This Time’s Quartet (Elsa Saade/Tracy Chahwan/Erik Ruin/Huda Asfour), Golem Ensemble & Dani Dobkin/Matt Sargent duo
This Time’s Quartet:
Co-founded by Elsa Saade (musician/puppeteer) and Tracy Chahwan (cartoonist/illustrator), This Time’s Quartet is a visionary carousel quartet that brings together four dynamic artists in an immersive, multi-sensory experience where poetry, music, live illustration and puppetry converge. This time, for our Mini East Coast tour, the quartet will feature Erik Ruin (shadow puppeteer and paper-cut artist), Huda Asfour (oud and voice), Elsa Saade and Tracy Chahwan.
Elsa Saade is a multidisciplinary artist, doula and community mobilizer. Over the last decade, she has primarily been a musician, puppeteer and street performer with several political theaters including Bread and Puppet Theater and Redwing Blackbird Theater.
Tracy Chahwan is a cartoonist and illustrator from Lebanon. She started her career in Beirut, producing street art and posters for local independent music venues and working with comics collectives publishing experimental comics and anthologies. In 2018, she published her first graphic novel “Beirut Bloody Beirut”, a story of two girls lost in the Beiruti night. After the Lebanese revolution in October 2019, she turned to journalistic comics, collaborating in books such as “Guantanamo Voices” and “Where to Marie? Stories of Feminisms in Lebanon”. Tracy’s work is marked by the radical and collaborative energy of the artistic scene in Beirut, where she worked actively the past years before she moved to the U.S. in 2019.
Erik Ruin is a Michigan-raised, Philadelphia-based printmaker, shadow puppeteer, paper-cut artist, etc., who has been lauded by the New York Times for his “spell-binding cut-paper animations.” His work oscillates between the poles of apocalyptic anxieties and utopian yearnings, with an emphasis on empathy, transcendence and obsessive detail. He frequently works collaboratively with musicians, theater performers, other artists and activist campaigns. He is a founding member of the international Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and co-author of the book Paths Toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (w/ Cindy Milstein, PM Press, 2012). Current projects include the Ominous Cloud Ensemble, an ever-evolving, collectively-improvising large ensemble for projections and music.
Palestinian musician Huda Asfour was born in Lebanon to a family of musicians, Asfour grew up in Tunis before moving to Gaza at 14, where she joined the National Conservatory of Music, and then lived in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where she studied under Khaled Jubran at the Edward Said Music Conservatory. She now divides her time between New York and Egypt.
Troy, NY-based artist Nathan Meltz presents The Golem Trilogy, a 30-minute stop-motion animation with a live-scoring ensemble.
In this animation, collaged robotic humanoids and animals in a sci-fi environment are blended with elements of experimental film and expressionistic, moody graphics to tell a story in three parts exploring the concepts of colonization, violence, resistance, and peace-making. The live-scoring ensemble consists of lap-steel guitarist Steve Hammond of several popular upstate New York bands and Raven Chacon’s Lazyhorse project, bassist Adam Elabd of the Arabic improvisational project Abu Zeyn, guitarist Mark Wolfe, and Meltz on drums/percussion.
As individual components, parts of the Golem Trilogy have screened internationally, at festivals including the Hallucinea Film Festival in Paris, France, the 24Frame Future Film Fest, in Bologna, Italy, the T-Short Film Festival, in Karlsruhe, Germany, the West Kortright Center Film Festival,in West Kortright, New York, on TV/Film, PBS-WMHT’s Upstate New York Independent Film Series, and the Electric Dreams Festival in Milan, Italy, where The Golem Smashes All Walls won the Special Jury Mention Award.
Dani Dobkin is a New York City based sound artist, composer and educator currently working within the means of sound, synthesis and ceramics. Recently their work has engaged with ideas of grief, decay, ephemerality and mycology. Past and recent collaborators include Yarn/Wire, International Contemporary Ensemble, CT::SWaM, Qubit and Women in Sound.
Matt Sargent is a composer, guitarist, recording engineer, and music technologist based in upstate New York, where he is an assistant professor of music at Bard College. His music grows from interests in resonance, the making/breaking of patterns, and computer models of musical thought. Over the last decade, his work has focused extensively on musical algorithms and real-time notation systems, which can be heard in his compositions and technical collaborations with other artists. He is currently engaged with expanding available repertoire for the pedal steel.
accessibility: ramp into lobby, then 7 stairs into theater