In partnership with Toronto’s Music Gallery, the DisPerSion Lab and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), present the 2016 Wendy Michener Lecture featuring two legendary mavericks of the experimental music and arts scene.
Above: From left, Ione and Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros is a pioneering force in contemporary American music whose career spans 50 years of boundary-dissolving music-making. She will speak about her life practice of Deep Listening, which has blossomed into an international community of certified practitioners, artists and scholars. In this context, Oliveros will discuss a recent project, Sensational Sounds for hearing and non-hearing performers, which brings together hearing and non-hearing performers in ensemble performance, utilizing new instruments built for this context.
Joining Oliveros is Ione, a noted author, playwright, director and poet whose works include the critically acclaimed memoir, Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color, Listening in Dreams and This is a Dream!
Oliveros and Ione will discuss a current work-in-progress, the mixed-reality opera The Nubian Word for Flowers. This major work, involving an international team of collaborators and cutting-edge technology, immerses the audience in a mythology that ranges from Lord Kitchener and his namesake Ontario town to the Nubian people of the Nile River in Africa.
There will be a Q & A session with the artists following the lecture. Admission is free. All are welcome.
This talk by Oliveros and Ione is part of the programming for the Music Gallery’s X-Avant XI Festival of New Music. As a sister event, the X-Avant Festival presents an improvised quartet performance featuring Oliveros (v-accordion), Ione (spoken word), Anne Bourne (cello) and York AMPD Professor Doug Van Nort (electronics) at 7pm at the Music Gallery.
The Wendy Michener Lecture, named in commemoration of the Canadian arts critic and journalist, was established at York University in 1986 to provide a forum for discussion of vital issues and developments in culture and the arts.