28th Annual MATA Festival: Night One: Positive Void – Evolving Things

Without a doubt, the 28th Annual MATA Festival is the liveliest and most interesting musical event happening in NYC on Memorial Day weekend, May 21 - 23. Ever since the Festival was co-founded by Philip Glass in the 1990s, it has been the prime opportunity for concertgoers to hear “Tomorrow’s Music Today.”

This year’s programs are fascinating and provocative – tap-dancing to music by Morton Feldman and Steve Reich, anyone? – and the performers are top-notch, including violinists Miranda Cuckson, Conrad Harris, and Leah Asher, pianists Marilyn Nonken and Taka Kigawa, BlackBox Ensemble, Unnameable Strings, and tap/pointe dance company The Bang Group, among others. Plus, there’s a six-hour experimental “rave” on May 20! All in all, the MATA Festival is not to be missed.

Transformation is the keynote of this year’s opening concert, a provocative encounter between instrumental performance and movement. The Bang Group executes Steve Reich’s Clapping Music with tap shoes, and reimagines Feldman's For John Cage – scored for piano and violin – as a tap dance. At the heart of the program are intriguing new solo and duo scores for violin, flute, voice, and electronics by Yifan Guo, Liann J Kang, Anselm McDonnell, Kaleena Miller, Sami Seif, and Zihan Wu, performed by MATA Mavens. While diverse in style, many of their works display a striking engagement with language. Bang choreographer David Parker interprets Pauline Kim Harris’s Sparkle Too with 10 pointe and eight tap shoes, and caps the evening with his witty Schlemiezel, a duo for dancers in Velcro-covered suits.

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