Broadway Voices Made Visual by Deaf Composer 2/23-3/16

Broadway singers will have their voices converted into imagery during a free performance and exhibition series at chashama's Times Square Gallery, Feb. 23rd through March 16th.

Using layered video projections of real-time frequency analysis software, deaf composer Jay Alan Zimmerman (Incredibly Deaf Musical, Smokin!, J@Z at the Zipper) will rehearse and present songs from his shows while attempting to re-train his brain to "hear" the shapes created by the voices of Ryan Allen, Raissa Katona Bennett (Phantom), Melvin Bell III (Black Nativity), Emily Cramer, Andrea Dora (Tarzan), Kelly Ellenwood (Phantom), Matt Lutz, Sierra Rein, Gabrielle Stravelli, and violinists Blair Lawhead, Bryony Straud-Watson, and Heather Vixler.

Called Art/Song, the project is a collaboration with abstract painter Lisa Ingram, who has further interpreted these vocal images of vowels and phonemes into a series of watercolor paintings and collaborated with Zimmerman on an installation of his destroyed synthesizers.

Open rehearsals will be every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon with free performances at 7pm. The gallery will be open Tuesday through Saturday, 2-7pm, with some artworks and multimedia installations on view 24 hours a day.

For more information, visit www.musicbyJAZ.com and www.chashama.org.

Jay Alan Zimmerman is the composer and author of several original musicals including his Incredibly DEaF Musical, which was a Washington Post "Pick of the Fringe" at DC's Capital Fringe Festival. In addition he composed the music for the plays Booth and Our Brutus which were both Fringe First Award winners at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the award-winning score for the dancefilm Do Not Call It Fixity featured at the Pompidou in Paris, and a multi-media symphony, Roboticus, created during a residency with the LEMUR musical robots.