Soundwave is proud to announce it’s 9th season focused on the theme of Time and featuring art parties, performance, dance, video, and music for our boldest, most interdisciplinary festival to date. Artists explore a range of subjects: intergenerational history, the cultivation of safe spaces for healing and joy within black, brown, and queer communities, art grown out of migration and displacement, and our current political reality.
Events include Twerk 4 Mother Earth featuring artists Fela Kutchii, known for her outdoor parties (Best of the Bay 2018); DIALECTS, a sober and ecstatic experimental performance by New Mexico-based new media artist Szu-Han Ho, exploring earth and migration; Just Ahead is Darkness, a Japanese obon-inspired evening of performance by contemporary Bay Area choreographers and sister duo Megan and Shannon Kurashige (Sharp & Fine); and Nochtlaca: Todos, todos, todos, with fierce, LA-based Latinx ranchera artist San Cha, and other musical guests.
The culmination of her two-year term, Chief Curator of Soundwave Tanya Gayer has assembled a multidisciplinary lineup of guest curators working in theater, dance, film, community building, social practice, and music to produce events that investigate sound and its relationship to time. “While essential, the inherent acceptance of time creates both cultural, artistic, and biological limitations,” Gayer states. “An artistic exploration of time opens up a consideration of movement and duration, of soundwaves traveling over distances, of bodies moving in rhythm across the globe.” Soundwave 9 uses time as a theme to explore the process of hearing, the possibility of slowing down time, the power of time as an organizing principle of life, and to consider the normative roles that time has constructed around us.
Soundwave runs September through November 2019 at Bay Area venues like CounterPulse, El Rio, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The full schedule, line-up, and tickets will be available this month.
Events Include:
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Twerk 4 Mother Earth: Throwing It Back & Forth: Musical artists Fela Kutchiii, Namaste Shawty, Onmommas, and Red Corvette perform at an art-saturated party curated by The House of Malico, a culturally progressive production house. Twerk 4 Mother Earth will be a ‘time’ themed artist experience cultivating safe(r) spaces for healing and joy within black, brown and queer communities. September 21, 2019 at El Rio.
Advance tickets
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DIALECTS: Artist Szu-Han Ho presents an experimental sound performance that draws from sounds, songs, and stories about migration and displacement, both human and nonhuman, curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez. Ho’s performance will explore the relationship between bodies and the spaces/sites of interwoven histories and memory. October 24, 2019 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Advance Tickets
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Just Ahead is Darkness: In a highly multidisciplinary program, choreographers/dancers Megan & Shannon Kurashige; composer/performer Cory Wright; author/reader Ben Loory; and dancers from Sharp & Fine collaborate in an event curated by Megan & Shannon Kurashige. Inspired by the bon dances in Hawaii, a traditional Japanese celebration of the spirits of family ancestors, the performance explores how time transforms the relationships between fact, story, and truth. October 26, 2019 at Counter Pulse.
Advance Tickets
- Nochtlaca: Todos, todos, todos: Artists San Cha, Persia, and Guillermo Galindo explore borders, walls (physical & psychological), and a disruptive “us vs. them” mentality in a multidisciplinary program curated by Christo Oropeza. The program emphasizes the importance of sound as a vehicle for a shared cathartic experience during difficult times. November 14 at Center for New Music.
Soundwave Time is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Zellerbach Family Foundation and produced with support from the Center for New Music.
Press photos can be downloaded from here.