National Sawdust Presents a Trilogy of Collaborative Live Music and Dance-Theater Pieces From Tiffany Mills Company and Ensemble Ipse

National Sawdust (Paola Prestini, Artistic Director; Ana De Archuleta, Managing Director) presents a program of three collaborative pieces from Tiffany Mills Company and Ensemble Ipse conceived for seven violas and seven dancers, including the world premiere of Vapor/Blood, on December 2 and 3.

Composed by Ensemble Ipse co-founder and co-director Max Giteck Duykers, with dramaturgy by Proto-type Theater founder Peter Petralia and choreography by Mills in collaboration with the Tiffany Mills Company, Vapor/Blood interrogates the power of sight in its many literal and metaphorical manifestations. It brings questions surrounding visibility and invisibility into vivid sonic and choreographic explorations, building a rich landscape of bodies, text, and sound. Vapor/Blood unites Mills, Duykers, and Petralia as co-visionaries, after a decade-long hiatus from live performance for Petralia, and continues creative relationships between the three artists that stretch back over 20 years.

 

Two works that came together in 2022 are also presented in these evenings at National Sawdust. Both likewise feature seven violas, an instrument that often plays a crucial but supporting and connective role in orchestras, and is seldom the focus of solo or ensemble pieces. They include Poem from Exile, composed by Stephanie Griffin, and inspired by Ovid's account of his wife's agony when he was exiled to the remote regions of the Roman Empire (now Romania), and Doa Persembunyian - A Prayer for Refuge, composed by Tony Prabowo for choir, rearranged by Griffin for seven violas, and based on a poem by Goenawan Mohamad about a woman's suffering in civil war-torn Romania.

 

For both earlier works, the compositions and arrangements were in place as Duykers approached Tiffany Mills to direct and choreograph the responding movements. Vapor/Blood grew out of Ensemble Ipse and Tiffany Mills Company's experience working together on Poem from Exile and Doa Persembunyian, with Petralia stepping into the team, and took form through a more all-encompassing, hands-on collaboration. Duykers' score, Mills' choreography, and the text compiled by Petralia from dancers' own words emerged in simultaneity—mutually responsive to and in process with one another. The text, created with the dancers and inspired by their movements, is woven into a multisensory performance that invites the audience to consider what it means to be seen for who they truly are. Text here interacts with a physical language rooted in Tiffany Mills Company's main influences: partnering, improvisation, and somatic modalities—all forms that contribute to self-exploration, human vulnerability, and individuality. The score features seven violists who perform alongside pre-recorded sounds that are given life through triggering and processing in the space—thereby connecting music to text to movement.

 

Across the evening, the two 2022 pieces rooted in pure movement and viola open into the text-dense Vapor/Blood, in which viola arrangements also become interlaced with electronics. The evening's showcase and entanglement of both the acoustic and electronic, of movement and theater, compositional and technical experimentation and storytelling forms, parallels National Sawdust's own commitment to the power of interdisciplinarity.

 

The viola serves as the evening's through-line as the three pieces explore what it means to be seen and perceived, culminating in Vapor/Blood's very direct engagement with this theme. Duykers emphasizes the viola's resonance with the ideas swirling around Vapor/Blood: often used in large orchestral compositions and arrangements in blends with woodwinds and brass, it can evade prominence while lending warmth and richness to a piece. “For a work that explores both being in and emerging from the background, this instrument feels so right,” he explains. “It's gorgeously rich and bigger in sound than most people realize. So if you put seven of those on a stage, you're going to have a huge sound that can be very evocative. For the piece, I wanted to create a layer of sound that something can very simply stand out from and then slip back into, in parallel with our exploration of the ways we make ourselves, and the ways society makes us, seen and unseen.”

 

Petralia and Duykers first met and began creating performances together in 1999,and met Mills when they were developing a show in residence at HERE Artists Residency Program (HARP). Says Petralia, “I was immediately super intrigued and blown away by the work that Tiffany was doing. I hadn't seen dance like that before—the physicality, the partnering, the way that she merged different sensibilities. It was different from what Max and I were doing but I saw similarities in our shared interest in playing with narrative structures and unusual storytelling; I knew I wanted to work with her.” The last performance Petralia participated in before taking a break (during which he focused on other forms of writing) prior to Vapor/Blood was Tiffany Mills Company's Berries and Bulls, which made its world premiere at BAM in 2013.

 

Duykers first teamed with Mills for Blue Room, which premiered at The Flea Theater in 2018, and then on the two-year process of developing the evening-length Homing over Zoom beginning in the middle of pandemic shutdowns. Mills says of the three finally joining forces for Vapor/Blood, “We've really been working together for this project: Max is not just making music, he's talking about content and asking, ‘does this text make sense' or ‘what is the movement here saying?' And Peter will talk about the movement or respond to music and how that supports or doesn't support a character development. After decades of working, I know all kinds of different types of collaborations, and this is the juiciest, most exciting and stimulating type of collaboration because everybody's really actively a part of it.”

 

The performance begins at 7:30 pm (doors at 6:30pm) at National Sawdust (80 N 6th St, Brooklyn) on December 2 and 3. Tickets can be purchased here.

 

 

Tiffany Mills Company was founded by choreographer and artistic director Tiffany Mills in 2000. The company creates dance-theater work that centers on diverse human relationships, is grounded in partnering/improvisation, and is fueled by collaboration across mediums. The company collaborates with artists from various disciplines and backgrounds to viscerally, aesthetically, and intellectually stimulate a wide-ranging audience. The company's recent evening-length works premiered in NYC at: LaMaMa, The Flea, and BAM Fisher. National highlights: PICA's TBA Festival (OR), Wexner Center (OH), ENT Center (CO), Contemporary Dance Theater/NPN (OH), Jacob's Pillow (MA), Dance Place (DC), and Austin Dance Festival (TX). NYC highlights: Guggenheim Museum/Works & Process, Duke on 42 Street, Symphony Space, Lincoln Center/Out-of-Doors, Dancing in the Streets, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace Project City/Dans, Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, Joyce SoHo, and Movement Research. International highlights: Russia, Italy, Mexico and Canada. Select residencies: Artpark (NY), NYU's Tisch Summer Dance Festival (NY), National Center for Choreography (OH), CUNY Dance Initiative (NY), BAM/PDP, Baryshnikov Arts Center (NY), Jacob's Pillow (MA), Joyce (NY), LMCC Swing Space (NY), Bogliasco/Jerome Robbins Foundation (Italy). Funding highlights: Harkness Foundation, NYC DCA, NYSCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NET/TEN, O'Donnell Green Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, Dance/NYC Coronavirus Dance Relief Fund, New Music USA, Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

 

Ensemble Ipse is a 501(c)(3) contemporary music ensemble dedicated to showcasing the wide variety of practices in the current new music scene. The ensemble presents concerts of recent music that transcends aesthetic categorization and strives to create a forum for composers and sound artists on the edges of the mainstream of contemporary music. With this in mind, Ensemble Ipse is committed to performing and commissioning the music of emerging composers, as well as composers who have been traditionally under-represented in the larger new music community, including women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+. Since forming in 2016, Ipse has premiered 48 works, 17 of them commissions, held numerous calls for scores for emerging composers, received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, New Music USA, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Network of Ensemble Theaters, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and released an album on New World Records in May, 2019.

                                                                                                                       

National Sawdust is a dynamic non-profit cultural institution that commissions, produces, and presents programming rooted in sound and supports multidisciplinary artists and arts organizations in the creation of innovative new work. Founded in 2015 by Kevin Dolan and Paola Prestini, National Sawdust operates out of an intimate space, equipped with a state-of-the-art Meyer spatial sound system, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where it is one of the few remaining cultural venues. The New York Times has described National Sawdust as “the city's most vital new-music hall” and as “a triumphantly successful performance space that stands for a hip, sophisticated brand of new music.”

 

National Sawdust provides artists across musical genres and artistic disciplines with comprehensive support including commissions, workshops, residencies, public performances, recording, mentorship, and professional development. It aims to be not only a home for its community of artists, but also a place for audiences to discover wide-ranging music at accessible ticket prices. The institution's mentorship initiatives counteract industry barriers and the historic marginalization of diverse communities in the arts, providing artists and arts workers with guidance, resources, and relationships with established visionaries to accelerate their careers.

 

Designed by Brooklyn's Bureau V, National Sawdust is constructed within the existing shell of a century-old sawdust factory, preserving the authenticity of Williamsburg's industrial past while providing a refined and intimate setting for the exploration of new music. At the venue's core is a flexible chamber hall, acoustically designed by renowned engineering firm Arup to provide the highest-quality experience of both unamplified and amplified music.

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