National Sawdust Presents Its FERUS Festival 2021 -

National Sawdust presents FERUS Festival 2021.

National Sawdust's FERUS Festival has earned its reputation as a showcase for cutting-edge audio, novel multimedia performances and provocative creative discussion, presenting a roster of events that The New Yorker calls "a walk on the wild side of contemporary music."

With a lineup that includes Ash Koosha and his anthropomorphized artificial intelligence YONA independently collaborating for a uniquely futuristic duet concert; a public converation with three of the most influential thought leaders and artists in the country - The Apollo Theater's Kamila Forbes, The Kennedy Center's Marc Bamthi Joseph and National Sawdust's Paola Prestini - explore issues of social justice and the arts; and a re-imagining of Mozart's Requiem in D Minor by the innovative modern electronic composer Jlin presented through the prism of Kyle Abraham's choreography as performed by members of Abraham's A.I.M. contemporary dance company, the 2021 FERUS Festival challenges our assumptions of the aesthetics and intention of streaming performance. All events will be available on the Live.NationalSawdust.org website beginning in early January and remain available throughout the month.

National Sawdust's co-founder and Artistic Director Paola Prestini says, "Our sixth annual FERUS Festival is emblematic of the core values we're stressing for National Sawdust's 2021 season: encouraging innovation in form and approach, emphasizing financial and professional mentorship for artists, expanding our work with movement and dance, and intensifying our commitment to spotlight the experience and creative work of a gender-diverse and racially-diverse roster of performers and composers."

Additional performance information will be announced shortly. National Sawdust is actively seeking preview, review and interview coverage for FERUS Festival. For advance video and audio clips, high-resolution images, or to request interviews with any FERUS artists, please reply to this email or contact John Seroff at JohnS@nationalsawdust.org

FERUS Performance Details

Premiering Thursday, January 7th at 6:00 PM EST Ash Koosha with YONA From his days as a leader of the underground punk scene in repressive Tehran to his more recent creation of the anthropomorphized "auxiliary human" AI named YONA, the polymath performer and self-described "software humanist" Ash Koosha is forever on the front lines of the musical vanguard, both real and virtual. Using software that creates sentences, melodies, and singing, YONA composes original music and lyrics via a complex text-to-speech process. In a duet straight out of science-fiction YONA and her creator collaborate and perform auto-generated love songs. Can YONA understand the meaning of real love or is her music simply a reflection of Ash's own cognition? Are the two one or is something more complex happening behind the screen? After the performance, stay for the artist talk-back with Paola Prestini for insights into performance in the digital world and more.

Premiering Friday, January 8th at 5:00 PM EST Active Hope with Kamilah Forbes, Marc Bamthi Joseph and Paola Prestini Watch what happens when a Broadway director, a poet and TED Global Fellow, and an award-winning composer lead a salon to explore the greatest and most tangled concerns of the modern era, including immigration, borders, beauty, erasure and appropriation, censorship, prison reform and wealth equality. Join arts leaders Kamilah Forbes of The Apollo Theater, Marc Bamthi Joseph of The Kennedy Center and Paola Prestini of National Sawdust for a public conversation about how artists can responsibly and inclusively build a more equitable and true path into the future.

Premiering Saturday, January 9th at 5:00 PM EST Mozart's Requiem: A Digital Short by Kyle Abraham, A.I.M, and Jlin In many ways, 2020 was a year defined by loss. When choreographer and MacArthur Fellow Kyle Abraham and pioneering producer Jlin began working on a new commission exploring death and reincarnation through a reimagining of Mozart's Requiem in D Minor, the pre-pandemic world looked very different. While most commissions and public performances are on hold in the U.S., National Sawdust has invited two of this generation's most exciting and genre-fluid artists to create a new dance film for FERUS featuring dancers from Abraham's contemporary movement company A.I.M, and musical excerpts by Jlin. A short discussion with the artists follows the screening.

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