A Native of Hong Kong, Viola Yip is a New York-based experimental composer, performer and curator.  Her recent interests fall on exploring the sonic materiality of instruments and found objects, as well as incorporating our musical listening and performing bodies as a form of technology in creating new musical experience.

Her works and performances have appeared in places such as Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Ravinia Festival, University of Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UC San Diego, NASA saxophone conference, PAUSA Art House in Buffalo, Hong Kong Cultural Center, Hong Kong City Hall and Radio 4 at Radio and Television Hong Kong, Abrons Arts Center, DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Secret Theater and Flushing Town Hall in NYC, unternehmen mitte in Basel and University of Huddersfield. Her recent collaborations include working with ICE ensemble, JACK quartet, Yarn/Wire, Marco Fusi and Lauren DeBoer among others. 

She is currently pursuing her PhD in music composition at Graduate School of Arts and Science of New York University. 

Toronto-based composer Patrick McGraw was born in the United States but has made Canada his home since 2001.   A lifelong interest in the sciences led him at first to a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology, but the pull of his other great love, music, proved irresistible.  He returned to school to study composition, with David Mott at York University and then with Gary Kulesha at the University of Toronto.  His chamber, electroacoustic, large ensemble, vocal and operatic works have been performed in the U.S. and Canada by TorQ Percussion, Reverb Brass, the Cecilia String Quartet, and the Toy Piano Composers Ensemble among others.  He was awarded the Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music for his string quartet Glass in 2014, and his piece A Force of Nature for trumpet, electronics and 3D video was recently selected as one of two Canadian works in the 2018 Mise-En music festival.  Although music is now his primary focus, he remains active in the sciences as a teacher and is credited with almost as many publications in Physical Review as works performed. Much of his work is inspired by the quest for a mutually enriching synergy between the two fields, and by a deep appreciation for the abstract beauty of natural and mathematical phenomena.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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photo: Prince Requino 

Hailing from the Philippines, Juro Kim Feliz (b. 1987)is a pianist and composer currently based in Toronto, Canada. Along with composition studies at the University of the Philippines and McGill University, he got mentoring from various consultations with composers Jonas Baes, Melissa Hui, Liza Lim, Chong Kee Yong, Dieter Mack and Linda Catlin Smith. He won the Goethe South East Asian Young Composer Award (1st place) in 2009 and landed as a Finalist in the Five-Minute Piano Concerto Competition of the Music Biennale Zagreb in 2017. He contributed and premiered works for festivals and projects including the Yogyakarta Contemporary Music Festivals (Indonesia, 2009; 2010; 2014); the Asian Composers League festivals (South Korea, 2009; Taiwan, 2011; Israel, 2012; Philippines, 2015); The Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (2014, 2016); the Project Bakawan Arts Festival (Philippines, 2015); thePivot Mentorship Program of the Canadian League of Composers (Toronto, 2017); the New Music on the Bayou (Louisiana, 2017); the Toronto Creative Music Lab (2017); the Waterloo Region Contemporary Music Sessions (2017); the MATA Festival (New York, 2018); and the Nief-Norf SummerFestival 2018 (Tennessee, 2018). His percussion duo work Gandingan sa Kagiliran(2014) is commercially released in the Millennial Masters Volume 7 album under Ablaze Records.

Sonja Rainey is an inter-disciplinary artist, designer and facilitator. She designs for opera and theatre, projections and puppetry, film and spectacle events. Her approach is tactile and experiential, responding to the visceral qualities of ideas and themes at hand to create immersive environments that blend forms and materials to investigate the questions and stories that lie below the surface. Her work has been presented at the Prague Quadrennial, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and is currently being shown at PAMA. Recent collaborations in Toronto have included the Canadian Opera Company, urbanvessel, Ahuri Theatre, Thin Edge New Music Collective, the Bicycle Opera Project, The Gladstone Hotel and Jumblies Theatre. Her contributions with these companies has encompassed installation, set and costume design; puppets mask and shadow projections, exhibit design as well as the creation of a series of short films. She is thrilled to be working increasingly with musicians and composers in the creation of environments and visuals for listening.

Janet Sit is a composer and pianist currently based in Toronto, by way of Hong Kong and Victoria. Her compositions have been performed in Beijing, Berlin, Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria. She holds a B.Sc. in Zoology and B.Mus. in Composition from the University of Toronto and a M.Mus. from University of Victoria. Her research interests include exploring acoustic properties of sound in various spaces and transmission media, seeking dialogue with marine scientists on underwater sound issues, collaborating in multi-disciplinary projects, and more recently, learning about digital music processing through the EQ: Women in Electronic Music workshop led by Rose Bolton. Janet has been commissioned by the Caution Tape Sound Collective, the Gray/Constant Duo, and Dave Riedstra for his cross-Canada tour Topography: new music for solo bass. She is a founding member of the Victoria Composers’ Collective and is currently in her second year as an organizing member of the Toronto Creative Music Lab (TCML). Some of her favourite TCML duties are cooking and baking for the participants, including co-leading a communal dumpling-making session for TCML 2017. In her spare moments, Janet loves to test new recipes on unsuspecting TCML organizers. She is excited to start her composition doctoral studies in the fall at UC San Diego, where she hopes to continue multi-disciplinary research and potentially take a few surfing lessons. She is very thankful to Thin Edge New Music Collective for this opportunity to collaborate with Sonja Rainey for this concert.

Amy Hull is an Indigenous dance artist of Mi'kmaq and Inuit heritage currently studying and training at York University. She began her dance training in ballet and has since been trained in the Graham, Horton, and Limon modern dance techniques. She also incorporates traditional Indigenous dance forms into her choreographies which most often express different hardships and tragedies experienced by contemporary Indigenous peoples. Amy combines her passion for dance and her love for her communities to advocate for change and political action, and to share a healing experience with others.

Dan Tapper explores the sonic and visual properties of the unheard and invisible. From revealing electromagnetic sounds produced by the earth’s ionosphere, to exploring hidden micro worlds and creating imaginary nebulas made from code. His explorations use scientific methods alongside thought experiments resulting in rich sonic and visual worlds.

Aerialist, actor, and choreographer, Rebecca Leonard, has performed locally and internationally with circus companies across Canada including Les Filles aux Lit,Hangtime, Circus Orange, HighStrung, Cirque Sublime, Cirque Eos, Lookup Theatre and Anti-Gravity since discovering circus in 1996. Feature film credits include The Tuxedo and Chicago.  Rebecca is an honours graduate of Ryerson Theatre School. She has choreographed for numerous theatre productions. Leonard’s aerial performances have been featured at events including the Calgary Stampede, Fashion Cares, Just for Laughs Festival, Toronto Film Festival, CNE, and Vancouver Comedy Festival. In 2003 she founded A Girl In The Sky Productions, a theatrical circus company and began a journey of making shows using circus as one of the main story telling elements. Most recently she co-produced the collaborative interdisciplinary project Balancing on the Edge at Harbourfront Centre Theatre featuring over 30 artists from Thin Edge New Music Collective and a curated group of radical, curious and virtuosic circus artists interested in pushing boundaries and transforming the definition of what is New Circus. Rebecca is Co-Producer/Artistic Director of CCAFT-Contemporary Circus Arts Festival Toronto an annual circus festival in Toronto dedicated to the exploration of contemporary circus arts from a multi disciplinary perspective. The local festival is dedicated to the development of circus arts in Toronto through discussion forums, artistic collaborations and the mentorship of locally based circus and interdisciplinary artists through education opportunities and the presentation innovative performance.

 Rebecca is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale du Cirque professional coaching program and she been in leadership roles throughout the U.S. and Canada including: Toronto School of Circus Arts, Cirque du Monde, Cirkids, WiseFool, Banff Center for the Arts, Harbourfront Circus Camp, Monica's Danz Gym, aerial and acrobatics coach atNECCA and Winnipeg Children’s Festival. Her teaching experience ranges from professional level coaching to youth-at-risk programming.  Rebecca specializes in aerial arts and also has a foundation in ground skills such as acrobatics, partner adagio, balancing and object manipulation. She integrates Pilate’s core-integration into her teaching approach and focuses on injury prevention, body balancing and the general health and longevity of the performer body. Utilizing her background in theatre, she has developed a questioning and image based creation process to refine and specify the artist’s vision.  She frequently works with artists on integrating technique and creative vision, developing new works and techniques and refining previously existing creations.
 

Rebecca Leonard is actively involved in the growing world of social circus and began working with Cirque du Monde in 2003. She has been working with Cirqiniq: regional Arctic social circus collaboration between Cirque du Soleil and the Kativik Regional Government of Nunavik since its inception in 2009 and currently works as a coach and organizer for the program through out the year. The Cirqiniq program is aimed at the youth at risk community and is working to create a model for a sustainable circus program in Nunavik. She has worked with Cirque du Monde Trainer of Trainers team, a group of trainers who are responsible for educating coaches in the Social Circus model created by Cirque du Soleil.  In addition to her wide-ranging pedagogical engagements, she is happy to be part of Toronto based social circus project: SoCirc (Social Circus Circle).

'Launching' is generously supported by:

Henderson Brewing Co

Nadège Patisserie

The Ten Spot

Long and McQuade

Collective Arts Brewing

21C Music

Arraymusic

*TENMC would like to thanks to the following individuals for their support of 'Fusing':

Christina Volpini

Adrienne Marcus Raja

Nick Storring

Jennie Punter

Rick Sacks + Linda Catlin Smith

Dan Tapper

Olaf Szester

Darren Creech

Rebecca Leonard

Suhashini Arulanandam

Kristin Messina

Christine Bowers

Gregory Lee Newsome

Ryan Scott

John Duvall + Ed Foley

Pam Duvall

Jeff Duvall + Katie Ratcliffe

Cheryl Duvall

Ilana Waniuk

Kai Masaoka

Susan Canon