chromatic (2016)

Created & performed by Susan Marshall, Jason Treuting, Suzanne Bocanegra
Presented by American Dance Institute
World Premiere June 23, 2016 The Kitchen, New York City
Lighting Design Eric Southern

Choreographer Susan Marshall, composer Jason Treuting, and visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra perform live real time color experiments using line, light, movement, shape, and sound. Inspired by Josef Albers’ 1963 masterpiece of color theory Interaction of Color, Marshall, Treuting, and Bocanegra push into the internal logic and emotion of color utilizing improvisatory systems devised from the structure of Albers’s book, a primer for understanding color used by artists and art students all over the world. Using their own bodies, they explore the subjectivity and humanity of individual perception in relation to color, movement, and sound.

Chromatic is made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the O.P. and W.E. Edwards Foundation Arts Fund, the Joseph & Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Baisley Powell Elebash Fund, and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Chromatic received creative and production support from the Princeton Atelier, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and Princeton University’s Office of the Dean of the Faculty.

Photos ©Peter Serling

COLLABORATOrS

Suzanne Bocanegra, Visual Design/Performer

Suzanne is an artist living and working in New York City. Her work has been seen in exhibitions in the United States and abroad, in such venues as the Serpentine Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Hayward Gallery in London, the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. A major show of Bocanegra’s work titled I Write the Songs opened at the Tang Museum in July 2010 and traveled to Site Santa Fe in 2011. Her lecture/performance When a Priest Marries a Witch, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Paul Lazar premiered at MoMA in 2010 and traveled to the Wexner Center, Performing Garage, James Cohan Gallery, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Little Dot, a twelve-hour sculpture with ballet dancers, opened Platform 2014 at NYC’s Danspace, performed by members of the New York Theater Ballet. The feature-length film of When a Priest Marries a Witch premiered in 2015 at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Bocanegra’s most recent piece, Bodycast, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Frances McDormand, premiered at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and had its New York premiere as part of the Next Wave Festival at BAM in 2013, traveling to the Marfa Contemporary in 2015. A recipient of the Rome Prize, she has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Tiffany Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Grant.

Jason Treuting, Composer/Performer

Jason enjoys exploring the tension between control and flexibility and making music that translates patterns into sound. He makes most of his music with and for Sō Percussion. He has been called “genre-busting” by The New York Times and his music has been described as “rich and engrossing” by Time Out New York. Treuting’s music has been played across the US in performing art centers like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Walker Art Center and the Kennedy Center as well as spots like Roulette, the Stone, and universities across the country. Treuting has been commissioned by cellist Jeff Ziegler, the Calder Quartet, janus trio, NOW Ensemble and the Orchestra of the League of Composers and has been featured as composer-in-residence at the Carlsbad Music Festival and the Canberra International Music Festival. His music is recorded on Cantaloupe Music and New Amsterdam Records. Treuting was one of the inaugural Lewis Center Fellows in the Arts at Princeton University and is currently an Edward T Cone performer-in-residence at Princeton University, and Co-Director of the Percussion Department at the Bard College Conservatory of Music.