Fuse Ensemble Presents Breathe!!
The concept for Fuse Ensemble’s early 2023 Mini-Season: Breathe!! was inspired by composer/director Gina Biver’s recent work on the Taxonomy of Breathing project by DC-based IceBox Collective. The Taxonomy of Breathing is a socially conscious, multidisciplinary art project that processes trauma by mapping recent world events using the connective lens of breath. Repertoire for Fuse Ensemble’s Breathe!! season includes works by David Dominique, David Lang, Jeffrey Mumford, and Gina Biver. Visuals this season include a film by artist Edgar Endress, and one by Steven Biver.
images from GASP film by artist Edgar Endress
Click here to watch videos from our performance at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, Virginia 3/11/23
Collaborators and Composers for Breathe!! Season 2022
Composer Jeffrey Mumford
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions.
Awards include the "Academy Award in Music" from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition.
Media Artist Edgar Endress
Broadly, my art process is centered in a strong conceptual research frame where material and forms appear as consequences of the idea, with a strong entanglement in the socio-cultural context where the project takes place. Influenced by Richard Schechner’s concepts of environmental, in situ, or contextual theater, my art seeks to transit between “impure life”—like public events and demonstrations—and “pure art,” or traditional theater. It is in this constant transiting between ‘impure’ and ‘pure’ art forms where I find aesthetic and conceptual inspiration…
David Dominique is a composer, performer and music theorist living in Richmond, Virginia. He is the 2022-2023 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition, and the 2021-2022 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His compositional output includes contemporary chamber music, jazz, electroacoustic music, installation, rock and theater.
Fuse Ensemble director Gina Biver is a composer of electroacoustic music for chamber ensemble, choir, multimedia, dance, sound installations and film. Her work is inspired by the written word and by visual art, both static and moving; she collaborates with other musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, poets, computer artists, sculptors, painters and video artists. Hannah Rosa Schiller from I Care If You Listen writes “Biver creates a playground for internal exploration that is both fascinating and deeply effective.”