Interview: Colleen Lanki of TomoeArts on kabuki and collaborating

My friend and Vancouver-based dancer, director, writer, and teacher Colleen Lanki was in town for the final performance of Portland State University's kabuki production Chushingura.  She is the artistic director of TomoeArts, "a dance theatre company that works between traditions and disciplines" and regularly produces some of the most intriguing and original work I've seen.  Colleen kindly agreed to join me in my studio where we talked about the kabuki play, her training in Japan, thoughts on collaborating, and the various projects we worked on together.  Included in this recording is music I composed for two of the productions mentioned in the interview - EN: a raincity street dance and Voices of Hiroshima.  Working with Colleen has been fun and rewarding especially because we were able to create a number of different shows together.  Finding like-minded artists is not as common as I would like, so I'm happy when opportunities arise to work with someone like Colleen.

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Colleen's website
TomoeArts website
TomoeArts youtube
TomoeArts facebook
TomoeArts flickr
 

Voices of Hiroshima

EN3: Community Circles

EN: a raincity street dance

EN: The Procession of Performing Circles

My interview with TaikoSource has been posted

I recently had the opportunity to talk about music in an interview with Ben Pachter of TaikoSource.  The website is a good resource for taiko-related articles, interviews, song database, and more.  Ben asked me about my approach to composing for mixed ensembles, collaborative process, pedagogy, and how I navigate crossing over from Japanese instruments to western percussion.  There are a handful of other interviews already posted and I would encourage anyone to check them out for a closer look into these taiko players and teachers.

Here is the interview

Let me know if you listened and have any comments on what was talked about.  Do you agree, disagree, or see things from another perspective?