TRIP Dance Theatre and KITKA
In the Body of Our Mother is a West Coast dance-choral collaboration with San Francisco’s a cappella group, KITKA, who accompanies the modern dance duet by artists from TRIP Dance Theatre with an ethereal song from the Republic of Georgia dating from the 12th century.
TRIP Dance Theatre strives to create and share with the public innovative, contemporary dance and music performances. TRIP collaborates with the TRIP Music Ensemble to generate multi-media works of the highest artistic integrity and provide opportunities for people of all backgrounds to weave creativity into the fabric of their everyday lives. The dance theatre currently draws together a talented and diverse group of six dancers and one actor. Their training in modern dance and ballet fuses with backgrounds in contemporary movement idioms such as Butoh, German Expressionist, Javanese and African dance, theater and martial arts.
TRIP's performance history includes over 100 performances in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York. They have performed at venues such as the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, Hollywood Bowl, UCLA's Hammer Museum, the Skirball Center, and Joyce SoHo, in New York.
Artistic Director Monica Favand founded TRIP Dance Theatre in 1996, with a desire to build community through dance, foster artistic collaboration and support the development of her choreography. The company became a non-profit organization in 1997. Composer and guitarist Charlie Campagna joined the company as music director and formed the music ensemble in 1998. Favand and Campagna founded the company's weekly Sacred Spaces Workshop, a community-based improvisational dance workshop with live music, in 1999.
KITKA was founded in 1979 as an offshoot of the Westwind International Folk Ensemble. Kitka began as a grassroots group of amateur singers from diverse backgrounds who met regularly to share their passion for the stunning dissonances, asymmetric rhythms, intricate ornamentation, lush harmonies, and resonant strength of Eastern European women’s vocal music. Under the direction of Bon Singer from 1981 to 1996, Kitka blossomed into a refined professional ensemble earning international renown for its artistry, versatility, and mastery of the demanding techniques of traditional and contemporary Balkan, Slavic, and Caucasian vocal styling. Under the co-direction of Shira Cion, Janet Kutulas, and Juliana Graffagna since 1997, Kitka has grown to earn recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chorus America, and the American Choral Directors’ Association as one of this country’s premier vocal ensembles. In addition, many international musical authorities consider Kitka the foremost interpreter of Balkan and Slavic choral repertoire working in the United States.
A frequent guest on national radio shows, Kitka has recently been featured on NPR programs such as A Prairie Home Companion, All Things Considered, On Point, West Coast Live and Performance Today. In the 2004-05 season, live Kitka concerts were also broadcast widely on Vermont Public Radio, the CBC (Radio Canada), and Ukrainian national radio and television.
A frequently occurring symbolic word in Balkan women’s folksong lyrics, Kitka means “bouquet” in Bulgarian and Macedonian.
Kitka has deep ties to Eastern Europe and has traveled there to perform and collect repertoire many times. In 2002, Kitka joined Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares as “international guests of honor” for this world-renowned choir’s 50th Anniversary Gala at the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2005, Kitka journeyed to Ukraine for a series of performances, international artist-exchange meetings, radio and television broadcasts, and research expeditions in rural villages.
In addition to original works by ensemble members, Kitka has presented premieres of new music by more than twenty-five composers. In 2000, Kitka received major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation to launch the New Folksongs Commissioning Project, which engages some of America’s most exciting composers to write new works for the group.
Kitka’s innovative sense of programming has led to dozens of other fruitful collaborations, ranging from a reconstruction of the medieval Carmina Burana pageant for CalPerformances, (Thomas Binkley, director), to work with Hollywood composers on major motion picture soundtracks including Braveheart, Jacob’s Ladder and Queen of the Damned. Other collaborations of note include creating the role of the Greek Chorus/Trojan Slave Women in the American Conservatory Theater’s three critically-acclaimed performance runs of Hecuba (Carey Perloff, Director) for which Kitka received a Drama Critic’s Circle Award nomination, and Songs from Mama’s Table, a celebration of the commonalties and contrasts between Balkan, Slavic and African-American women’s singing traditions with Grammy nominees Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir.
Kitka has released eight critically acclaimed recordings, six on its own Diaphonica label.
www.kitka.org
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