Artists from around the World Share Music You Can SEE and Dance You Can HEAR
The 2013 International Body Music Festival, which concluded last week in San Francisco, celebrates contemporary and traditional body music. This weekend, 10 artists from the festival visit campus for a weeklong residency (November 16 -20).
Body music artists play the world’s oldest instrument—the human body—by snapping, clapping, stepping, stomping, and more in their performances.
“Body Music will broaden our sense of what music is,” said Marion Dry, senior music performance faculty in voice and director of the Music Performance Program. “We hope that at the end of the week our students will be able to go back to their own musical endeavors with new approaches to making music and added excitement, too.”
The International Body Music Festival, founded by Artistic Director Keith Terry and Assistant Director Evie Ladin, is a project of Crosspulse, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit dedicated to the performance, recording, and education of cross-cultural rhythmic arts.
“Audiences can expect to be treated to a diversity of sounds and movements that are subtle and intricate, dynamic and riveting, traditional and totally new, and bathed with the professionalism, virtuosity, humor, and spontaneity that reflects Keith Terry's genius, his skill in orchestrating all of this, and the genius of the artists he has gathered,” said Isabel Fine, Wellesley’s concert manager.
Fine first encountered Terry’s work in 1980. “Since then, body music has become quite a well known genre and Keith's nonprofit organization, Crosspulse, has really been the instigator of the whole world of body music expanding in the Bay Area, all over the U.S., and abroad,” she said.
Several public performances will be offered on campus, including an opening concert on Saturday, November 16, at 7:30 p.m. in Jewett; a public workshop on Sunday, November 17, from noon to 2 p.m. in Alumnae Hall Ballroom; a family show on Sunday, November 17, at 3 p.m. in Alumnae Hall Ballroom; and an epilogue performance on Wednesday, November 20, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in Jewett. Reservations for events taking place in Jewett Auditorium are suggested, as space is limited; please contact Isabel Fine. For more information about these events and Body Music Week in Boston, visit the Events page.
Body Music is presented as part of the Wellesley College Concert Series. The Concert Series began in 1876, and each year brings world-class performers to campus, complementing the department's academic offerings and augmenting the cultural life of the College and surrounding community.