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presents…

KRONOS QUARTETDavid Harrington, violin Hank Dutt, violaJohn Sherba, violin Sunny Yang, cello

THE LIVING EARTH SHOWAndy Meyerson, percussion Travis Andrews, electric guitar

YOUTH SPEAKSGabriel Cortez Aimee Suzara A.M. Smiley Michael Wayne Turner IIITassiana Willis, collaborating curator

Directed and edited by Sean San José    

Saturday, October 7, 2017 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

Echoes World Premiere

Text created by Gabriel Cortez, A.M. Smiley, Aimee Suzara, Michael Wayne Turner III and Tassiana Willis

with writing from Tongo Eisen-Martin and Enrique Garcia Naranjo and participants in San José workshops for Youth Speaks

Music composed by Danny Clay

Sound design by Brian Mohr

PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE

Kronos Quartet, P.O. Box 225340, San Francisco, CA 94122 Janet Cowperthwaite, Managing Director kronosquartet.org

Youth Speaks, 1663 Mission Street, Suite 604, San Francisco, CA 94103 Joan Osato, Producing Director youthspeaks.org

The Living Earth Show, c/o The Center for New Music, 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94117 thelivingearthshow.com

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ARTIST PROFILES

San Francisco Performances presents Kronos Quartet on the mainstage for the sixth time. The ensemble first appeared in 1986 with ODC; they also have appeared frequently on the Family Matinee Series. Youth Speaks and The Living Earth Show make their SF Perfor-mances debuts.

Kronos Quartet

For more than 40 years, San Francis-co’s Kronos Quartet—David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)—has com-bined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world’s most celebrated and influential ensembles, per-forming thousands of concerts, releasing more than 60 recordings, collaborating with many of the world’s most intriguing and accomplished composers and per-formers, and commissioning over 900 works and arrangements for string quar-tet. Kronos has received over 40 awards, including the Polar Music and Avery Fisher Prizes, two of the most prestigious awards given to musicians.

Integral to Kronos’ work is a series of long-running collaborations with many of the world’s foremost composers, including Americans Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich; Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Za-

deh; Russia’s Vladimir Martynov; Poland’s Henryk Górecki; and Serbian-American Aleksandra Vrebalov. Additional collabora-tors have included Wu Man, Laurie Ander-son, Tanya Tagaq, Mahsa Vahdat, Trevor Pa-glen, Van Dyke Parks, múm, Dawn Upshaw, Noam Chomsky, Tom Waits, Asha Bhosle, Taraf de Haïdouks, and Howard Zinn.

On tour for five months per year, Kronos appears in the world’s most prestigious concert halls, clubs, and festivals. Kronos is equally prolific and wide-ranging on re-cordings, including the Grammy- and Latin Grammy-nominated Nuevo (2002) and the 2004 Grammy-winner Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Kronos’ most recent releases include the One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley box set; Folk Songs, which features Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, Rhi-annon Giddens, and Natalie Merchant singing traditional songs; and Ladilikan, a collaborative album with Trio Da Kali, a “super-group” of Malian griot musicians as-sembled by Aga Khan Music Initiative.

The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association manages all aspects of Kro-nos’ work, including the commissioning of new works, concert tours and home season performances, education programs, and a self-produced Kronos Festival. In 2015, Kronos launched Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, an education and legacy project that is commission-ing—and distributing for free—the first learning library of contemporary reper-toire for string quartet.

The Living Earth Show

Called “outstanding” by the San Francis-co Chronicle, “transcendent” by the Charles-ton City Paper,  “a vanguard effort of new chamber music” by  the San Francisco Ex-aminer,  and “a fully distorted perpetual motion of awesome” by  I Care If You Lis-ten, The Living Earth Show is a megaphone and canvas for some of the world’s most progressive artists. Comprised of electric guitarist  Travis Andrews  and percussion-ist  Andy Meyerson, the San Francisco-based ensemble uses the traditions of classical and experimental music as tools to allow artists of all disciplines to create their most ambitious works and respond to the world in which they live.

Memorizing every work it performs, The Living Earth Show thrives on pushing the boundaries of technical and artistic possi-bility in its presentation of commissioned electro-acoustic chamber music. The en-semble has commissioned and premiered

works by such diverse composers as Anna Meredith, Timo Andres, Nicole Lizée, M. Lamar, Raven Chacon, Brian Ferneyhough, Samuel Adams, Ken Ueno, Luciano Ches-sa, Sharmi Basu, Ted Hearne, Jon Russell, Adrian Knight, Alden Jenks, Nick Vasallo, and Zachary James Watkins. Many of these commissions can be found on the group’s critically acclaimed debut album, High Art (Innova Records, 2013) and its upcoming albums Dance Music (New Amsterdam Re-cords) and TAFT (slashsound).

Upcoming productions include  Aeo-lus,  opera with Ken Ueno and Majel Con-nery, a new song cycle presented with and composed by Ted Hearne, a collabo-ration with Kronos Quartet and Youth Speaks, M. Lamar’s song cycle Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman, Dennis Aman’s evening-length work  24 Preludes and Fugues, Nicholas Vasallo’s Sur-rounding The Earth, a new work written for the ensemble by  Raven  Chacon, the col-laborative performance project AFFIRMA-TIVE ACTION, and a new evening-length collaboration with Post:Ballet and com-posers including Samuel Adams, Andrew Norman, Daniel Wohl scheduled to pre-miere in 2019.

When not performing as The Liv-ing Earth Show, Andy and Travis also comprise 2/3 of the rhythm section of  C O /\/\ /\/\ /\ /\/ D O, a musical jug-gernaut dedicated to dismantling heter-opatriarchy through militant, violently queer rap metal.

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Youth Speaks

Founded in 1996 in San Francisco, Youth Speaks has long championed a local, na-tional, and increasingly global movement of young people picking up pens and step-ping proudly onto stages, declaring them-selves present. We believe that literacy is a need, not a want.

One of the world’s leading presenters of spoken word performance, education and youth, Youth Speaks produces local and national youth poetry slams, festivals, and reading series, alongside a comprehensive slate of arts-in-education programs during the school day, in the after-school hours and on weekends. In addition, we create in-ternationally recognized theater and digi-tal programming, and have helped launch a national network of over 70 programs that believe in the power of young people.

Gabriel Cortez is a poet and teach-ing artist. His work has been featured by KQED, Upworthy and the Huffington Post and performed in such venues as the Ora-cle Arena, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Nourse Theater and Zellerbach Audito-rium. Gabriel is a Lead Artist with Youth Speaks. Gabriel is also a founding mem-ber of Ghostlines, The Root Slam, and the Write Home Project.

A.M. Smiley obtained her B.A in Per-forming Arts and Social Justice from the University of San Francisco and her M.A. in Drama from San Francisco State Univer-sity. Smiley acted as the Assistant Director for Campo Santo’s world premiere produc-

tion of H.O.M.E. (Hookers On Mars Eventu-ally), written by Star Finch and directed by Sean San José. Smiley continues to work as a core member of Campo Santo, and is in the process of writing two original works.

Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatri-cal work about race, gender and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Suzara has graced stages nationally with her dynamic spoken word. Her debut po-etry book, Souvenir, a Willa Award Final-ist, was lauded as “a powerful meditation on history and the legacies of race, family and identity” (David Mura), and her poems appear in numerous colletions, including Phat’itude and Kartika Review. Her perfor-mance work has been supported by YBC-Away Award, National Endowment for the Arts; and staged at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, CounterPULSE, and others.

Michael Wayne Turner III is an award winning writer, poet, spoken word art-ist, actor, dancer, emcee, and choreogra-pher. Michael is currently touring Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s reincarnation of WORD BECOMES FLESH (a five man sixty minute hip-hop theatrical). As an educator and facilitator of the art-education, Michael has developed a framework for engag-ing young people with his art through an educational lens, enabling the personal narrative to have a voice. Michael lives to provide this service to the world.

Tassiana Willis is one of the inaugural Emerging Arts Fellows at Youth Speaks. She is an accomplished writer, actress, and singer and has been a leader in Youth Speaks programs such as SPOKES Youth Advisory Board, Brave New Voices Team Bay Area, and Future Corp. She was chosen by the Emerging Arts Professionals SF/Bay as one of their Fellows, and was a facilita-tor at Berkeley Rep for the community engagement process for  Anna Deveare Smith’s Notes from the Field.

Sean San José is a director, writer, per-former and Co-Founder of Campo Santo, a new performances group founded in 1996 that gives voice to untold stories of people of color through new performance pre-mieres created in long-term processes. For 15 years San José was the Program Director of the Performance Program at Intersec-tion for the Arts. San José was the Cre-ator  and Project Director of Alma Delfina Group-Teatro Contra el SIDA (1994–2002) and Pieces of the Quilt, a collection of more than 50 short plays confronting AIDS. facebook.com/camposantosf/

Danny Clay

Danny Clay is a composer and teach-ing artist from Ohio, currently based in San Francisco. His work is deeply rooted in curiosity, collaboration, and the sheer joy of making things. His projects often incorporate musical games, open forms, found objects, archival media, toy in-struments, classrooms of elementary schoolers, graphic notation, digital er-rata, cross-disciplinary research, and the everything-in-between.

Recent collaborators include Kronos Quar-tet, Sarah Cahill, Phyllis Chen, Third Coast Percussion, Post:Ballet, Quince Contempo-rary Vocal Ensemble, Thingamajigs, Areon Flutes, Mobius Trio, The Living Earth Show, Friction Quartet, Nonsemble 6, MUSA Ba-roque, Anna Rainwater, Elevate Ensemble, the Trinity Alps Chamber Players, Mabel Kwan, David Grollman, Karl Fousek, Greg Gorlen, Joseph Edward Yonker, Quinn Walk-er, Wil Bolton, Stijn Hüwels, and Nobuto Suda.

His work has been released on Parlour Tapes+, Patient Sounds, Hibernate Re-cordings, IIKKI Editions, Unknown Tone Records, Eilean Records, Rural Colours, Phinery Recordings, Heat Death Records, Futuresequence, Tessellate Recordings, and Turmeric Magnitudes.

As a teaching artist specializing in com-position with elementary schoolers, he has worked with Little Opera, the San Francisco Opera, 826 Valencia, Thingamajigs, the In-ternational Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Composers and Schools in Concert (CSIC), and currently curates Project Object, a net-label of experimental music by kids.

He also serves as a resident curator at the Center for New Music in San Francisco and a host of Music from Other Minds on KALW radio.