UNFIX NYC Producers
The Producing Artistic Director of
Ren Gyo Soh The Associate Artistic director of the Ume Group Yokko is the founder/producing artistic director of Ren Gyo Soh, an actress, Butoh & Movement artist, Solo performer/writer, Theatre educator and certified Yoga instructor from Nagoya, Japan. She has acted in, devised and choreographed a variety of local and international shows, having won several awards, including “Best One-Woman Show” for her Butoh Medea (United Solo 2014 at Theatre Row). Butoh Medea was invited to present at United Solo Europe, Warsaw, Poland (Teatr Syrena, Warsaw, Poland), then toured to Edinburgh Festival fringe (Paradise Green), and is nominated for Asian Arts Award. Her work is deeply rooted Japanese culture, and she collaborates with local artists to blend different cultures to create new work. Click for Detail Bio "Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi "Butoh is a dance of life" - Kazuo Ono "My dance is expansion of human concept- letting a human body metamorphosis into anything including an animal, a plant, even an object which does not have a life, and the fundamental ideology of my butoh is finding the possibility." -Tatsumi Hijikata What is 'ecology'? It is the relations between all living beings on this planet, and its study. The world is not a 'fix'ed place. The world is continuously changing, we are changing, we are all living beings. I believe in the power of love, the power of art and in what art can do for all living beings, for the land we live in, and for future generations. We can be the change we want to see in the world. And I would love to collaborate with as many people as possible. |
The Producing Artistic Director of
The Ume Group Keelie works as a theatre-maker, filmmaker and educator. She has studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the Stella Adler Studio, HB Studios and the Niall O’Leary School of Dance. She holds a MFA in Acting from Brooklyn College and was a 2016 George J Mitchell Scholar where she received a MFA with First Class Distinction in Theatre Directing at Trinity College Dublin/ The Lir Academy. Keelie has worked extensively as a theatre, dance and creative writing teaching artist in public schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx. She competed in the 2009 Irish Dance World Championships and has appeared in world premieres and reprised works by playwrights including Charles Mee, Ben Gassman, Paul Ketchum, Elizabeth Irwin and Mac Wellman. Keelie has been a company member of the Void Theatre Company of NYC and the Blessed Unrest training ensemble. Keelie was a member of the original cast of The Ume Group's Dream Dances (2015) and led The Ceíli Ensemble (2015) and is the Producing Artistic Director of The Ume Group. Her work is largely physical and often lives at the intersection of dance and theatre. www.keeliesheridan.com Keelie thinks using performing art to bring awareness to ecologies makes sense- there is creativity and ingenuity in the way environments and their inhabitants co-exist, and the creative process of any performative act demands that the artists form and nurture an ecosystem between themselves, the work and their audiences. |
The Music Director of
Grace & St. Paul Church Sean Carmichael is the Director of Music at Grace and St. Paul’s Church and a doctoral candidate in Piano Performance at the University of Maryland, studying under Dr. Mayron Tsong. He completed both his B.M. and M.M. degrees in Piano Performance at SUNY Potsdam while studying with Dr. Paul Wyse. As a winner of the Crane Concerto Competition, Sean performed Rachmaninoff's First Concerto with the Crane Symphony Orchestra in 2007. He has given solo performances at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Rubinstein Hall in Munich, Binghamton’s Tri-Cities Opera Center, the Old Forge Arts Center and has toured New York State with three of his former colleagues presenting the Chopin Etudes and Preludes in their entirety. During graduate school, Sean was awarded with two collaborative piano assistantships, which privileged him to accompany the Crane Chorus singing Bach’s B minor Mass under the baton of Helmuth Rilling as well as the UMD Choir singing Britten’s War Requiem with BSO conductor, Marin Alsop. Sean has served on the piano faculty at the State University of New York at Potsdam’s Crane Youth Music summer program, the International School of Music in Bethesda, MD and the Jubilee Enrichment Program in Chinatown. Recently, Sean opened a joint piano studio in Manhattan’s Upper West Side with his wife, Nadia. In March of 2017, he will be serving on the adjudication panel for the 69th annual Hong Kong Schools Music Festival. Sean recognizes that the arts provide opportunities to raise awareness about issues that may be elusive in our day to day lives. He is excited to be a part of UNFIX NYC and looks forward to a day full of thought provoking performances, especially since the climate seems to be quickly changing on all fronts. |
The Funder & The Artistic Director of Unfix Festival, Glasgow Scotland
Paul Michael Henry
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Why have a festival of Performance and Ecology?
The festival theme aims to identify an untapped resource for artists: Ecology is perhaps the grand theme of our times, uniting issues of climate change, sustainability, political independence / interdependence, and the various flows of ageing and death, economics, culture and emotion. Rather than restricting ourselves to ‘environmental art’, UNFIX takes a broad definition of the term and includes ecologies of Imagination (the connections between the ideas, myths, dreams and archetypes we live by), Politics, Environment, Soul and Mental Health (the ecology of the individual psyche and questions of balance and happiness; ecologies of emotion and the forces of love, conflict, anger, shame). This wide net is intended as an offer to artists to find methods of rethinking human inter-relationships and environmental approaches through our bodies and physical sense of living, both in daily life and the concentrated forums of performance and culture. UNFIX is conceived as an act of love, a bear hug to the world, a prayer of sorts. As humans we don’t have to ‘work hard’ and ‘earn a living’; we already have one by virtue of being alive. The question is how to engage with it. How we can love each other more, and stop killing the planet? We can no longer pretend to be separate from one another. |