Our Own Creative Work

Each year, the Ensemble produces a diverse range of performing arts projects. These include contemporary music concerts produced in San Francisco, in our Oakland studio, and on tour, unique theatrical and interactive installation projects involving invented musical instruments, new opera projects, and collaborations with dance and theater companies. In this past year, we focused on producing video and live-streamed events.

In late December, after filming in the PDE Studio, we streamed the premiere of Breathing At the Boundaries, our widely acclaimed collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Rinde Eckert, Michael Palmer, and Alexander V Nichols.

In May, we streamed With Friends Like These featuring vocalist Rinde Eckert and Vietnamese musician and composer Vân Ánh Võ in collaboration with the Dresher Davel Invented Instrument Duo alongside Sarah Cahill performing Elapsed Time, commissioned from Dresher by Cahill.

In October, we presented two live concerts in our studio. After Sarah Cahill generously donated her Baldwin concert grand piano to the Ensemble, we were able to feature duo pianists Sarah Cahill and Regina Myers performing a program of contemporary two-piano works, including Dresher’s early composition This Same Temple. The 2nd concert featured composer/woodwind performer and long-time collaborator Ned Rothenberg performing solos and duos with Dresher.

We just completed an intensive and very productive 3-week workshop of Hidden Mercy—our collaboration with Larry Reed’s Shadowlight Theater and playwright Eugenie Chan that will premiere in early 2023 at the Presidio Theater.

This fall Paul also began composing the score for the Ensemble’s collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s Hewlett 50 Commission, Global Moves, which will premiere at the Presidio Theater in June 2022. The collaborators include Rinde Eckert, Michael Palmer, Alexander V. Nichols, and dancers from India, Israel, and China.

The Ensemble also received a prestigious Hewlett 50 award to commission Cambodian choreographer/dancer Charya Burt’s The Rebirth of Apsara, a dance/theatre work exploring how Khmer [Cambodian] art has embodied the essence of Cambodian culture from ancient mythology to post-Khmer-Rouge genocide revitalization, and its impact on the Cambodian Diaspora in America.  This project features a commissioned score from the celebrated Cambodian composer Chinary Ung.

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