Home » Events » Tatsuya Nakatani, Jacob Felix Heule, Kevin Corcoran with Butoh, dance – Less & More | Turquoise Yantra Grotto

Tatsuya Nakatani, Jacob Felix Heule, Kevin Corcoran with Butoh, dance – Less & More | Turquoise Yantra Grotto

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/01/2016
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Location
Turquoise Yantra Grotto

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$10-15

Join us for a spectacular evening of breathtaking virtuosity and deep listening spaces while Butoh sensations Ronie Baker and Sea Chel improvise. Tatsuya is one of the most compelling performers I have seen in my life and his performances are full of grace and ferocity. Kanoko and Soo will open us up with a minimalist set of subtle proportions.

Tatsuya Nakatani is a creative artist / percussionist originally from Osaka, Japan who has released over sixty recordings in North America and Europe. Residing in the USA since 1994 he has performed countless solo percussion concerts and has collaborated with hundreds of artists in international music festivals, university concert halls, art museums and galleries. His latest project is the Nakatani Gong Orchestra, which builds community ensembles performing on multiple bowed gongs under his direction, as recently presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Nakatani’s constant touring fosters the raw and fresh quality in his music, which can only survive through an open willingness to share energy, culture, music and self on a global human scale. His master classes and workshops at schools and universities, emphasize his unique musical approach and philosophy in creating visceral, non-linear music.

He has created his own instrumentation, effectively inventing many instruments and extended techniques. He utilizes drums, gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows to create an intense, intuitively primitive, expressive music of unusually strong spirit that defies category or genre. His music is based in improvised/ experimental music, jazz, free jazz, rock, and noise, yet retains the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music.

Jacob Felix Heule is a percussionist and electronic musician focused on sound-oriented improvisation following the traditions of electro-acoustic improv, noise, and 20th-century composition. His playing embraces both rough-edged intensity and disciplined instrumental technique.

As an acoustic musician, Heule employs diverse techniques to activate the sonic potential of physical objects, usually drums and cymbals. The primary content of his music arises from this heightened awareness of the physicality of sound — vibrating material objects creating air pressure waves. His playing is minimalist in allowing the raw sounds of objects to stand on their own: The material is the music.

Heule’s Norwegian/American acoustic noise ensemble Sult has been actively touring the US and Europe, and released its second album, Harm, in 2013. His local group Addleds (with Kyle Bruckmann, Kanoko Nishi, and Tony Dryer) was awarded a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music to hold a concert series in the fall of 2013. Heule has also been actively touring with Voicehandler, his electro-acoustic duo with Danishta Rivero, and they are currently working on a recording of the their open-form song cycle.

Kevin Corcoran is a percussionist and field recordist with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of art, music, ecology, and communication.

As a drummer/percussionist he is most interested in techniques which extend the sonic possibilities of the instrument emphasizing textural sound, atonal sympathetic vibration, sustained tones without audible attack and the use of found objects.

Kevin grew up in Sacramento where he played in a variety of rock and free-jazz groups in addition to solo and collaborative free improvisation and continues these practices in his current city San Francisco.
He holds a degree in Technocultural Studies from the University of California at Davis where he studied sonic arts with Bob Ostertag, Sam Nichols and Kriss Ravetto. He has performed throughout the United States, Europe and in Japan and collaborated on several published recordings since 2002.

Kanoko Nishi-Smith is an improviser currently based in San Francisco Bay Area. She uses her instruments, piano and koto, Japanese 13-string zither, to create music with strong focus on resulting movements and state of mind.

Ronnie Baker is an experimental performer, with a background in Butoh and Ballet. He has been studying with Koichi and Hiroko Tamano for 15 years and has studied ballet with Monique Goldwater and ODC Dance for over 5. Since the early 1990’s he has blended mixed-media and interdisciplinary performance with circus arts in the US and Japan.

Sea Heikes is a semi-nomadic video and performance artist using Butoh, Body Weather, and Somatic Movement as a basis for corporeal inquiry. She has created site responsive works in Central America, South East Asia, and the US. Many of her performances are interventionist in nature with the intention to disrupt and dismantle the notions of everyday life. These pieces often serve as investigations and lay the groundwork for more choreographic work that’s created in workshops with other performers and made for the stage.


Now in our 6th season, the Turquoise Yantra Grotto is a house concert series for avant improvisers and invented instrumentalists with a focus on ethno-modernism and extended techniques. We hold a monthly event which is part concert and part social club, part concert and part art opening, near Twin Peaks in San Francisco. The Turquoise Yantra Grotto is home to many unique invented instruments including the Zen Industrial Gamelan (or grand metalliphone), the Gamelan Piano, and several sonic paintings, as well as instruments by Bart Hopkin, Tom Nunn, David Samas, Dan Gottwald, Peter Whitehead, Bryan Day, Larnie Fox, Susan Rawcliffe and many others. The 4 pianos in the house are each uniquely tuned for a variety of repertoire showcased in our solo piano series.

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