SASSAS proudly presents sound. at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook: Anna Homler, Odeya Nini, and Laura Steenberge, a FREE public concert featuring composer/performers Anna Homler, Odeya Nini, and Laura Steenberge. Commissioned by SASSAS, and performed with the entire Los Angeles basin as a backdrop, the concert offers an exciting aural re-imagining of this iconic and historically complex hilltop.
The commissioned artists are presenting works spanning the terrain of the Overlook. The Baldwin Park Scenic Overlook is unique in the greater Los Angeles area and California State Park system. A historically complex site, the Overlook offers 360 degree views of the Los Angeles Basin as it resides at the juncture of industry and parkland / preserve. Adjacent to the location of the 1963 Baldwin Hills Dam break and just north of an active oil field, the park was the site of a decade long development battle which was successful in fending off a 230-home development, but failed to stop the flat topping of the hill. Parts of the park have been regraded and, “in certain ways the land still looks as though it’s recovering from the earlier violence.” (Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times).
This concert is made possible in part by a Culver City Performing Arts Grant with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment.
About the Artists:
Anna Homler is a vocal, visual and performance artist based in Los Angeles. She has performed and exhibited her work in venues around the world. With a sensibility that is both ancient and post-modern, Homler sings in an improvised melodic language. Her work explores alternative means of communication and the poetics of ordinary things. She creates perceptual interventions by using language as music and objects as instruments. Homler has performed at well-known venues throughout the United States and Europe, and since 1982 she has collaborated in America with composer/musicians Steve Moshier, David Moss, Ethan James, Steve Roden, and Steve Peters; and in Europe, with the Voices of Kwahn, Steve Beresford, Peter Kowald, Frank Schulte, Richard Sanderson, Geert Waegeman, and Sylvia Hallett, among others. Highlighting Homler’s work is the performance/installation project PHARMACIA POETICA, which examines the symbolic and tonal qualities of words and objects. The installation has traveled nationwide as part of the exhibition, 40 Years of California Assemblage, and has also been shown at Gracie Mansion in New York; the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe and Nonsequitur Music Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Gallery 400 in Chicago Illinois; the Melkfabriek in Den Bosch, Holland; and at Gallery Oko in Amsterdam. Homler’s music first became known in the 1980s with her Breadwoman cassette (High Performance Audio), a collaboration with Steve Moshier. In 2016 Breadwoman and Other Tales was re-released by RVNG to critical acclaim.
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Her performance will be an exploration of voices lost and found, in homage to the late, great, healer and singer Yu Zhang, incorporating the sound poetry of Kyn Taniya.
Odeya Nini is a Los Angeles based experimental vocalist and contemporary composer. At the locus of her interests are textural harmony, gesture, tonal animation, and the illumination of minute sounds, in works spanning chamber music to vocal pieces and collages of musique concrète. Her solo vocal work extends the dimension and expression of the voice and body, creating a sonic and physical panorama of silence to noise and tenderness to grandeur.
Odeya’s work has been presented at venues and festivals across the US and internationally, such as Resonant Bodies Festival, Banff Centre, The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, MONA and Art Basel Miami, from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, Australia, Mongolia, Madagascar and Vietnam. She has lectured on contemporary vocal techniques and composition at the university level and leads workshops, sound baths and retreats exploring the creative and healing qualities of embodying voice.
Laura Steenberge is a Los Angeles-based performer and composer who works with instruments, the voice, objects, images and movement. She is interested in the long view of history and is influenced by the study of folk music, psycholinguistics, acoustics, mythology and chant. A multi-instrumentalist and public speaker, Steenberge sings and speaks and plays viola da gamba, contrabass, homemade instruments, piano and harmonica. –
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Additional Performers:
Erika Bell
Jesse Quebbeman-Turley
Sharon Chohi Kim