The New Museum for Contemporary Art presents Voice & Light Systems by Nick Hallett :: four Thursdays in May, 2009 :: 235 Bowery, New York, NY.

Nick Hallett — singer, composer, and downtown impresario — creates a four-part series at the New Museum theater connecting the human voice to multimedia ritual. In collaboration with a rotating cast of performers and artists, Hallett presents original music and performance alongside new interpretations of celebrated vocal works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The singing voice is seen here in its rawest state, stripped of its language-based sensibilities, and more as a flexible sound instrument, capable of producing protosemantic, acoustic phenomena. As such, concepts of drone, repetition, and improvisation prevail over the tropes of traditional song. Each evening is staged using pure light, illuminated objects, and projection methods derived from structuralist film and the psychedelic lightshow to create a live, interdisciplinary synthesis of sound and image. Taking from John Cage’s maxim that “art should not be different than life, but an action within life,” Voice & Light Systems revisits the Zen-Buddhism-inspired methodologies popular among Western artists during the 1960s and ’70s as ritual practices in and of themselves, envisioning their scores much as sacred texts in a pre-literary culture, to be rendered as expressions of devout “art consciousness.” With this experimental tradition as a starting point, Hallett begins to develop new work for contemporary contemplation, with the voice—the most basic instrument of artistic expression—at its core.

Nick Hallett: Voice & Light Systems, Part One: Meredith Monk’s Our Lady of Late :: Thursday, May 7, 7 p.m. :: Location: New Museum Theater :: $12 Members, $15 General Public

Nick Hallett: Voice & Light Systems, Part Two: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung :: Thursday, May 14, 7 p.m. ::
Location: New Museum Theater :: $12 Members, $15 General Public

Nick Hallett: Voice & Light Systems, Part Three: Whispering Exercises Premiere :: Thursday, May 21, 7 p.m. ::
Location: New Museum Theater :: $12 Members, $15 General Public

Nick Hallett: Voice & Light Systems, Part Four: Auroville :: Thursday, May 28, 7 p.m. :: Location: New Museum
theater :: $12 Members, $15 General Public

For more informations, see: http://www.newmuseum.org/events/330