International Contemporary Ensemble Returns to Chelsea Factory for World Premieres by Call For____ Composers on April 3

For Immediate Release
Contact: Leah Rankin | Morahan Arts & Media
leah@morahanartsandmedia.com | 646-378-9386

International Contemporary Ensemble Returns to 
Chelsea Factory for World Premieres by 
Call For____ Composers on April 3

Featuring New Works by Bonita Oliver and Sylvain Souklaye, and 
Works Composed and Performed by Ensemble Members

ICE Announces Call For ____ Commission Program 2024

iceorg.org

New York, NY (March 14, 2024) — International Contemporary Ensemble returns to Chelsea Factory for an evening of world premieres by Call For____ commissioned composers on Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. The program features Bonita Oliver’s FOR NAMESAKE and Sylvian Souklaye’s What is left inside?, both commissioned by ICE through the Call For___ program with lead support from the Jerome Foundation. 

Last names are the focus of Bonita Oliver’s FOR NAMESAKE – how migration has impacted last names and the people who hold them, the power those names have represented, the impact on shaping communities and the subsequent impact on the earth. This work is an invitation to look into one’s own last name journey with curiosity and intention. Audience members are invited to participate in this exploration by submitting their last name to be spoken during the performance here.

Sylvain Souklaye’s What is left inside? focuses on the origin of language and the discovery of phrases - creating a sociological experience for the audience. In this work, Soulaye crafts a conversation where his body becomes an instrument as a way to manifest and represent its relationship to the outside world from within. Using ambisonic microphones, motion sensors and more to recreate an interior world, Souklaye translates those primal investigations into noises, sounds, and words in a truly sonic and bodily experience as What is left inside? explores the verbal and sonic viscerality of our interiority.

These new works are performed alongside Fay Victor’s bassoon duo, BassoonIIBassoon, performed by Varun Rangaswamy and Rebekah Heller; a duo version of Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody, performed by Alice Teyssier and Fay Victor; and the world premiere of Nathan Davis and Clara Warnaar’s Estuary.

Estuary features Nathan Davis and Clara Warnaar collaborating on a percussion duo for the first time. The work explores the idea of an estuary as a metaphor for interconnectedness – a place of merging and transience where new identities form as the musicians sample acoustic sounds from each other during the performance.

ICE also announces the next cycle of its Call For____ program, inviting individual or collective practitioners of performed sound to apply to create a new work for the International Contemporary Ensemble. Two early-career artists will be commissioned for a new work to be premiered at one of ICE’s events during an upcoming concert season. The selected artists will receive workshop and rehearsal opportunities with the Ensemble’s musicians throughout the process, as well as mentorship, support for documentation and storytelling through digitice.org, and a commission fee. The deadline to apply for this cycle is April 19, 2024.

Concert Information
WORLD PREMIERES & RECENT WORKS
International Contemporary Ensemble
Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Chelsea Factory | 547 W 26th St | New York, NY 10001
Tickets: $10
Link: https://www.chelseafactory.org/ice-cf24 

Program:
Bonita Oliver - FOR NAMESAKE (2024, World Premiere)*
Sylvain Souklaye - What is left inside? (2024, World Premiere)*
Fay Victor - BassoonIIBassoon (2021)
Cathy Berberian - Stripsody (1966)
Nathan Davis & Clara Warnaar - Estuary (2024, World Premiere) 

*commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble with lead support from the Jerome Foundation.

Artists:
International Contemporary Ensemble
     Alice Teyssier, voice and flute
     Eric Umble, clarinet
     Fay Victor, voice
     Rebekah Heller, bassoon
     Varun Rangaswamy, bassoon
     Nathan Davis, percussion
     Clara Warnaar, percussion
Sylvain Souklaye, performer
Nicholas Houfek, lighting designer

About Bonita Oliver

Bonita Oliver is a Harlem-based multidisciplinary artist and improviser whose work is about transitions and transformation. She creates body-in-space concept art through visuals, voice, music, and environmental soundscapes. Bonita is a 2023/24 Opera America IDEA Opera Grantee and 2023/2024 MOME NYC Women's Fund Awardee for the development of AR:Arias: Sojourner Truth. Bonita is grateful to be supported by ICE in creating this invitation for collective reflection, For Namesake.

About Sylvain Souklaye
Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker, and author. He started his artistic journey focusing on DIY social justice–or vandalism, as he called it–defined as the necessary destruction to achieve justice and self-designation. This inner quest took other forms with his writings and his obsession with noise and its sonic linguistics. Those raw words and intense sounds created the conditions for his live experiences. Interiority is at the center of Souklaye's body of work; collective intimacy and epigenetic dialogues are the inner spaces where he invites the audience (in)to. sylvainsouklaye.com 

About International Contemporary Ensemble
Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments in order to inspire audiences to reimagine how they experience contemporary music and sound. The Ensemble creates a mosaic musical ecosystem as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), honoring the diversity of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists in “a mission worth following” (I Care If You Listen). 

Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and is the recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, as well as Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year Award. Past artistic leadership includes co-founder Claire Chase and Ensemble members Joshua Rubin, Rebekah Heller, and Ross Karre. Notable presenting partners have included Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, TIME:SPANS Festival, Roulette, and Miller Theatre. The Ensemble has given performances at Warsaw Autumn, Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Park Avenue Armory, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ojai Music Festival, and Big Ears Festival as well as in venues such as the Dutch National Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Through trailblazing initiatives such as the Call for ____ Commission Program and Ensemble Evolution (in partnership with The New School’s College of Performing Arts), the Ensemble has had a major impact on the contemporary performance ecosystem in New York City, nationally, and internationally, by supporting the creativity of their composer-collaborators, as well as presenting workshops and performances for hundreds of student composers. Many of the Ensemble’s composer-collaborators have developed highly influential careers, such as Du Yun, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for the opera Angel’s Bone, which the Ensemble developed and premiered, and MacArthur Fellows Tyshawn Sorey and Courtney Bryan. 

The Ensemble’s Digitice platform provides high-quality video documentation for artist-collaborators, as well as public access to an archive of composers’ workshops and performances. In addition, the Ensemble continues to build space for dialogue on equity, and has facilitated New Music Virtual Town Hall meetings for peer organizations and individual musicians to share resources, processes, and initiatives around equity and inclusion.

Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org 

The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2023-24 concert season are made possible by the generous support of the Ensemble’s board, many individuals, as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, The Cheswatyr Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA’s Organizational Development Fund, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) from the U.S. Small Business Administration. The International Contemporary Ensemble was the Ensemble in Residence of the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology from 2018-2021. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Photo Credit: Photo of Bonita Oliver (Michael Scott Jones), Photo of Sylvain Souklay (courtesy of the artist)

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