Satellite Collective and SiTE:LAB, presents Echo & Narcissus

Satellite Collective’s upcoming show, Echo & Narcissus received grants from the ArtPrize jury and Frey Foundation to bring the show’s music, video and opera singers together as a live performance installation with SiTE:LAB from September 19 – October 7, 2018, at 415 Franklin St SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49507, following its run earlier in the month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For more information visit: http://www.artprize.org/67243.

Satellite Collective’s Echo & Narcissus is a vocal and hand projected performance – an aria to illuminate the unrest and discord of our moment. Original music for seven piece chamber and jazz orchestra, live performance by vocalists, and hand projected imagery will move through the halls of a historic space of the city, followed by the audience. Whether it’s a politician’s self-aggrandizement or social media users in echo chambers, it’s a potent time to face the myth of Narcissus and what it means to look in a mirror. New York-based Satellite Collective brings a live performance where Narcissus and Echo will break apart in full opera and project their inner lives on each other and their immediate surroundings: the historic space of the Franklin Street School in collaboration with SiTE:LAB. The performers will move from space to space as their story unfolds, illuminating themselves and the art near and around them with images of their own fears and inner lives.

The performance which will have taken place at The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Fischer space, will be turned inside out and projected onto the walls of a class room in an old Christian High School in Grand Rapids, taking the piece into the world of visual art and becoming visible to upwards of 40,000 people over a month long period.

The production in Brooklyn will be held at BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY on Friday, September 14, 2018 at 8pm and Saturday, September 15, 2018 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at https://www.bam.org/SatelliteCollective.

New York, 1971. Narcissus, a rebellious yet charismatic outsider, hunts alone in the city at night. He’s come south from his father’s kingdom on the city’s outer coast. Echo, a young nymph and socialite, falls for Narcissus and they hook up. Her brother and the other nymphs fail in their attempt to separate her from Narcissus and one night the two commit an irrevocable crime. Echo’s brother tries with more urgency to separate the two, but is instead drawn into an adventure that ends with tragedy.

Echo & Narcissus will engage original music, live chamber performance, visual art, ballet, digital multimedia, opera, and lighting design.

WRITER Kevin Draper; COMPOSER Aaron Severini; DIRECTOR Philip Stoddard; CHOREOGRAPHER Norbert De La Cruz III; LIGHTING DESIGNER Brandon Stirling Baker; FILM MAKER Lora Robertson; PRODUCTION DESIGNER Kevin Draper; PROJECTION DESIGNER Simon Harding; LIVE MUSIC ShoutHouse.

Featuring dancers Matteo Fiorani, Timothy Stickney, Joslin Vezeau, and Tara Youngman, and singers Christine Taylor Price and Philip Stoddard.

“We work at the intersection of dance, visual art and music – and we use architects and poets as the glue,” said Founding Artistic Director Kevin Draper. “This will be our first, focused, evening length work where group action has to resonate in service to the story. We’re crafting a pretty high level of intensity for the audience.”

In a few short years, Satellite Collective has embraced art forms fearlessly and styled multiple seasons of dance, music, film and word. In 2017, this peculiar, dynamic group produced for the first time an integrated, evening length work and fuse their collective process into a full-length collaborative event. Live pop and indie classical music, film, dance, theater and architecture will all be put to service in a production that will, literally, immerse the audience.

Echo & Narcissus is the 17th interdisciplinary performance work by Satellite Collective since its founding eight years ago.

“These are people who know how to produce a show.”
– The New York Times, 2014

“An admirably cooperative endeavor and a peculiar one.”
– The New York Times, 2015

“Satellite Collective aims to open up the stage to diverse artistic practice, producing alternate channels for performance to envelope the audience-expressing the theatrical and choreographic gesture, sound, décor, film, stagecraft and storytelling into a total artwork.”
– New York Observer, 2016

ABOUT SiTE:LAB
SiTE:LAB is a nomadic all-volunteer artist-led initiative that has organized over 20 projects primarily in underutilized sites in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Project sites have included: An entire city block, an abandoned natural history museum, a nature preserve, vacant commercial buildings, and a once-grand downtown hotel. Our current site is an abandoned 70,000 Sq Ft high school. “I think that SiTE:LAB is a world class…Installation group or whatever they call themselves…You could bring this to Documenta in Germany and it would be respected.” Jerry Saltz, Senior art Critic New York Magazine. https://www.instagram.com/sitelab/

ABOUT ARTPRIZE
ArtPrize is an open, independently organized international art competition which takes place for 19 days every other fall in Grand Rapids, Michigan. More than five hundred thousand dollars in prizes are awarded each year, which include a $200,000 prize awarded entirely by public vote and another $200,000 prize awarded by a jury of art experts. Any artist working in any medium from anywhere in the world can participate. Art is exhibited throughout downtown Grand Rapids-museums, bars, public parks, restaurants, theaters, hotels, bridges, laundromats, auto body shops, vacant storefronts and office spaces. Artists and venues register for the competition then find each other through an online connections process in late spring. No one at ArtPrize selects a single artist or artwork, directs an artist where to show work or directs a venue what to show. In 2018, 1,260+ works created by 1,400+ artists from 41 states and 40 countries will be exhibited in 165+ venues. ArtPrize is free and open to the public and now attracts over 500,000 visitors, making it the most attended public art event in the world in 2014 and 2015, according the The Art Newspaper’s annual “Big Ticket List.”

ArtPrize is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. ArtPrize 10 will take place from September 19 — October 7, 2018. ArtPrize alternates years with “Project 1 by ArtPrize”-a new event to launch in 2019, slated to engage a single artist or small group of artists to present a dynamic citywide public art project. Learn more at project1byartprize.org.

ABOUT SATELLITE COLLECTIVE
In a few short years, Satellite Collective has fearlessly styled multiple seasons of dance, music, film and word to their vision. Under the leadership of Kevin Draper Satellite has launched young choreographers, composers, film makers, poets and artists with an uncanny sense of timing – they’ve tapped into an intense scene of NYC artists from New York City Ballet, Juilliard, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Bowery Poetry Club; bridged a global network of artists working in every medium from video games to installation, and fused pop music from members of The Lumineers, San Fermin and the song writing scenes in the Pacific Northwest into arresting short film and stage work. Always, with a stylish and confident manner, always with a vision.

Satellite believes in artists collaborating as equals, globally and virtually. We incubate performances, arts exchanges, and publications that allow artists to work together because we believe that is the future. Founded in 2010, Satellite Collective has produced three evening-length ballets, four hours of original music, two hours of original film, commissioned eight modern dance works, founded Transmission, an arts publication, hosted five annual arts retreats, launched Telephone, which simultaneously published the interconnected works of 315 artists from 42 countries, and has recently launched Satellite Press, a small independent press publishing emerging and established authors and poets.

Satellite is proud to have received support from BAM, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Frey Foundation, Nestle, SAP, 92Y, DeVos Institute of Arts Management, Brooklyn Arts Council and many others government, public and private supporters.

Satellite is a graduate of the 2015-16 BAM Professional Development Program in collaboration with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management.

To learn more about Satellite, visit:
www.satellitecollective.org
www.transmission.satellitecollective.org
www.satellitepress.org
www.telephone.satellitecollective.org

To learn more about Artistic Director Kevin Draper, visit www.kevindraper.org.