The Long Breath

Thingamajigs Performance Group convenes with singer-songwriter-scholar Gelsey Bell (New York), and Dyemark (Oakland) in an evening of experimental performance and meditations on alternate tunings, durational forms, and new work.

Space is limited! Reservation required! Email to reserve.

About The Artists

• Gelsey Bell is a singer, songwriter, and scholar. Described by the New York Times as a “brandy-voiced” “winning soprano” whose performance of her own music is “virtuosic” and “glorious noise,” she has released two studio albums, Under A Piano (2005) and In Place of Arms (2010), two experimental albums, February (2008) and Love Is Just a Crack In the Space of You (2009), and the digital album SCALING, live at Roulette (2012). Her work has been presented internationally in Performa 11 & 13, the Vital Vox festival, the BEAT festival, the LUMEN festival, the SITE festival, the Resonant Bodies festival, Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques in France, and most recently Voice – Creature of Transition in Amsterdam. Gelsey is a core member of thingNY, and Varispeed,. She has worked with numerous composers, choreographers, and performance creators including Robert Ashley, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, Ne(x)tworks, Kimberly Bartosik, Yasuko Yokoshi, Dave Malloy, Rachel Chavkin, Alec Duffy, John King, Chris Cochrane and Fast Forward (as the Chutneys), Kate Soper, Rick Burkhardt, Miguel Frasconi, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, and the Panoply Performance Laboratory. Gelsey recently completed a doctorate at New York University in Performance Studies. She is also TDR/The Drama Review’s Critical Acts Co-Editor.


• Dyemark is is Steven Dye, a multi-disciplinary artist working with sound, projection, and live performance. He has presented work and created site-specific installations and performances at venues throughout the world. Much of his work is collaborative, incorporating musical and theatrical performance, live accompaniment for film, instrument building, field recordings, found footage, camera-less filmmaking, expanded cinema techniques and site-specific sound and light installations. He is a member of the performing arts groups Wet Gate and Epic[Abridged], works collaboratively with the musical groups Tarantel and Portraits and is a frequent contributor to the Illuminated Corridor project. His solo work with 16mm film projection is a direct engagement with the materials and apparatus of film projection, developing dynamic compositions using sound and light that explore the relationships between what we hear and what we see.



• Thingamajigs Performance Group uses unique musical instruments and performance practices, combining traditional Eastern sensibilities with modern American technologies. For tonight's performance TPG includes Dylan Bolles (flutes, voice), Suki O’Kane (percussion, electronics), and Edward Schocker (reeds, glass, electric guitar), inspired by their 2014 "Within A Day" project that has convened the ensemble in short, intense residencies with diverse composers to rapidly develop new work, share physical practice, and catalyze new thinking. Using a collaborative process that purposefully blurs divisions between the roles of composer and performer, "Within A Day" has resulted in a new work with composer Robert Moran (b. 1937, Philadelphia) now available on Innova Recordings, a collaboration with yogini Ann Dyer that commenced at dawn and concluded at sunset on a single day, a week-long residency with thingNY in New York that began in a former door factory and culminated in the occupation of an abandoned CitiBank, and the recent premiere of "Whatchamacallit" at BAM/PFA with Pauline Oliveros, a leader in the musical avant-garde for five decades.