Live performance of original score for Movement Cloisonne
Veronika Krausas, Composer | Michel Taddei, Double Bass
Replay of our June 1, 2020 Live Virtual Concert! Complete program information here, including program notes:
PROGRAM: Aram Khachaturian – Sonata-Song for Viola Solo Elliott Carter – Steep Steps Robert Schumann – Bird as a Prophet Peteris Vasks – Landscape with Birds Veronika Krausas – Cloisonne Jörg Widmann – Selections from 24 Duos for Violin and Cello Michel Blavet – Gigue en Rondeau Ruth Crawford Seeger – Selections from Diaphonic Suite Beethoven – Piano Sonata, Op. 78 Complete concert information and program here:
MUSICIANS: Anna Presler, violin Phyllis Kamrin, viola Leighton Fong, cello Eric Zivian, piano Michel Taddei, bass Stacey Pelinka, flute Jerome Simas, clarinet All sound and video by Zach Miley (www.zachmiley.com), except Eric Zivian’s performances by Boby Borisov of OO audio. Many thanks to our hosts, Elizabeth Peña and the Doug Adams Gallery (Graduate Theological Union).
DotSandPlastic Tbilisi 2020, The Painterly Edition, brings to the capital of the Caucasus the art works of American, Irish, Mexican, Georgian and Spanish artist living in far apart cities of the world like Miami, Los Angeles, Madrid, Tbilisi, Rome and Bangkok. The previous edition held in Madrid was dedicated to new media in art but in this occasion it focuses on painting as it has been one of the core disciplines in art and it is though painting that we can have a sense of evolution in the arts.
Impressions from Rustaveli is inspired by the 12th century Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli, whose epic poem The Knight in Panther’s Skin is considered a masterpiece of Georgia’s national literature. The poem is dedicated to King Tamara, the first female ruler of the Kingdom of Georgia at the height of its power in the Middle Ages, and is a chivalric romance which nonetheless emphatically affirms equality between women and men.Georgian artist Nana Tchitchoua’s film reinvigorates Rustaveli’s writings, infusing them in a film collage with painting, drawing, costume and the performative cinematic language of filmmakers like Sergei Parajanov and Jack Smith. Actors in both traditional and ornamental costume gesture to the camera, frontally posed and holding objects, or otherwise interacting with each other while frame separations, solarisations and other analogue film techniques produce blurry, overlapping, impressionistic images. The filmmaker describes the work as a “glorification of love, beauty, friendship and nobility. It portrays the heroes and heroines whose radiant loveliness is represented in terms of bright celestial light”. A ghastly quality of image emerges, with actors’ bodies haloed with bright light.What emerges in Tchitchoua’s exotic, Byzantine images is an encounter between Western and Eastern cultures. Impressions from Rustaveli is more than a simple adaptation of a folk legend, the film expresses through image, sound, erotics and emotion what can’t quite be represented by words or painting. The language of the film is light in all its beauty and complication.
-Herb Shellenberger
Join us at Black Iris, Tuesday Nov. 24 for Last Night’s Dream, an evening of experimental film celebrating the artistic output of The Republic of Georgia’s, Nanuka Tchitchoua. The screening will be followed by an evening of music and celebration, with DJ Rattan (Bio Ritmo) spinning rare Georgian, Turkish and Greek LPs from the 60s and 70s in the Tiny Bar.
(Film Listing)
– Movement Cloisonne
– HER
– Deer
– Well Tempered Lebanon
– In the Presence of the Absence
– Impressions from Rustaveli
8pm door for film screening
Nanuka (Nana) Tchitchoua was born in 1978 in Tbilisi, Georgia. She emigrated to USA with her family in 1992 and continued her art and film education at the California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Art and MFA in Experimental Animation. She is an artist working in media from painting and collage to sculpture and film, all of which draw profoundly on her deeply Georgian soul. It has been her focus and a mission to bring a contemporary perspective on Georgian traditions that have survived cultural transition and upheaval for centuries. Her work is a fusion of ancient archetypes, ethnographic treasures and various cultural icons. In navigating the tenuous path of her dual cultural identity she asserts the transformative possibilities of finding beauty amid ruins, making something out of nothing – a cross-referencing of images that are fiercely nostalgic for a heroic and romantic dream world.
Since 2002, Tchitchoua has been working as the liaison of the Tula Tea Room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Borzoi Cabinet Theatre. Tchitchoua returns to Georgia regularly where she is an artist/curator of the American Pavilion of the FestiNova (International Contemporary Art Festival)
Nana’s short film “Impressions from Rustaveli’ draws inspiration from Georgian medieval epic poem ‘The Knight in The Panther’s Skin’ by Shota Rustaveli – a Georgian monk who dedicated his epic poem to the female King Tamara.
Georgian Literature in film panel discussion with artist Nana Tchitchoua, Translator Lyn Coffin,Georgian writer Gio (Aka) Morchiladze,Georgian scholar, writer and translator Donald Reyfield in conversation with journalist, William Dunbar.
