New Performance Traditions | Paul Dresher Ensemble present the music theater production Schick Machine December 15-17 on Z Space's Steindler Stage, 450 Florida St. in San Francisco. With text and direction by Rinde Eckert, in Schick Machine 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 (part of a deconstructed pipe organ) after the performance, the audience is invited onstage - to engage and explore a kind of audio “maker” sound and visual domain. Collaboratively created by a multidisciplinary team including 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. Tickets: www.zspace.org
"The sounds are fresh and surprising as layers and textures change...often mind-blowing. A theater piece for percussionist Steven Schick by composer Paul Dresher and director Rinde Eckert...a group of back-to-the-future percussion instruments." M. Swed LA Times
Schick Machine features percussionist Schick exploring a visually compelling world of mechanical devices, invented instruments and seemingly infinite sonic possibilities. As he wanders amidst a stage set filled with very large invented instruments– Schick 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.
“Steven Schick is a wizard, a master, a roshi of percussion. Schick turns percussion into a benign and exquisitely elegant form of martial art. The intensity and commitment are palpable, breathtaking.” Australian media comments after a performance.
While exploring this visually extraordinary stage, Schick 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 “cymbol” disk and assorted woodblocks that bounce around in space!”
Schick Machine was commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Meyer Sound Labs and produced with the generous support of the Creative Work Fund, the Phyllis Wattis Foundation, the Argosy Fund for Contemporary Music, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bernard Osher Foundation and the 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.
