GEKIKAI
An ongoing Post-Asiatic Performance Series
PERFORMING AT SOMEDAY
Saturday, Jan 20 › 9pm › $5
GEKIKAI: post-asiatic salon starring BILL HORIST, VANESSA SKANTZE, DOUGLAS RIDIGNS, SHERI BROWN, NOAH MICKENS, IN THE DEEP MUSEUM, and NEQUAQUAM VACUUM.
"Gekikai" is a Japanese term, meaning both "The World of the Theater" and "The Ways of the Barbarian". Thus Gekikai is the name of our post-asiatic salon: a performative cultural space at the interstices of the radical and traditional arts of Asia and the West. Butoh, odissi, raga, jazz, noise—filtered through a post-modernist and distinctly Western perspective.
This installment of Gekikai revisits a long-form improvisation that happened earlier this year in Seattle. Bill Horist, arguably the world's great virtuoso of the prepared guitar, heads up a cast of post-asiatic musicians who interact both physically and sonically with dancers from the P.A.N., Death Posture, and Societas Insomnia.
About the artist
"Post-Asiatic" is a term we first used around six years ago, to describe a relatively new movement in experimental music and performance which had gone previously unnamed. Characterized by the interpolation of traditional Asian musical forms into very non-traditional modes of performance by people living in the United States with very little direct connection to the sources of these traditions; this fascinating cultural undercurrent has continued to evolve and recombine, largely here on the West Coast.
“Gekikai” is a much older term which invokes many of the same contradiciont, meaning both “The World of the Theater” and “The Ways of the Barbarian”.
So are we barbarians of the occident drawn to the ways of Asia’s wandering stage class, and to the new forms that are resolving themselves from the fusion of these two worlds. Butoh, Bhangra, Odissi, Gamelan, Bunraku, Raga, Noh, Gagaku, Taiko, and Noise have all followed this path to the West in recent years; just as the native Jazz, Pop, and Hip-Hop forms of the U.S. have echoed these arts in the work of Hiroshima, Cibo Matto, and The Wu-Tang Clan.
Gekikai will reconvene each month with post-asiatic experiments from Joan Laage, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Susie Kozawa, Michael Sakamoto, P.A.N., the b-boy crew Circle of Fire, Triple Nipple DJs, Wu Fei, Children of the Apocalypse, Sardonik Grin, The Hop-Frog Kollectif, Aditi Tahiti, Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, T. Rose Bent, Insomnia Butoh, Joel Taylor, Kiss the Goat, Serpentine, and an ever-expanding spirit family of Westsiders.
Performer links
, , | ©2006–2008 Someday Inc. All rights reserved.