FLIPFEST!

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A follow-up to the 2005 FlipSide visual arts exhibition, FlipFest! brought an evening-long celebration of diaspora and fusion featuring collaborative, contemporary theater, dance, music, spoken word, and post-genre performance to New York audiences. DJ Joro Boro, puppeteer Vít Hořejš, and CEC ArtsLink’s Sasha Suvorkov introduced wildly diverse, cutting-edge work from WaxFactory, Robert Black and Yoshiko Chuma, Jim Neu, Polish vocalist Sylwia Gorak, Russian dancer Ilya Belenkov, Hungarian jazz saxophonist Viktor Tóth, Slovenian choreographer Goran Bogdanvoski, Czech performance artist František Skála, Siberian musicians German and Klavdia Khatylaev and much more.

November 22nd, 2008 at the Angel Orensanz Foundation: 172 Norfolk Street, Lower East Side, NYC

Watch videos from FlipFEST! on CEC ArtsLink's Vimeo.

FlipFest! was co-produced by CEC ArtsLink and Bonnie Sue Stein/GOH Productions. We thank the following foundation and institutions for their support:

See the full press release.
See the order of apperances and description of peformances.
Download the full program (PDF).

Participating Artists

Tea Algaic (2004 ArtsLink Projects awardee) is a director, writer, and actor. Her recent directing credits include St. Joan by George Bernard Shaw (New York University), Zero Hour by Tea Alagic (Yale University Theater), The Brothers Size by Tarrell Alvin McCraney (The Public Theater, NY, The Studio Theater, Washington D.C, The Abbey Theater, Dublin), Book of Daniel by Daniel Alexander Jones (University of Texas/Austin) and Chiang Kai Chek by Charles Mee (Yale Cabaret). As associate artistic director of the Ensemble Company for the Performing Arts, Alagic directed Woyzeck by George Buchner and Self-Accusation by Peter Handke. She has acted with Theatre du Soleil, Robert Lepage, Richard Foreman and Yoshiko Chuma. Alagic received a BFA in acting from Charles University in Prague, and an MFA in directing from Yale School of Drama, where she received the Julian Milton Kaufman Prize for Best Director. She has received awards from the Cairo International Festival and the Edinburgh International Fringe Fest among others. She is currently working on Zero Hour, commissioned by the Public Theater; its first reading will be at The Abbey Theatre in December 2008.

Lucian Ban (2004 ArtsLink Projects collaboration with Sam Newsome) is a pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger, originally from Cluj, Romania. He currently lives in New York City where he is at the forefront of contemporary modern jazz. He performs and tours regularly with his own projects and as a sideman, and was nominated in 2005 and 2006 for the prestigious Hans Koller Best European Jazz Musician Preis in Austria. Ban has written music for theater, film and ballet, including for the New York City Symphony Orchestra. His compositions are frequently performed and recorded, and include a commission for the Machito Orchestra, performed at the 2002 Super Bowl, among others. New York-based projects include original music for Philosopher Fox produced by East River Comedia, nominated for the prestigious IT Award; and music for the Paul Auster playTimbuktu directed by Richard Schechner. For more information, visit his website.

Ilya Belenkov (2007 ArtsLink Fellow) is a dancer and choreographer. Born in 1980 in Kazakhstan, he currently lives in Moscow where he works with two dance companies, Ohne Zucker and Po.V.S.Tanze. After discovering dance in 1999, he has immersed himself in numerous workshops and art labs and participated in collaborative projects nationally and internationally, focusing on release techniques. He was an ArtsLink fellow with Maryland’s Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 2007, and has worked in the US with TRYST Downtown (Paul Benney, Clarinda Mac Low and Alejandra Martorell’s series of free outdoor performances in Lower Manhattan, supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and his duo System of Units with Katerina Basalaeva.

Robert Black (1996 ArtsLink Projects awardee and frequent CEC ArtsLink VisArt participant) is equally at home on the double bass in classical, contemporary and experimental musical genres and collaborations. He has an active performing career as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestra player. He has produced over 75 commissioned solo works and his solo tours have taken him throughout the world. He is a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Black’s recent collaborators include actor Kathryn Walker, Brazilian artist Ige D'Aquino, choreographers Katie Nollet-Stevinson and Yoshiko Chuma, and the Ciompi and Miami String Quartets. He maintains a full teaching schedule at the Hartt School of the University of Hartford, the Festival Eleazar de Carvalho in Brazil and the Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Music Program. He has recorded for Sony Classical, Point/Polygram, Koch, Mode, O.O. Discs, Cantaloupe and others. A recipient of numerous grants, he received a 1998 Bessie Award for his collaborative work with The School of Hard Knocks in NYC. For more information, visit his website

Goran Bogdanovski (2003 ArtsLink Fellow) has performed with more than 70 choreographers and directors since 1989 in classical ballet, physical theatre, contemporary dance, film and video. Since 2000, when he founded Fičo Balet, he has been developing his own choreography, as well as performing and leading workshops from Moscow to New York. From 2002-2008 he ran Kino Šiška, a rehearsal space for contemporary dance and theater in Ljubljana, and in 2003 he helped to launch Gibanica (Moving Cake), the first biannual Slovene dance festival. He is also a founder of NOMAD Dance Academy, an educational and artistic research project with partners from Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria.

Yoshiko Chuma (ArtsLink Host and 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2008 ArtsLink Projects awardee) is a conceptual artist and choreographer and artistic director of The School of Hard Knocks. She has created more than sixty full-length performance works for theaters and site-specific venues with her company and on commission throughout the world. Chuma first worked in Eastern and Central Europe in 1985, and has led workshops, and initiated residencies and collaborations with artists in the region. Her company has performed throughout the world at sites including the Hong Kong harbor, the Eiffel Tower, Newcastle Swing Bridge, Dublin’s Temple Bar district, Tallinn’s Old Town, The Joyce Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, City Center and the National Theaters of Sarajevo and Macedonia. Chuma has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for Artists and the Japan Foundation, among others. She is the recipient of a 1984 Bessie Award for choreography, six Bessie Awards to company artists from 1987-1998, and a 2007 Bessie for Sustained Achievement. For more information, visit her website

DJ Joro Boro (Friend of ArtsLink) was born in Bulgaria. In New York City, he was a fixture at Mehanata Bulgarian Bar. His music is best described as Ethnotech or EthnoMesh—a cosmopolitan textured knot-work of dance styles including Gypsy speed brass, Arabic dancehall, Angolan kuduro, Punjabi bhangra, Brazilianfavela funk, digital cumbia, merengue de la calle, plus sleazy Balkan incarnations of chalga, turbo folk, and manele. As described by Other Music, it is a music of "movement, progressive voice, and diversity. The fast-forward multifarious collective from the 'Eastern Bloc' and beyond, spearheaded by Joro-Boro and Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello, pluralistically exhale out of a trans-cultural osmosis of East meets West, romantically fusing the abundant expressions of a relevant past into a shifting matrix of the now-sound of today's wayward cultural bents. That is, an unorthodox real-deal identity stamp to destroy and forge through all barriers that are political, social, and musical."

Sylwia Gorak (2008 ArtsLink Fellow) is a vocal performer and painter, and has participated in exhibitions, concerts, and vocal and video performances worldwide, from New York and London to Poland and Japan. Integrating landscape painting with environmental science, Gorak rearranges man-made structures and landmarks that surround her from their utilitarian contexts. As a performer, Gorak is also interested in acoustics and the material properties of sound. In 2001 she was a soprano with The Paderewski Festival Singers in a concert at Carnegie Hall. Born in Poland, Gorak graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and studied Voice in Krakow.

Vít Hořejš (1994 ArtsLink Projects awardee) moved to New York from Prague in 1979. He is the Artistic Director of the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre and has written, adapted and directed a dozen plays for the company. The Theatre is dedicated to the preservation and presentation of traditional and not-so-traditional puppetry. The company has played to great acclaim in twenty-seven states in the US and at international festivals in Poland, Turkey, Pakistan, and the Czech Republic. Hořejš himself has published stories and plays and toured extensively in the US, Asia, and Europe.

Daniel Alexander Jones (Friend of ArtsLink) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and the actor/writer of Book of Daniel. American Theatre Magazine named him one of fifteen artists whose work would "change American stages for decades to come." He is the recipient of the prestigious Alpert Award in the Arts in Theatre (2006) and the 2007 McKnight National Theatre Artist Residency and Commission at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. His theater pieces include PhoenixFabrik, Bel Canto, Earthbirths, Blood:Shock:Boogie and Hera Bright. This year Jones joins the faculty at Fordham University as an Assistant Professor of Theater and will also launch his online theater initiative, Round House Arts. His current projects include Qualities of Light, an interactive performance installation created with acclaimed musician, Helga Davis. A native of Massachusetts, Jones lives in New York City.

Lisa Karrer (1995 and 1997 ArtsLink Projects awardee) is a composer, vocalist, and performance artist who frequently collaborates with other artists. Karrer has created multi-media projects in Estonia that co-produced by Eesti Kontsert and Von Krahli Teater, and was featured at two NYYD International Music Festivals in Tallinn. She has produced CDs for the groups Music For Homemade Instruments and Gamelan Son of Lion, and, recorded a chamber opera The Birth of George with co-composer David Simons (Tellus/Harvestworks). Her new solo workSchismism pt 2: Natural Law premiered at the Living Theatre in October 2008. Two of her compositions appear on Gamelan Son of Lion’s new CD Sonogram on Innova Records. Lisa continues to develop projects such as Mary’s SITE, a video with composition for chamber ensemble, based on the animated sculpture of visual artist Mary Ziegler. For more information, visit her website

John Kelly (1995 ArtsLink Projects awardee)is a performance and visual artist. His original performances have been presented by The Kitchen, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Warhol Museum, the Whitney Biennial, PS 122, BAM Next WaveFestival, and the Tate Modern. In 1998 he directed (and sang a leading role in) Ime Na Koncu Jezika (The Name On The Tip Of The Tongue), a chamber opera by Mitja Vhrovnik Smerkar for the Glej Theatre of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has collaborated with David Del Tredici, Laurie Anderson, and The Jazz Passengers; commissioned scores by Richard Einhorn and Richard Peaslee; and performed with Natalie Merchant and Antony and The Johnsons. Kelly is currently writing songs for his recording, The Escape Artist. His acting credits include James Joyce’s TheDead, John Cage’s An Alphabet, Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Rinde Eckert’s Orpheus X. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including two Bessie Awards, two Obie Awards, an American Choreographer Award, the 2001 CalArts/ Alpert Award and the 2006-2007 Rome Prize in Visual Art at The American Academy in Rome. JOHN KELLY, an autobiography was published by the 2wice Arts Foundation. For more information, visit his website

Klavdia and German Khatylaev (2008 ArtsLink Independent Projects awardees), a husband and wife duo, are members of the native Sakha-Yakut tribe of Siberia. Their spiritual folk music expresses a deep connection to the land. The practice and form of the music has ancient roots in nomadic and pagan history. The couple is acclaimed throughout Russia and Europe for their unique folk music, a mix of original and traditional Siberian songs, featuring a specialized style of throat-singing and performance on native instruments including the khomuz (mouth harp) and the kyrympa (a type of string-bowed fiddle). Their music was included on a Smithsonian Folkways CD, Tuva: Among the Spirits: Sound, Music and Nature in Sakha and Tuva. For more information, visit their website

Dalia Michelevičiūtė (1995 ArtsLink Fellow) has been a company actress with the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, formerly the Lithuanian State Academic Theatre, since 1992. She is also an award-winning ballroom dancer. Michelevičiūtė has appeared in numerous roles in theater and film, and has toured worldwide. She received great acclaim for roles under directors Eimuntas Nekrošius, Oskaras Koršunovas and others, and for a cameo appearance in Yoshiko Chuma’s Three Storiesand a solo performance of an excerpt from Three Sisters at Dixon Place in New York during her ArtsLink residency. Major theatre roles includeRomulus the Great (1991), Marquise de Sad (1992),Eliazaveta Bam (1992), Rain Seller (1993), Persona (1994), The Stranger (1995), Public (1997), Time and Room (1997), Three Sisters (1996); LIFE, Women's Songs (1998), Roberto Zucco(1998), Carmen (1998), Richard III (1999), Station in N City(2000), Dances of Lugnazade Feast (2001), Testament of Barbora Radvilaite (2002). She has acted in the films Don't Know Who I Am, Fish Day, Awakening, Thrush - Green Bird, Moon's Lithuania, and New Adventures of Robin Hood.

Dijana Milošević (1997 ArtsLink Fellow and 2003 Independent Projects awardee) is a theater director and co-founder of Belgrade’s DAH Theatre, the first theatre laboratory in Serbia. In 1993, the group became DAH Theatre Research Center. In 1992, she co-founded NATASHA Project, an international theater network, and ANET – Association of Independent Theatre Groups in Belgrade. She is also a contributor to The Magdalena Project, an international network of women in contemporary theater. Milošević is the director of DAH International School for Actors and Directors, and frequently writes about theater, lectures, and leads workshops, as well as touring internationally with her company. Currently she is working on THE ILIAD PROJECT: DOGSBODY,a project with San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen in collaboration with Artistic Associate playwright Erik Ehn, set to premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2009.

Maja Mitić (DAH Theatre) has been a core member of DAH Theatre Research Center in Belgrade since 1991 and currently teaches there. She has taken part in several theater, television, radio, and film productions and collaborated on the development of The Helen Case with Kathy Randels.

Jim Neu (2000 ArtsLink Projects awardee) has been pushing the envelope of spoken theater since the late 1970s. Whether in plays or dance/text collaborations with choreographers, his language achieves a lyrical, hilarious balance of the familiar and the absurd. His new comedy GANG OF SEVEN explores the world of focus groups, as some normally harmless citizens discover an explosive collective identity. The show opens in December 2008 at La MaMa ETC with cast members Mary Shultz, Tony Nunziata, Chris Maresca, John Costelloe, Byron Thomas, Kristine Lee, and Jim Neu.

Sam Newsome (2004 ArtsLink Projects awardee)has been active in the New York jazz scene since the 1990s as a member of the Terence Blanchard Quintet, which has toured worldwide and released several CDs for Columbia/Sony, including the critically-acclaimed Malcolm X Jazz Suite. He plays both tenor and soprano saxophones, and has incorporated various types of non-Western scales into his palette. His group Global Unity released two CDs, Sam Newsome & Global Unity(Columbia/Sony) and Global Unity (Palmetto). He later explored solo saxophone works by Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Sonny Rollins, and Anthony Braxton, culminating in the 2007 release of a solo saxophone CD, Monk Abstractions. Currently, Newsome teaches jazz studies at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, tours with Lucian Ban, among others, and is at work on his second solo saxophone CD, Blue Soliloquy.

Al Orensanz (Friend of ArtsLink) is a poet, historian, philosopher, and scholar of Social Upheaval Studies with a PhD in Sociology from New York University. Al can currently be found in various capacities as the public face of the Angel Orensanz Foundation.

Kathy Randels (1998 ArtsLink Projects awardee) is the founding artistic director of New Orleans’ ArtSpot Productions. She has written, performed in and directed numerous original solo and group works in Louisiana and beyond. She received a 2008 V-Day Leadership Award, as well as a 2003 Obie Award and a 2007-2009 NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors grant. Her recent collaborations include Flight, Lakeviews, and Alternate Roots’ UPROOTED: The Katrina Project. She also collaborated on three Dah Theatre performances from 1997 to 2003. In 1996, Randels founded the Drama Club at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women and has worked with the Students at the Center Program in New Orleans Public Schools since 1998. For more information, visit her website

David Simons (1995 and 1997 ArtsLink Projects awardee) is a composer and performer specializing in percussion, theremin, electronics, and world music. Recordings of his works include the CDs Prismatic Hearing (Tzadik), Kebyar Leyak, Cool it Wayang, and Naked We Stand for Gamelan Son of Lion, and on albums by God is My Co-Pilot, Stockhausen, Shelley Hirsch, Music For Homemade Instruments, and many others. Simons’ music for theater and dance has brought him to Zagreb and Tallinn, Seoul and Yogyakarta, Munich and Berlin, Guantanamo, Honolulu, and Bali. He has received a Rockefeller Bellagio residency, NYFA fellowships, and commissions from the American Composers Forum, Mary Flagler Cary Trust and Meet the Composer. His composition Odentity for the Newband’s Harry Partch instruments premiered in 2007. A graduate of California Institute of the Arts, he has published writings on music and sound in Radiotexte(Semiotexte#16), EAR magazine, andSoundings. For more information, visit his website

František Skála (2003 ArtsLink Independent Projects awardee) is a Prague-born sculptor, painter, children's book illustrator, musician and dancer. He is a founding member of the music group Malý taneční orchestr Universal (the Small Dance Band) which performs popular music from the communist era of Czechoslovakia in a humorous fashion, as well as a founding member of the music trio Tros Sketos. His exhibitions and performances have been seen worldwide, including a notable 2004 solo show of sweeping proportions at The Rudolfinium Gallery in Prague. In visual art, he has created poignant works in wood, clay, plastic and seaweed, among other mediums. Skála describes his own work as an attempt to make "visible the invisible" or to "grasp the ungraspable." Using these abstract terms, he apologizes for his inability to describe the fascinating world that surrounds us.

Ivan Talijancic (2002 ArtsLink Projects awardee) is a director, choreographer, visual and graphic designer and video- and film-maker. He is a co-founder and artistic co-director of the international theater group WaxFactory, for which he has directedLULU, QUARTET V2.0, LADYFROMTHESEA, Sarah Kane'sCLEANSED, …SHE SAID and 39 FRAMES. His site-specific performance, WILD ANIMUS, commissioned by Too Far (San Francisco) in 2006, was performed in over fifty cities in North America, Europe and Australia. Most recently, Talijancic stagedX, a video-opera created in collaboration with the composer Katharina Rosenberger, at the Zürcher Theaterspektakel in Zurich and La Batie festival in Geneva; and MALFI, an adaptation of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, at Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana in May 2008. Following its premiere at PS 122 in October 2008, BLIND.NESS will also be presented in Slovenia in co-production with Cankarjev dom. Talijancic is a Usual Suspect at the NY Theatre Workshop, a recent fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) and the current recipient of TCG/New Generations grant. He has taught and been artist-in-residence at several institutions in the United States and abroad including the City University of New York and Brown University.

Viktor Tóth’s (2007 ArtsLink Fellow) Climbing with Mountainsalbum won best jazz album of 2007 in his native Hungary. He has played saxophone with internationally renowned musicians including Hamid Drake, Henry Franklyn, William Parker, and Mihaly Dresch. He leads the Tóth Viktor Tercett, composes, produces music for dance, collects folk music and is always looking to forge ahead in new directions.

Jeff Zielinski (2007 ArtsLink Host) has been involved in the arts since 1986. He began gigging as a drummer in central Massachusetts and played and toured with bands in North Carolina. In 1999, he moved to New Orleans to explore different musical genres, broaden his musical vocabulary, and continue to create friendships with people from all over the world.