Recontre III
Collaborative Immersive Performance


Josiah Boothby - French horn
Laura Luna Castillo - VR environment design, visual spaces Leanna Keith - Flutes
Ashley Menestrina - Movement artist
Daniel Peterson - Live sound processing and coding
Ewa Trębacz - Violin, Ambisonic sound sources


This collaborative immersive performance will bring to life a sound archive based on Ambisonic recordings realized in unique acoustical spaces of historical significance in Washington State.

These spaces include WWI era bunkers in Fort Worden, and an abandoned nuclear plant in Satsop, Washington--inside its monumental cooling towers and the reactor building. The original sounds were created by Josiah Boothby (French horn), Leanna Keith (flutist) and Ewa Trębacz (violinist and composer), through their improvised sessions in these spaces, ambisonically recorded and processed by Ewa Trębacz. This initial material will become a fragmented archive of sound sources, brought into another industrial place of significance in the Seattle area, the Georgetown Steam Plant.

An archive of sonic fragments will be explored in live performance through the use of room-scale VR, motion capture and positional trackers worn by performers in a 3D environment designed by Laura Luna Castillo, and processed live in Ambisonics by composer Daniel Peterson. Movement artist Ashley Menestrina will trigger sounds in the virtual space in a dialogue with the musicians, who will also be activating sounds and creating new sound events in real time. An interwoven virtual and physical space is created and traversed through trackers which bind the position and corporeality of the performers with virtual objects, translating their position into an invisible reality of sound clusters and spatial sonic arrangements.

 

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Josiah Boothby is a versatile hornist devoted to new music, with a particular focus on improvisation and creative collaboration with composers and other artists. Josiah has performed at the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival as a soloist, and is a member of Artemisia Winds, a chamber ensemble built around a core trio with composer/performers Angelique Poteat and Ryan Hare. As an orchestral musician, Josiah is a member of the Boise Philharmonic and the Yakima Symphony, and has performed frequently with the Seattle Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, and Seattle Modern Orchestra. In addition, during December Josiah can also be found playing in a nine-piece jazz band accompanying the glamorous Land of the Sweets: A Burlesque Nutcracker.





Laura Luna Castillo is a Mexican multimedia and new technologies artist and composer. Through convergences of time-based media, music, sculpture, and generative storytelling Luna explores personal and collective identities shaped by political and intimate spaces. With a passion for machines, generative narratives, and the complexities of memory, Luna Castillo has developed audiovisual performances, installations, and hybrid works for festivals such as MUTEK Montréal, CYNETART Festival, and EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center). 






A freelance flutist, artist, improviser, and composer in the Seattle area, Leanna Keith (she/they) delights in creating sound experiences that make audiences laugh, cry, and say: “I didn’t know the flute could do that!” Their works focus on timbre-shifting, the mixed-race experience, queer theory, and the breaking of performer/audience boundaries. She is dedicated to playing music by living composers, and advocates for the usage of music as social activism. Leanna is the professor of flute at Cornish College of the Arts.





Ashley Menestrina is a movement artist with deep ties to improvisation. Her repertoire of solo works: "Always a Creature", "The Human Condition: Absent Presence", and "Combative Echoes" have been performed in eight countries and received numerous awards from festival juries. She has further worked as a collaborator/choreographer for the following artists: Alice Gosti, Gonzaga University, Anna Mlasowsky for the Amazon A.I.R program, Emily Schoen Branch, and Maia Melene Durfee since moving to Seattle in 2021.





Daniel Peterson is an acousmatic composer working with ambisonics. He completed a Master of Music in Composition at the University of Washington working with Juan Pampin and a Ph.D. at the Department for Digital Arts and Experimental Media working with Richard Karpen. His compositional interests include spectral analysis, ambisonics, and the exploration of the relationships between literature, philosophy, and music.





Ewa Trębacz is a Polish-American composer, violinist and an interdisciplinary artist.  Collaboration, understood as an exchange of creativity, is essential to her work. Exploring the unique interaction between the human subjects and their acoustic environment, she often uses space as a catalyst for improvisation, working through Ambisonic recording sessions in acoustically impelling spaces. Her works have been presented at major international festivals and conferences such as Ars Electronica Festival, ICMC, NYCEMF, CIME/ICEM, International Festival of Contemporary Music “Warsaw Autumn”, and many others. She holds a Master’s degree in Composition from the K.Penderecki Academy of Music in Kraków, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington DXARTS department.



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