New Performance Traditions & Paul Dresher Ensemble Present The Final 4 Performances Of SCHICK MACHINE

Running December 15 -17th on Z Space's Steindler Stage.

By: A.A. Cristi Oct. 27, 2023

New Performance Traditions & Paul Dresher Ensemble Present The Final 4 Performances Of SCHICK MACHINE

The Paul Dresher Ensemble Presents the final 4 performances of its legendary music theater production Schick Machine December 15 -17th on Z Space's Steindler Stage.

Directed by Rinde Eckert, virtuoso percussionist Steven Schick inhabits a fantastical stage filled with huge invented instruments and sound sculptures – including the Hurdy Grande, the Tumbler, the Field of Flowers and the Peacock (a deconstructed pipe organ). After the performance, the audience is invited onstage to play the inventions and explore a unique kind of “maker” sound & visual environment.

Following the production's California premiere in March 2009 Schick Machine has toured across the country with a SRO run in Hong Kong as well. At its debut the production was described as "fresh and surprising...often mind-blowing" Mark Swed LA Times.

As Schick wanders amidst a stage set filled with very large invented instruments– he draws the audience into a magical place filled with creative potential. Quickly the audience relinquishes its expectations about what an instrument should look like, how it should be played, and what sounds it can make, and is enticed into a sonorous world of continual aural and visual surprises.

“Every percussionist has a secret life. Working with Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert; Daniel Schmidt, Matt Heckert, and Tom Ontiveros has been an illumination of the id of percussion, it's secret passions and guilty pleasures.” remarks Steven Schick.

“In making a concert/theater work with Steven Schick, we started with an understanding of Steve's virtuosic skills,” remarks director Rinde Eckert. “We move with Steve, losing ourselves in the moment, in a world that won't let us remain oblivious or ecstatic, a world that disturbs our sleep, and wakes us from the dream.”

In Schick Machine while exploring the visually extraordinary stage, Steve has unexpected encounters with both tiny noise-making objects and the huge invented instruments, luring the audience into a magical world full of musical surprises including “a dazzling electrified metal hoop that seems to want to spin and wow forever, an organ mounted like the Aztec rays of the sun, a four-foot wide spinning “cymbal” disk and assorted woodblocks that bounce around in space!”

New Performance Traditions | Paul Dresher Ensemble

Schick Machine

December 15-17 on Z Space's Steindler Stage,

450 Florida St. San Francisco 94110

Friday & Saturday December 15 & 16 at 8pm

Saturday & Sunday family matinees Dec. 16 & 17 at 3pm

Tickets: http://www.zspace.org/schick

Evening Performances $25, children age 15 & under: $12.50

Family Matinee Performances: $20, children age 15 & under: $10

Box Office: 415-626-0453 Tickets http://www.zspace.org/schick

Hi Rez Photos & Video Clips: http:newperformancetraditions.org/schick

Schick Machine was collaboratively created by a multidisciplinary team that includes composer/instrument builder Paul Dresher, writer/director Rinde Eckert, percussionist/performer Steven Schick, lighting and visual designer Tom Ontiveros, instrument inventor/educator Daniel Schmidt, and mechanical sound artist Matt Heckert. Schick Machine features percussionist Schick exploring a visually compelling world of mechanical devices, invented instruments and seemingly infinite sonic possibilities.

Paul Dresher describes the collaborative process: “We set out to create a tightly structured and coherent theatrical entity and at the same time to honor the inspiration from which all music has evolved: the in-the-moment pleasures of creating and exploring the richness of sounds produced by striking, plucking, bowing and blowing on resonant objects. In Schick Machine we are vividly reminded that “play” is truly at the core of the idea of ‘playing music'.”

The Collaborators:

Paul Dresher is a renowned experimental musician, instrument builder and composer. Dresher pushes the limits of contemporary music with works of new opera and music theater, electro-acoustic chamber music, and collaborative scores for dance, film, drama and the visual arts. A prolific composer and active performer, Paul Dresher is uniquely able to integrate different musical influences into a coherent and remarkably personal style.

The virtuoso percussionist Steven Schick is a performer who has been described as “a wizard, a master, a roshi of percussion.” Schick turns percussion into a benign and exquisitely elegant form of martial art.” Schick has been music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus and artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. In 2015 he was music director of the Ojai Festival.

The multi-talented and acclaimed Rinde Eckert's Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured worldwide. Eckert was a 2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and an inaugural Doris Duke Artist in 2012. He received the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts for Theatre, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Marc Blitzstein Award.

Daniel Schmidt is a musical instrument designer, inventor, and composer. Schmidt's inventions have been played and exhibited internationally creating new genres as well as the instruments. He has collaborated with Paul Dresher for many years. They have collaboratively created the Quadrachord and the Hurdy Grande, as well as the instruments for Sound Stage, Schick Machine and their invented instrument installation work Sound Maze.

Matt Heckert, a performance-sound artist and engineer, is one of the founding directors of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL). Heckert developed a group of sound producing machines (Mechanical Sound Orchestra) that has performed throughout the United States and Europe.

Tom Ontiveros the production and lighting designer, has focused on visual design for new and premier works by Paul Dresher, Mark Grey, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (Santa Cruz Civic); playwrights Naomi Iizuka, Charles Mee and Jessica Hagedorn; choreographers Allyson Green, Yolande Snaith, Mark Haim, and Scott Wells

Schick Machine was commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Meyer Sound Labs and produced with generous support from the Creative Work Fund, Phyllis Wattis Foundation, Argosy Fund for Contemporary Music, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Bernard Osher Foundation and Meet The Composer/Commissioning Music USA Program. The composition of the score was supported by Dresher's Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Music Composition in 2006-07.

The Paul Dresher Ensemble believes deeply in the transformative power of artistic expression. Like the best of American culture, the Ensemble's work is grounded in experimentation and exploration, and embodies a distinctly entrepreneurial spirit. For nearly four decades the Ensemble has been a creative force and active member of the San Francisco Bay Area as well as the national arts community.