Thingamajigs Performance Group (TPG)
TPG is a sound-based ensemble working co-creatively in a variety of mediums and with a wide array of local and international artists. Formed in 2008 from longtime Thingamajigs contributors, TPG continues to break new ground in performance fields such as durational performance, alternate tuning, group and open compositional formats, inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural collaboration, and site-work.
Current Members : Dylan Bolles, Keith Evans, Suki O'Kane and Edward Schocker
Collaborators (past and present) : Gelsey Bell, Rae Diamond, Ann Dyer, Sasha Hom, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Eric Kupers, Michael Meyers, Robert Moran, Pauline Oliveros, Stephen Ratcliffe, Zachary James Watkins, Jeffrey Young
next shows
Coming Soon…
thingNY + Thingamajigs Performance Group (2014)
'Fraid o' Freyja : The just-intoned, psychedelic alter-ego of TPG
FOF was born of a tuning experiment enacted on a Wurlitzer dubbed "The Schocker/Fokker Tuning"; given life by the "what-would-happen-if" one month rental of a rock rehearsal space. It continues what TPG started, only louder.
'Fraid o' Freyja in Day of Noise 2017
Durational Performances & Other Collaborations
WITHIN A DAY
A working residency between composer Robert Moran and TPG culminated in a musical work. It attempted to blur the divisions between a performer and a composer, within a day. In January 2014, WITHIN A DAY premiered in Center for New Music. The same year, another residency with Pauline Oliveros led to the second work in the series. Since then Thingamajigs Performance Group has collaborated with various other artists to investigate these artistic roles in a musical work, conceived and performed within a day.
In 2017 the series returned with multiple collaborations. The first with embodied arts and practices expert Alex Boyd; who teaches Daojiao Lishi Quanfa, a Daoist alchemic practice from northern China focused on the cultivation, storing, harnessing, directing and utilization of energy. The second work was developed with the SF bay area based bassist, bandleader, composer, curator and producer - Lisa Mezzacappa.
14 hours of poetry & PERFORMANCE
TPG is in a multi-year collaboration with poet Stephen Ratcliffe that creates large scale durational works based on 1,000 poem cycles. Stephen writes a poem every day for 1,000 days. Performing these poems takes approximately 14 hours and features Stephen reading each poem, which TPG then interprets as a performance score.
The most recent performance, Continuum, featured TPG with performing artists Rae Diamond (composer and director of the Long Tone Choir) and Shinichi Iova-Koga (artistic director of the movement theater ensemble inkBoat). The first piece, Human/Nature, premiered at UC Davis in 2008; the second, Remarks on Color/Sound, was staged at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2010; and the third, Temporality, premiered in May 2012 and was remounted in the Mills College Art Gallery in February 2013.
In the past, Thingamajigs has collaborated with other groups and musicians such as ThingNY for different kinds of durational performances.
Twenty-minute precis of a 15-hour performance featuring inkBoat, The Long Tone Choir, Thingamajigs, and the poet Stephen Ratcliffe, on Mare Island, California, October 1 2016
Videography by John Carnahan and Terri Fredlund, edited by John Carnahan for Berkeley Community Media.
