Joy Guidry: Live at The Kitchen
Joy Guidry
November 5, 8pm EDT
512 West 19th Street
Program
Please hold your applause until the end of the program.
Lisa E. Harris, Joy becomes Light
Joy Guidry, Just because I have dick doesn't mean I’m a man
Jessie Cox, Form Content Negotiations
Joy Guidry, Inner child
Joy Guidry and Alex Broussard (film), 2:19 am
Joy Guidry, Maudry Richard Davis
Olivia Shortt, She exists in several different time zones at once
Joy Guidry, Grace
Production Credits
Joy Guidry: Bassoon, Theremin, Voice, Electronics, Video
Jessie Cox: Percussion
Lighting Design: Leo Janks
Sound Engineer: Aaron Robinson
Organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator
This concert is made possible with endowment support from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; annual grants from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Howard Gilman Foundation, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Special Thanks
I would like to give thanks to all of my family, friends, and mentors for all of the support, care, and love throughout my life this far.
Bios
Radical self-love, compassion, laughter, and the drive to amplify Black art-makers and noise-makers comprise the core of NYC-based bassoonist and composer Joy Guidry’s work. Their performances have been hailed by The San Diego Tribune as “lyrical and haunting…hair-raising and unsettling.” A versatile improviser and a composer of experimental, daring new works that embody a deep love of storytelling, Guidry’s own music channels their inner child, in honor of their ancestors and predecessors. In every aspect of their practice, Guidry seeks to support, hire, and promote Black artists. To this end Guidry has spearheaded Sounds of the African Diaspora, a competition and commissioning platform for composers from the African diaspora. This new initiative ensures that composers from the diaspora have access to the space, resources, and time necessary to foster new, innovative music. Guidry holds a bachelor’s degree in Bassoon Performance from the Peabody Conservatory and a Graduate Performance Diploma from the Mannes School of Music. They have performed with the Dance Centre Kenya Ballet Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and have been a featured soloist in Yvette Jackson’s opera Fear is their Alibi that premiered at the 2021 PROTOTYPE festival. They have been commissioned by The National Sawdust, Long Beach Opera, JACK Quartet, and the I&I Foundation, and they have attended and been featured by prestigious festivals including the Spoleto Festival USA and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Guidry is a finalist for the 2021 Berlin Prize for Young Artists taking place in Berlin, Germany in January 2022. https://www.guidrybassoon.com/
Swiss artist Jessie Cox makes music about the universe—and our future in it. Through avant-garde classical, experimental jazz, and sound art, he has devised his own strand of musical science fiction, one that asks where we go next. For the last decade, his music has been marked by its freeness; his embrace of otherness has led to a body of work described by the LA Times as “some of the most experimental music, not just of the day, but the season.” Cox’s music goes forward. When he describes it, he compares it to time travel and space exploration, likening the role of a composer to that of a rocket ship traversing undiscovered galaxies. He is influenced by a vast array of artists who have used their music to imagine futures, and takes Afrofuturism as a core inspiration; asking questions about existence and the ways we make spaces habitable. https://www.jessiecoxmusic.com/
Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative soprano, performer, composer, improviser, writer, singer/songwriter, researcher, and educator from Houston, Texas who makes time, and space, to dream. Her newly released debut solo album, Life and That, is a nine-track recollection of original tunes being sung around a Texas campfire, a bluesy round of musical chairs, and a drowsy line dance teetering on the border of dream land. Li is the 2021 recipient of the Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/ Sound awarded by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Recognized by Huffington Post as “one of fourteen artists transforming Opera,” Li's work resists genre classification as she focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. She is the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia, an arts collective and production company that produced her ten-year durational work Cry of the Third Eye, a new opera film in Three Acts (2020) that archives the effects of gentrification on her historic Houston neighborhood, Third Ward. Li recently created and curated Houston’s inaugural Free Time Flow Festival at MacGregor Park, celebrating the intersections of basketball, electro-acoustic music and improvisational performance. Li can be heard on her 2020 release EarthSeed, a live performance album based on the writings of Octavia E Butler, composed by Harris and Nicole Mitchell on FPE records. She is an inaugural artist in residence of the New Quorum Residency for Composers in New Orleans. In 2021, Li returns as faculty with the International Contemporary Ensemble at the College of the Performing Arts, New School University. Recent commissions include Give It a Rest: X Lullabies in Support of Black Rest/Unrest for the contemporary classical duo Mazumal and A Black Woman Told Me and I Believe Her. A Movement commissioned by Harvard University for the 2020 Freshman Seminar under the direction of Professor Claire Chase. She is a current Monroe Research Fellow at Tulane University's Center for the Gulf South where she is developing her environmental justice research project Onshore Trilling: What to Do When the Earth Sings the Bruise. https://lisaeharris.com/
Olivia Shortt (They/Them; Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) is a Tkarón:to-based trans-disciplinary multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, curator, administrator, and producer. They made their Australian debut in 2017 performing new Canadian and Australian works for saxophone and Ondes Martinot in Melbourne with keyboardist Jacob Abela. They made their Lincoln Center debut in 2018 in New York City performing Michael Pisaro’s A Wave and Waves with the International Contemporary Ensemble. They made their film debut, acting and playing saxophone, in acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film Guest of Honour; and recorded an album with their duo Stereoscope, consisting of Robert Lemay’s composition Fragments Noirs two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB (an underground laboratory specializing in Neutrinos and dark matter physics in Northern Ontario, Canada). Their own performance-art-storytelling-work has been featured at Native Earth's Performing Arts' Weesageechak Festival, Upintheair Theatre’s e-Volver Festival, Paprika Festival, and the Vector Festival. Recent commissions and collaborations include Long Beach Opera (Songbook 2020), the JACK Quartet, and a new opera for Loose Tea Music Theatre. Most recently, they were awarded and named one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times’ Emerging Queer Artists, was a finalist for the 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award and was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine. https://www.olivia-shortt.com/