Flower of the Season 2024 - Dance and Music
Hatsu-kaze (First Autumn Breeze)
Sparrows on the Road Join the Flock
Design by Kio Griffith
Get Ready for a Dynamic Fusion of Music and Dance!
Join us at the Electric Lodge in Venice, for an electrifying night of improvisation featuring LA's finest musicians and dancers. Experience individual and duo performances that will captivate your senses:
· Vinny Golia (woodwinds)
· Patrick Shiroishi (saxophone)
· Breeze Smith (percussion)
· Alicia Byer (clarinet)
· Kozue Matsumoto (koto)
· Paul Chavez (digital and original instruments)
· Roxanne Steinberg (dance)
· Oguri (dance)
Don't miss these unique collaborations where every moment is spontaneous and thrilling! Each day a different set:
Week 1.
Friday, September 6, 8:00 pm. Alicia, Paul, Roxanne, and Oguri
Saturday, September 7, 8:00 pm. Patrick, Breeze, Roxanne, and Oguri
Sunday, September 8, 3:00 pm. Vinny, Kozue, Roxanne , and Oguri
Week 2.
Friday, September 13, 8:00 pm. Patrick, Breeze, Roxanne, and Oguri
Saturday, September 14, 8:00 pm. Alicia, Kozue, Roxanne, and Oguri
Sunday, September 15, 3:00 pm. Vinny, Paul, Roxanne, and Oguri
Admission: Free>>RSVP
First come first served
Electric Lodge 1416 Electric Avenue, Venice, CA 90291
Free parking at Electric Lodge
About Flower of the Season and this year’s event
Continuing a 22-year tradition of working in the community by sharing classes and performances with a minimal yet encompassing use of space and theatricality, this year’s performances will feature LA’s creative improviser and dancer/choreographer Oguri and Roxanne Steinberg (Venice, CA), their cross gerne on-on-one collaborates.
The series is an inquiry into the meaning of improvisation in music and dance through one-on-one improvisation performances between a dancer and a musician. The residency will include 6 free public performances, free workshops and discussions to take a deep dive into the nature and practice of attention, action and response in dance and music. Growing out of years of sensitivity, training and exercises in awareness and presence, this as a direct challenge to the premise of our efforts.
This project is funded by City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs; Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture; California Arts Council, and an Artist Residency at Electric Lodge.
Artists Biographies
Breeze Smith, drums/percussion/sound imagery, has performed and improvised in various ensembles and in solo projects. He is also a visual artist with commissioned works of sculpture, paintings and drawings. He performs with L.A. legend, Dwight Trible, and his Cosmic Vibrations, and has recorded with the collective. Recent recording with Trio 919 with Vinny Golia, Tony Green and Breeze is about to be released in 2024.
Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles who is perhaps best known for his extensive and incredibly intense work with the saxophone. Over the last decade he has established himself as one of the premier improvising musicians in Los Angeles, playing solo and in numerous collaborative projects. Shiroishi may well be considered a foundational player in the city’s vast musical expanse. He has presented work and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Museum of Surgical Sciences and has toured around the world in various solo and band configurations including The Armed, contemporary classical ensemble Wild Up and Upsilon Acrux.
Alicia Byer is a clarinetist-composer-improviser originally from Claremont, CA. She holds a BA in music composition from Mills College. She has studied with Fred Frith, Joelle Leandre, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Cecil Taylor, and others. Inspirations include nature, culture, and everything in-between.
Since 1971, when multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia gave up painting to pursue music full time, he has worked internationally as a composer, bandleader, and performer in all forms of creative music. Golia draws influences from jazz, world and contemporary classical music and has performed in Europe, Japan, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and North America in a multitude of ensembles. He plays numerous woodwinds (as well as many diverse ethnic aerophones) has placed many times in the Downbeat Critic's Poll on various instruments winning the “Rising Star category for Baritone Saxophone in 2015, and in 1990 won the Jazz Times Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition award for his work on the Bass saxophone. Golia is involved in other arts and media besides Jazz and Improvised music; he has composed for Ballet, modern dance, theatre, video and films such as Evolution's Child, Serpent's Lair, Blood and Concrete a Love Story and The Real World; The Lost Episodes amongst many others. Golia's label, Nine Winds, formed in 1977, focused on releasing music from North America's West Coast. https://vinnygoliamusic.bandcamp.com/music
Paul Chavez is a Chicano composer, instrumentalist, and sound designer. Chavez’s music plays with sonic textures and spaces and are created through the manipulation of found sounds and homemade instruments. His "Rasquachismo" music, a Chicano tradition of reusing and repurposing materials, often conveys roughhewn, layered soundscapes. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “deliriously original”, his music and sound designs have been heard at the Los Angeles Music Center, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Architecture and Design Museum, the Los Angeles Design Festival, Regen Projects, New York Live Arts, the Grec Festival in Barcelona, REDCAT, and Dublin’s Project Arts Centre. He has created sound scores in collaboration with many artists, including Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg, Architecture Office, Carole Kim, Sarah Elgart, Morleigh Steinberg, and Melinda Ring.
Kozue Matsumoto: Born and raised in the Tohoku (東北) area in Japan and having lived in Tokyo as well, Kozue is now based in the Los Angeles area. She has played the koto since she was three years old under Ikuta-ryu (生田流) Miyagi-kai (宮城会) and holds a semi-master title (準師範). She has also played the shamisen and the shinobue since she was small.
In North America, she has been collaborating with various musicians and movement, visual, installation, and other artists. Not only does she play traditional, contemporary, and experimental music, but she also improvises, composes, and creates mixed media arts.
Together with her creative works and inter-disciplinary collaborations with various artists, she has a strong interest in exploring the possibilities of bringing Japanese traditional sounds and performing arts beyond their conventional contexts. She has performed as a soloist at Genshin Impact Symphony Concert at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles as well as in Chicago in 2023 and 2024. She has also contributed her koto sounds to Shogun (TV series released in 2024 from Disney on Hulu), Ghost of Tsushima (a PlayStation game released in 2020 from Sony), and other video games/TV series.
She has been invited as a guest lecturer/Artists by schools in the USA and Japan and also travels throughout the USA for lectures, master classes, and workshops. Such schools and institutions include but not limited to the Consulate General of Japan, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, Washington State University, Keio University (Japan), MiraCosta College, Bakersfield College, Skidmore College, and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
Roxanne Steinberg dances to transcend familiar vocabularies and bring about a heightened sense of perception, connectivity and flow of primordial associations. A graduate of Bennington College, she has taught Body Weather Laboratory since 1988. She performs worldwide as a soloist and with her partner Oguri, sister Morleigh Steinberg, and composers Yas-Kaz, Paul Chavez, Kenta Nagai, Tatsuya Nakatani, Leon Mobley, Myra Melford, Alex Cline, Pheeroan Aklaff, Motoko Honda, Will Salmon. She has worked with dancers Min Tanaka and Amagatsu of Sankai Juku, and artists Hirokazu Kosaka, Carole Kim and Bill Viola. Roxanne has taught at UCLA, Cal Arts, Cal State Los Angeles, Sci Arc, Pomona College, and Harvard Westlake, among others. She is artist-in-residence at the Electric Lodge in Venice. She is a 2020 DCA COLA Fellow.
A native of Japan and a resident of Venice, California, Oguri formed Body Weather Laboratory Los Angeles with Roxanne Steinberg. Since 1990, Oguri has been teaching, creating, and producing dance and multimedia works that incorporate his large-scale set/sculpture installations in both formal theater settings and site-specific venues worldwide. He continues to investigate the relationship between dance and the environment, as well as the boundaries between performer and audience. Oguri has developed collaborative projects with dancers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and poets, using literature, daily life imagery, and simple materials to transform space and time through dance. He actively brings dance to the wider community. Oguri has received numerous grants and awards regionally, nationally, and internationally, including the 2018 United States Artist Doris Duke Fellow.