Anacostia Arts Center will host performer Jen Shyu as a Guest Artist on November 4 and 5 for a solo performance and workshop!

About Jen Shyu:

2016 Doris Duke Artist and Fulbright scholar, experimental vocalist-composer, multi-instrumentalist, dancer, and producer Jen Shyu  has been named “one of the most creative vocalists in contemporary improvised music” ( The Nation). She has worked with Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton, has produced six albums, with her duo album with Mark Dresser making her the first female and vocalist as band leader on Pi Recordings. Her most recent album  Sounds and Cries of the World on Pi was voted in the “Top 10 Best Albums of 2015” by  The New York Times and  The Nation,  among others. A Stanford University graduate dedicated to traditional music study, she has performed her own music at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

About  Solo Rites: Seven Breaths, a solo music ritual-drama:

Named “one of the most creative vocalists in contemporary improvised music” by David Hadju in  The Nation, 2016 Doris Duke Artist Jen Shyu invites you to join her for a musical pilgrimage through Taiwan, China, East Timor, Indonesia, Vietnam, and South Korea. In this solo music ritual-drama, directed by award-winning, renowned Indonesian filmmaker Garin Nugroho, this American-East Timorese-Taiwanese experimental jazz artist sings in seven languages, transporting the audience. Ben Ratliff of  The  New York Times also writes that her concerts, “…involving movement, video and self-accompaniment on the two-stringed Taiwanese moon lute, or the gayageum, a 12-stringed Korean zither,” are “among the most arresting performances I’ve seen over the past five years. It’s not just the meticulous preparation of the work and the range of its reference, but its flexibility: She seems open, instinctual, almost fearless” (Ben Ratliff,  The  New York Times).

About the “You Are Everything”” Intermedia Improvisation Workshop:

Shyu will show the students highlights of her video footage from her traditional music and dance research over the last 10 years from Taiwan, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, South Korea, etc., and talk about how it inspired the creation of Solo Rites: Seven Breaths in collaboration with renowned Indonesian filmmaker Garin Nugroho. Then Shyu will guide the group in an intensive ear and rhythm training as well as intermedia improvisation workshop for artists and non-artists, meant to give the students some tools and inspiration to pursue their own creative projects, whether it be a future solo performance piece or writing project or whatever creative work they wish to embark upon from the workshop session onwards.

This engagement of Jen Shyu is made possible by the DC Special Presenter Initiative program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities