Thursday, October 30, 2014

Black Cinema House

Last weekend I had the pleasure of visiting the Dorchester Art+Housing Collaborative run by Theaster Gates' Rebuild Foundation. Kelly and I are both enamored of collective living spaces. Visiting the apartments on Chicago's South Side, the building site of the future connected arts center, and the Black Cinema House was a delightful afternoon of beautiful renovation, social investment, and inspirational conversations. The work Rebuild is doing in the MidWest is a profound inspiration to me as EbM and RIME move forward. They have partnered with the Chicago Housing Authority to re-imagine an empty residential project as mixed-income housing focused around a community arts center. They are fostering a number of cultural institutions in concert with this collective housing experiment: The Black Cinema House; The Listening House; The Archive House. Each is an important institution on its own. The strength and breadth of the vision Rebuild brings to a place is phenomenal. Rebuild and DAHC, they don't know this yet, are two of the local Chicago organizations I hope to get involved in RIME in 02016.

Speaking of which, in two weeks, on November 16, (and again on December 7) I will be going back down to the Black Cinema House for Kinosonik.

"In collaboration with Chicago Film Archives and Experimental Sound Studio, Rebuild Foundation’s Black Cinema House presents KINOSONIK, a pilot project of live music/sound performances with cinema. Two pairs of collaborating sound/music artists, selected by ESS, will each spend 4 to 6 weeks studying and working with several short films selected from CFA’s extensive vault. The artist pairs — Tomeka Reid & Olivia Block and Marvin Tate & Joseph Clayton Mills — have been selected because of their substantive and exemplary artistic accomplishments to date, their commitment to risk-taking exploratory approaches to sound and music, their long-standing experience in collaboration, and their interest in integrating their various sonic approaches with moving image.

Structured as two mini-residencies, the pilot program results in two live performances by each pair, one at BCH and one at ESS. For audiences, it promises to be a rare and deeply engaging experience of live sound with cinema, given the unique and sophisticated talents of the artists, and their commitment to rigorous improvisational and compositional approaches."

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