Sushi celebrates its 30th season in 2010 with a broad spectrum of performance, music, dance and visual arts. Check back regularly as we continue to add to the schedule. Follow the link at the bottom of the page to purchase tickets to SUSHI performances.
SUSHI Presents…
January 5 @ 8 pm — CHECK OUT WHAT KPBS’ CULTURE LUST HAS TO SAY ABOUT THIS SHOW!
Margaret Noble, sound design (San Diego), using a variety of acoustic instruments, analogue synthesizers, and voice, this multi-channel performance will push against tensions facing the solo performer in the electro-acoustic genre. Most notably challenging for this project are the dualities of prepared vs. improvised, pop vs. experimental, and acoustic vs. electronic. The experience of a music performance is ideally interactive in feel between audience and performer. The tensions used in this work are designed to bring forward a new sound experience that is challenging and yet still accessible.
Susan Narucki, voice and electronics (San Diego) calls her set “Bending the Voice” – it explores the edges between speaking and singing, bending narratives, and the perception of time. The set includes works by John Cage, a piece for voice/electronics and an experimental work about narrative that Narucki is creating.
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SUSHI Presents…
January 25 @ 8pm — special engagement Ear, Nose and Throat
Ear, Nose and Throat is a trio from Baltimore, Maryland who make improvised music that short-circuits the distinctions between harsh noise, free jazz, art-rock and academic electronic music. The varied biographies of its three members define this Bermuda Triangle of sound: M.C. Schmidt, Jason Willett, and Max Eilbacher. The result is a trio that can go wherever it wants to go: from crystalline new age space music to facemelting power-electronics to sweaty, angular drums and horns skronk-funk to squirrelly post-everything free playing to aktionist tantrums that leave audiences confused and ecstatic. For some time now Baltimore has been home to a great deal of irreverent, bizarrre and ornery music-making (from Nautical Almanac to DJ Dogdick to Cex to Dan Deacon), and the multi-generational, multi-genre pileup that is Ear, Nose and Throat exports the city’s pulsating noise/improv scene for the world to gape at.
M. C. Schmidt, one half of distinguished electronic duo Matmos, divides his duties between drumming, modular synthesis, and highly physical speech and action with whatever objects he finds ready to hand. Expect furniture to be moved, random things to be inserted in and out of his mouth, and odd snippets of dialogue from interior dramas to just pop up out of nowhere.
Jason Willett, one third of Leprechaun Catering and a longstanding member of Half Japanese, has turned the amplified rubber band into a startlingly powerful double-bass-like soundmaker, and commands attention as he manipulates a bewildering array of customized modular electronics built by noted Baltimore circuit-bender Peter Blasser. He’s also a keen trumpet player and signal processor, a kind of secret weapon who slyly pulls the jams into position and then takes them apart (often while rollilng and smoking a cigarette in mid-song).
Max Eilbacher, leader of teenage noise gods Needle Gun and a core member of tribal Baltimore drum-noise unit Teeth Mountain, plays violin, modular synthesizer and saxophone with a purity of intent and a sheer force that belies his 19 years on this planet. Don’t let the babyface fool you, Max brings it and then some.
All Tickets: $15/General $10/Sushi Members
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SUSHI Presents…
February 9 @ 8pm
Steve Schick – solo performance of “Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” by John Luther Adams
The vastness of John Luther Adams’ Alaskan landscape is brought to sound in this percussion solo. The composition consists of eight movements for percussion and computer generated electronics which forms a tableaux that has come to epitomize Adams’ music: the solitary figure of a human being suspended in a resonant space and it teems with life, in the sounds of tam-tams, cymbals, drums, triangles and a lone bass air raid siren.
All Tickets: $15/General $10/Sushi Members
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SUSHI Presents…
March 16 @ 8pm
Scott Amendola – percussion
Wil Blades – Hammond B3 organ – From San Francisco
Scott Amendola and Wil Blades conjure various sonic deities though only a duo. Performing pieces from Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite” as well as originals, They’ll cover everything from Avant Garde to Funk, Bebop to Rock.
All Tickets: $15/General $10/Sushi Members — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
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SUSHI Presents…
Family Matters
Family Matters introduces Sushi’s audience to a group of artists who reflect on the esoteric legacies of the avant-garde through work that is formally – if paradoxically – influenced by popular entertainment.
A visual art exhibit interspersed with performances, lectures and film.
Featuring San Diegobased new media artist Lisa Hutton making dada nonsense poems the subject of her multimedia animations. Andrew Kaufman plays the role of artist-as-amateur-magician in his Kiss series, which pays homage to the lineage of sculptors, from Constantin Brancusi to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who have made work based on the subject of the kiss. The Hague-based artist Oscar Prinsen takes on the persona of a self-help guru who erects playground sculpture (for adults) that comically institutionalizes many of the themes of early performance art. Iowa based artist, Donna Stack embraces the feminist legacy of using soft, gendered materials in a series of profanity-laden, handstiched welcome mats that would make Martha Stewart blush. And the two-piece Canadian band The Cedar Tavern Singers compose pop songs about such avant-trivia
as the Futurist Manifesto and Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork, Spiral Jetty.
- Exhibit opens Thursday, March 4
- Opening reception Friday, March 5
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Performance by The Ceder Tavern Singers Saturday, March 6 — CHECK OUT THEIR SITE HERE * All Tickets: $20/General $15/Sushi Members — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
- Film Screening and Panel Discussion: Nepotism and Other Character Flaws, March 12, 8PM * All Tickets: $15/General $10/Sushi Members — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
- Exhibit closes Saturday April 24
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SUSHI Presents…
The Symmetry Project – by Jess Curtis and Maria Francesca Scaroni
The Symmetry Project is a journey through perception. Two naked bodies interact through a highly structured improvisational score, constricted in a specific physical practice; that of moving symmetrically, relative to themselves or to each other. In this space of temporary “habitus”, the two bodies are constantly tuning, reformulating the perception of the self and of the other.
In the sharing of a central axis, spine, mouth, genitals, face, and anus reveal their interconnectedness and centrality in embodied experience. Limbs entangle and intertwine creating an inter-corporeal kaleidoscope of flesh. A kind of über-intimacy develops, going far beyond sexuality into a kind of communal biology, a symbiotic sensory field. Blending, merging, and then again differentiating, the two become “unfinished entities” – as Pierre Bourdieu refers to the body – improvising new habits, “perceiving the possible”.
Exploring and manipulating our perception, they reveal the body’s awkwardness, its monstrosity, its potential failure and finiteness, they create space for the possibility of the unknown, the wondrous, the ecstatic, the infinite.
Collaborating with composer/contrabassist Klaus Janek, video artist Regina Teichs, installation artist Ricarda Mieth and photographer Sven Hagolani in a variety of presentational contexts, including photo and video media, “live art” performance installations in galleries, internet, public sites and performance in theatrical contexts, Curtis and Scaroni investigate homologous movement as a lens whose distortion, and or focus, yields insight into a variety of physical, aesthetic, social, and ethical realities.
PRESS:
“..deeply thoughtful, entrancingly beautiful simplicity…….up close [...] is where this symbiotic ritual ought to be experienced. See it now if you can.” - Rachel Howard, SF Chronicle
“Should you go and see it? Yes. Symmetry is brainy, sensuous, and asks important questions.” – Rita Felciano, SF Bay Guardian
“The pair take the body at its most basic and vulnerable — naked — and transform its homely and altogether familiar form into abstractions both known and weirdly beautiful. As the dancers move, their bodies resemble pulsing, heroically fragile inkblot drawings in motion.” –Ann Murphy, The Contra Costa Times
“Does nudity, as much as it liberates physically, wrap us in an emotional shroud? Where does intimacy end and exhibitionism begin?… any dance that raises such questions must be taken seriously.”
- Allan Ulrich, Voice of Dance
March 19 @ 8pm — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
March 20 @ 8pm — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
March 21 @ 6pm — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
** This performance contains nudity **
All Tickets: $20/General $15/Sushi Members
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SUSHI Presents…
The Kharmful Charms of Daniil Kharms – A regional premier devised and created by ARTEL
A theatrical Incident with Curious Music, Unfamiliar Singing and Improbable Dancing
Fresh off the heels of the critically acclaimed Grand Guignolers’ Absinthe, Opium & Magic: 1920s Shanghai, [via]Corpora International Performance Research and Development House is proud to present its resident laboratory’s world premiere production, Kharmful Charms of Daniil Kharms. After a riotous oversold presentation of the workshop production last spring, ARTEL – a mad-gang of artisanal scientists comprising the underground American Russian Theatre Ensemble Laboratory - brings Daniil Kharms back with a vengeance! And he is more charming, macabre, and scintillating than ever! Kharmful Charms of Daniil Kharms is an original decadent comedy, illogically formulated from Russian Surrealist and Absurdist motifs, constructed as an evening of not-so-innocent commotions and antics, vignettes and dreamlike incidents, all set to a rousing live musical score.
Declaring 2010 as the Year of the Absurd, ARTEL is making explosive (re)solutions to the New Year, beginning with detonating notions of theatre as a dramatic servant of literature. While English speaking academics are just now wrestling with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s ten year old articulation of a ‘post-dramatic theatre’, ARTEL ransacks a storehouse constructed eighty years ago by Daniil Kharms when he divined a creative practice of sluchai*, to propose its own poetics of perplexing alogical perspectives formulated for a new decade of twenty-first century theatre.
Daniil Kharms, an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. By the late 1920s, his anti-rational verse, nonlinear theatrical performances, and public displays of iniquitous and irrational behavior earned Kharms – who always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe – the reputation of being a talented but highly eccentric “fool” or “crazy-man” in Leningrad cultural circles. Exiled briefly during the “relatively vegetarian” days of the early 1930s, ten years later he was imprisoned in the psychiatric ward of Leningrad Prison No. 1. Kharms died in his cell – most likely from starvation – in February, 1942 as the Nazi blockade of Leningrad was well underway. His writings (a vast assortment of stories, miniatures, plays, poems, and pseudo-scientific/philosophical investigations) were virtually unknown until the 1970s, and not published officially in Russia until the late-1980s period of “glasnost”.
March 26 @ 8pm — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
March 27 @ 8pm — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
All Tickets: $20/General $15/Sushi Members
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SUSHI Presents…
April 6 @ 8pm
Kenny Wollesen – percussion from New York City
Bombshell – from San Diego
Arriving from New York with the very latest creations from the sonic design studio of Wollesonic Laboratories, Wollesen joins up with San Diego’s own DIY marching band, Bombshell, headed by Sean Conway for a night of kaleidophonic experiment and play.
All Tickets: $15/General $10/Sushi Members — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
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SUSHI Presents…
Life is a Bowl of Cherries by San Diego based choreographer, Patricia Sandback
Originally produced for Mojalet Dance Collective, featuring Artistic Director Faith Jensen-Ismay, this raucous work prompted Janice Steinberg of the Union-Tribune to exclaim “…and something extraordinary happened in the creative process between Sandback and Jensen-Ismay, whose solo interludes as a crazed television chef are fall-off-you-chair funny and brilliantly unnerving.”
A two-act dance/theater work, Sandback gleefully borrows images from opera, TV, and nature to examine life’s big questions of “why we are here and where are we going?” Dancers Faith Jensen-Ismay, Kathryn McLean, David Hanlon, Erica Buechner, Lyndsey Gemmell, Mandy Langen, Lara Segura, and Robby Johnson join forces for an event of dance, theater, and song that fully embraces the message “live and laugh at it all.”
The diverse music selections for the piece include those by the irreverent jazz artist Uri Caine, the lovely Janet Klein and Her Parlor Boys, selections by the grooving Les Yeux Noirs, a treat from the brothers Strauss, the famous and beautiful humming chorus from Madame Butterfly, selections from Cosi Fan Tutte (Never Trust a Woman), La Traviata (The Fallen Woman) and Lucia Di Lammermoor (which involves madness and murder), and more. And the title song, Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries, which was written during the Depression as an ironic counterpoint to the tenor of those times, speaks loudly to us now.
Friday April 9 @ 8pm — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
Saturday April 10@ 8pm – PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
Sunday April 11 @ 6pm – PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
All Tickets: $20/General $15/Sushi Members
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SUSHI Presents…
May 7 @ 8pm
Michael Pisaro, composer, Los Angeles
Greg Stuart – percussion – So. Carolina
redfish bluefish – percussion ensemble – San Diego
The Los Angeles composer Michael Pisaro will be joined by percussionist Greg Stuart and Red Fish Blue Fish for an evening of experimental percussion music. “Fields Have Ears” will explore various soundscapes composed of sustained percussion sonorities, field recordings, and sine tones. This concert is a rare event in that the three works performed will be realized live, employing up to 16 performers in combination with multi-channel sound.
All Tickets: $15/General $10/Sushi Members — PURCHASE TICKETS HERE
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SUSHI Presents…
Die Roten Punkte (the utterly dysfunctional pairing of German siblings Otto and Astrid Rot) became an instant household name in Europe after topping the charts with its 2005 hits ‘I’m In A Band’ and ‘Best Band In The World.’ “Inspired, brilliantly executed lunacy…sonic collision between Plastic Bertrand, Kraftwerk and early Ramones.” -The Gazette, Montreal
May 2010 DATE TBA
All Tickets: $20/General $15/Sushi Members
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SUSHI Presents…
Mark Your Calendar – The 2010 Red Ball is Saturday, June 5th.
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Tickets for SUSHI performances can be purchased HERE, or via the individual links above.
* All Fresh Sounds Series are Curated by Bonnie Wright in collaboration with Spruce Street Forum
