PROTOTYPE: Out of Bounds

Caroline Shaw (Composer) is a New York-based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Dover Quartet, TENET, The Crossing, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, the Baltimore Symphony, and Roomful of Teeth with A Far Cry. The 2018-19 season will see premieres by pianist Jonathan Biss with the Seattle Symphony, Anne Sofie von Otter with Philharmonia Baroque, the LA Philharmonic, and Juilliard 415. Caroline’s film scores include Erica Fae’s To Keep the Light and Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline as well as the upcoming short 8th Year of the Emergency by Maureen Towey. She has produced for Kanye West (The Life of Pablo; Ye) and Nas (NASIR), and has contributed to records by The National, and by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. Once she got to sing in three-part harmony with Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds at the Kennedy Center, and that was pretty much the bees’ knees and elbows. Caroline has studied at Rice, Yale, and Princeton, currently teaches at NYU, and is a Creative Associate at the Juilliard School. She has held residencies at Dumbarton Oaks, the Banff Centre, Music on Main, and the Vail Dance Festival. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin.

Roomful of Teeth (Ensemble) is a GRAMMY-winning vocal project dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. Through study with masters from vocal traditions the world over, the eight-voice ensemble continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques and, through an ongoing commissioning process, forges a new repertoire without borders. Founded in 2009 by Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth gathers annually at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts, where they’ve studied with some of the world’s top performers and teachers in Tuvan throat singing, yodeling, Broadway belting, Inuit throat singing, Korean P’ansori, Georgian singing, Sardinian cantu a tenore, Hindustani music, Persian classical singing, and Death Metal singing. Commissioned Composers include Rinde Eckert, Fred Hersch, Merrill Garbus (of tUnE-yArDs), William Brittelle, Toby Twining, Missy Mazzoli, Julia Wolfe, Ted Hearne and Ambrose Akinmusire, among many others. Projects in 2016-2017 include The Colorado, a music-driven documentary film that explores water, land and survival in the Colorado River Basin (featuring former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and Wilco’s Glenn Kotche); collaborations with A Far Cry and Nick Zammuto of The Books; appearances at new music festivals in the US, Canada and Sweden; and partnerships with nearly two dozen higher education institutions across the country.

Ximena Garnica (Stage Direction) is a Colombian multi-disciplinary artist, director, and choreographer. She works in collaboration with Japanese multi-disciplinary artist Shige Moriya. Their collaborative works manifest in live body-rooted performance, photography, sculpture, video, and mixed-media installation art, as well as publications and research projects. Shige and Ximena are the co-founders and artistic directors of the arts organization LEIMAY and the performance group the LEIMAY Ensemble. The word LEIMAY is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn, or the transition from one era to the other. Ximena and Shige work out of their home studio CAVE located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Their work has been presented at a number of art spaces including BAM, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Watermill Center, HERE, Japan Society, and The Asian Museum of San Francisco. This year they have been nominated for the USA Artists Fellowship and the Herb Alpert Award.  They have been part of the Bessie Schonberg Individual Choreographers Residency at the Yard, the Watermill Center Residency Programs, and the HERE Artist in Residency Program. Ximena was a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors, and she is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Riverside.

The LEIMAY Ensemble (Dancers) is a group of five international dancers and performers who create body-centered works around the principle of LUDUS, a practice that explores methods to physically condition the body of the performers and develop a sensitivity to the “in-between space.” Founded in 2012 by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya the group took form through the creation of the Becoming Series pentalogy, of which three parts have been created: Becoming Corpus, borders, and Frantic Beauty (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2013-2017). The group holds a regular practice at their studio in Brooklyn where they engage in the creation of new work as well as on teaching, training, research, and distillation of years of direct transmission of embodied knowledge by Japanese Butoh pioneers, Noguchi Taiso practitioners, and Experimental Theater innovators. Their work has received commissions by the Watermill Center, Performa, HERE Arts, and the New York Restoration Project. In 2019 they will take part in a month-long residency at the University of California Riverside where they will present repertory work and engage with undergraduate students in the creation of a public dance installation of kinetic sculptures.

Times Square Arts (co-presenter) the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Times Square Arts is a laboratory for contemporary art in the public realm—a place where ideas are tested and new possibilities explored. We work with artists and cultural institutions to create dialogues with Times Square and all of its physical and mythological manifestations. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity. Tsq.org/arts. @tsqarts.