MIRA新伝統 + VORA + Gamelan Bike Bike

✦ Nov 13 [concert] MIRA新伝統 + VORA + Gamelan Bike Bike co-presented by Fountains + Notebook 8-11pm @ Roundhouse Theatre Pay-What-You-Can ticket available. Email us at [email protected] See the rest of the festival's programming HERE Notebook & Fountains present a night of live experimental audiovisual performances with MIRA新伝統 (Live/ FR+JP), Vora (Live/LA-US), and Gamelan Bike Bike (Live/CA). Federico Campagna describes the logic of organising modern life as Technic: a world in which everything is measured, named, made useful. Lived experience is decomposed into discrete and interchangeable units. People become economic actors, quantity over quality, and whatever we cannot count is treated as if it doesn’t exist. The result, he argues, is a crisis of imagination, an inability to picture any world other than this one. Anna Tsing finds the same logic at work in forests and supply chains, where modern economies make life “scalable”, turning land, plants, and people into uniform parts that can be expanded and exchanged without change. In her work, she follows the matsutake mushroom through damaged landscapes and finds something else persisting in the ruins: life that survives not by standing alone, but through its encounters with others. When the matsutake’s mycelium weaves underneath the earth, its threads meet and fuse, trading water, nutrients, and signals. Biologists call this anastomosis: separate lives growing into one another, each changed, neither lost. Campagna might call this Magic, a meeting that can’t be measured. What might the sharing of mythology, folklore, and tradition teach us, in the same way, about how we relate to one another today? Each of the artists tonight answers in their own way, carrying traditions, music, ritual, and myth into new materials and places. Where threads meet and can no longer be counted apart, perhaps that is where Magic begins. Sources: Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (2018) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) --------- MIRA新伝統 was founded in Tokyo in 2018 and relocated to Athens in 2024. MIRA新伝統 (pronounced MIRA SHINDENTO) is the ongoing live performance of electronic musician Raphael Leray and performer Honami Higuchi. Weaving theory-fiction, music and performance art, the duo build ritualized audiovisual works that envision non-capitalist, post-anthropocentric mythologies. MIRA新伝統 performances are a continuous work rather than a fixed piece, mutating from one edition to the next as its music, sculpture and staging evolve. What a given audience encounters is always the current state of an ongoing metamorphosis. VORA was raised in and by the mountains and waters of Los Angeles. Part experimental electronic and part contemporary performance, VORA uses electronic production, cello, and channeled vocals to explore mysticism, ecology, and the intimate connection between body, land and emotion. Since 2021 VORA has performed nationally and internationally, touring their live A/V work The White Snake across Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore, and performing for designers at New York Fashion Week. VORA is a Rising Artist Grant recipient mentored by Nicolas Jaar, and founder of Water&Power, a music venue and community space in South LA centering queer and BIPOC artists. They curate VISCERA, a hybrid experimental performance night bridging DIY and traditional art. Gamelan Bike Bike draws its musical inspiration from Bali, Indonesia and its raw materials from the scrap metal bins of Vancouver. Since forming in 2012, the group has built unconventional instruments as a means to spark creativity, foster community, and generate new forms of contemporary gamelan. The ensemble has commissioned works from Balinese composers I Putu Gede Sukaryana (Balot), I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka, and Ni Made Ayu Dwi Sattvitri, among others. Their recent album Teka-Teki, released by label Insitu Recordings, is a series of intricate, puzzle-like works bridging sonic imaginaries between Bali and Vancouver. The ensemble regularly offers introductory gamelan workshops to the community. WARNING: STROBE LIGHTING Please be aware that strobe lighting and intense flashing light effects will be used throughout this performance. --------- We thank our partner The Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, and acknowledge funding support from City of Vancouver, BC Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia, and Canada Council for the Arts. 💫 CONSTELLATION FESTIVAL 🌟 is a result of a two year cultural production mentorship program with Chapel Sound. We acknowledge and are deeply thankful that this programming takes place on is the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.