Music for puppets in Japanese mountains

In what may be the most unlikely artistic collaboration of this year, the Genetic Choir will create new music for the piece “Born on this Planet” by Bunraku company Mokugu-sha on 22nd and 25th of September in Tokushima, Japan.

After giving vocal workshops and concerts coming weekend in Hiroshima (see here), the Genetic Choir Ensemble will travel to Tokushima province where they will meet with master puppeteer Kanroku, who is one of the most prominent performers and teachers of this ancient puppeteer tradition.

For a new play that he created in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster (“Born on this planet”), he asked the Genetic Choir to create new all-vocal music, which will be premiered on the 22nd and 25th of September in Japan. First in Tokushima city, and the second performance in one of the ancient village puppet theatres (Kitagawa Nouson Butai ), up in the mountains of Tokushima province.

We can’t tell you how excited we are!  😀

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If you want to follow what we’ll do:

There will be regular updates about the Japan tour via facebook. We have a brand new Genetic Choir Ensemble page:

https://www.facebook.com/GCEnsemble/

And you can also still befriend us as https://www.facebook.com/genetic.choir

Japan tour with puppeteers

The Genetic Choir Ensemble is set to travel to Japan in September this year, to first perform on the Creative Music Festival 2016 in Hiroshima, and afterwards join Bunraku company Mokugu-sha on a small tour in Tokushima prefecture. Performances in Japan will be on 18/19 September and 22/25 September 2016.

We are very happy for this opportunity to work interdisciplinary with puppetry, as the special link between inanimate objects and sound will also be a focus on this weekend’s Genetic Choir workshop in Amsterdam: Material Grooves (2/3 april)

The upcoming visit to Japan will help us to investigate further a bigger Japan project that we are brewing on for 2017/2018, envisioned as a multi-disciplinary research between puppeteers, dancers, singers and water-engineers. (!)

Save the dates if you happen to be near Hiroshima or Tokushima in autumn.  🙂

 

 

Invitation to Japan

The Genetic Choir has been invited to be guest artist on CMF – Creative Music Festival in Hiroshima in 2016 !

We would love to accept this beautiful invitation and are now working on extending our tour and forging musical collaborations in other Japanese cities so that a working visit of the Genetic Choir to Japan next year becomes feasible.

Please let us know if you know of people/sponsors who could help make this happen, or if you know of other contemporary music contacts in Japan that we could approach to offer concerts and/or workshops.

For the occasion, we open the Japanese part of this website today:  はこちら – (click here)

You can get in contact with us here. Any advice or suggestions are welcome! 🙂

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The Creative Music Festival (CMF) is a music festival that has been held in Japan every year since 1998.

In past editions, more than 40 guest artists were invited from all over the world to give experimental workshops and concerts. Past guest artists are active in the international forefront, and included the improvising musicians Urs Leimgruber, Carl Bergstroem-Nielsen, Godfried-Willem Raes, Joelle Leandre, Trevor Wishart, Michael Fischer, Makoto Nomura, Koichi Makigami, Yoshihide Otomo, Tomomi Adachi, Akio Suzuki, Dora Video, the improvisation actress Yuri Kinugawa, the artists Tetsuya Umeda, Horio Kanta, etc.

As a music festival CMF focuses on the relationship between music and various adjacent fields – body expression and theatre, fine art, sound art, sociology, etc. Participants therefore come from a wide range of fields: professional musicians, music teachers, amateur musicians, artists, dancers, music therapists, etc.

The composer Yu Wakao organized the festival until CMF2008; since CMF2009 it has been organized by the composer and improviser Daisuke Terauchi.

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