and was remounted for 28 performances in 2010.

The Rambler (June 2011) continued Goode's collaboration with Basil Twist, who designed both puppetry and scenic elements of the piece. Twist's ingenious use of moving vertical and horizontal curtains caused a visually striking effect of constantly changing scope and perspective.

When We Fall Apart (June 2012) presented a collaboration with architect Cass Calder Smith that incorporated real stories from the community to investigate the myth of stability.

The company's current work, Hush, is a collaboration with sound effects artist Sudhu Tewari, and premiered in September 2013.

Although her primary training is in classical piano performance, Kanoko Nishi's most recent interest has been in improvisational music making, both in a solo context and in collaborations with other artists. Working on both the piano and the koto, her second instrument, she explores various extended techniques, in order to widen the range of vocabularies on each instrument and to enable them to adapt to different musical genres. Frequent collaborators to date include Jacob Felix Heule, Jon Raskin, Theresa Wong, Maryclare Brzytwa, and Shayna Dunkelman. Ms. Nishi also enjoys collaborating with dancers, such as Paige Sorvillo, Yuko Kaseki, Isak Immanuel, Sherwood Chen, as well as with poets and visual artists.

Ms. Nishi has also performed with other musicians in the Bay Area and in Europe. She studied at Mills College, as well as with Fred Frith, Joëlle Léandre, and Kazue Sawai.

Sarah Cahill has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to her include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, and Evan Ziporyn, and she has also premiered pieces by Lou Harrison, Julia Wolfe, Ingram Marshall, Toshi Ichiyanagi, George Lewis, Leo Ornstein, and many others.

Cahill has researched and recorded the music by the important early 20th-century American modernists Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford, and has commissioned a number of new pieces in tribute to their enduring influence. She enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for performance. Recent appearances include Spoleto Festival USA, Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, the Portland Piano Festival, and the Mendocino Music Festival. In February she will be soloist with the La Jolla Symphony conducted by Steven Schick for Lou Harrison's Piano Concerto. She has performed chamber music with the New Century Chamber Orchestra, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and many other chamber groups.

Sarah's most recent project, A Sweeter Music, premiered in the Cal Performances series in Berkeley in January 2009 and continued to New Sounds Live at Merkin Hall, Rothko Chapel, the North Dakota Museum of Art, Le Poisson Rouge, and venues around the country, with newly commissioned works on the theme of peace by Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Yoko Ono, Frederic Rzewski, Phil Kline, and many others. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "the music, helped along by the impassioned force of Cahill's playing, amounted to a persuasive and varied investigation of the subject," and London's Financial Times called it "a unique commissioning programme that unites artistic aspirations with moral philosophy." Her next project, Utopia/Dystopia, will feature new works by young composers envisioning the future of the planet.

Most of Sarah's albums are on the New Albion label. She has also recorded for the CRI, New World, Other Minds, Tzadik, Albany, Cold Blue, and Artifact labels. Her album A Sweeter Music is being released by Other Minds, and she is currently preparing a CD of Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants. Her radio show,Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 8 to 10 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory, hosts a new music series at the Exploratorium, and curates a monthly series of new music concerts at the Berkeley Art Museum.