una marea creciente

Sound. Light. Motion.

Ocean as mirror, ocean as siren, ocean as muse.

FIVE AWARD-WINNING MIAMI ARTISTS AND INNOVATORS COLLABORATE
TO CREATE UNA MAREA CRECIENTE: A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY NON-NARRATIVE
OPERA ON RISING SEA LEVELS
Performance to Take Place at Faena Forum on Monday, May 7 at 8 pm

A collaboration between five award-winning Miami artists and innovators has produced a visionary engagement with our relationship to the water that surrounds us
in an age of rising seas. Taking the form of a non-narrative opera, this one-night only performance, Un Marea Creciente, will premiere Monday, May 7, 2018 at 8 pm at Faena Forum on Miami Beach, 3300-3398 Collins Avenue. Free and open to the public.

Una Marea Creciente was composed by Orlando Garcia, with vocals and chamber ensembles under his direction, an experimental libretto by Campbell McGrath, performances by BrazzDance under the direction of Augusto Soledade, and video installations by Jacek Kolasinski and John Stuart with Elizabeth Marsh, and sponsored by Faena Arts and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Knight Arts Challenge.

Time-bound and site-specific, Una Marea Creciente invites the audience to engage with dancers, performers and recorded media in an echo-chamber of mermaids and sea gods, whale songs and floodwalls and the music of the waves. In 2008, Miami composer Orlando Garcia invited three FIU colleagues to collaborate in creating a multi-media, non-narrative opera from his musical work, “Transcending Time.” That piece, with an experimental libretto by award-winning poet Campbell McGrath, and video installations by John Stuart and Jacek Kolasinski, received its premier at the New Music Biennialle in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2009.

Eager to collaborate again, in 2016 the artists hatched a new plan to begin a project that would address a topic of vital importance to everyone in South Florida – sea-level rise. Built around Garcia’s latest musical composition, the result is another ambient, non-narrative opera, Una Marea Creciente, with an experimental libretto by McGrath, video by Kolasinski and Stuart along with Elizabeth Marsh, and the dynamic addition of the award-winning Augusto Soldade Brazzdance group.

This conceptual approach to a topic that effects all residents of South Florida, invites the audience to explore several performance venues within the Forum building, where music, dance, video and text will be performed. Beginning at 8 pm and running until approximately 9:30 pm, the event is free and open to the public. For more information contact Liane Sippin, lsippin@fiu.edu.

The project will be performed at the Faena Forum, which is a pioneering new building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Rem Koolhaas/OMA in Miami Beach. Faena Forum was envisioned by Alan Faena as the cultural heart of the Faena District Miami Beach, which encompasses six blocks of new development designed by OMA, Foster + Partners, and Brandon Haw, and the renovation of historic buildings. Faena Forum serves as an incubator for cultural expression as well as a place for convening and community building that reshapes the cultural landscape of Miami Beach.

Inaugurated in 2016, Faena Forum has commissioned contemporary artists to envision and realize major site-specific works, such as ángeles veloces arcanos fugaces by assume vivid astro focus (from June 2017 through January 2018), Biennale of Moving Images (May 2017), Creative Misunderstandings by Alejandro Guzmán (March 2017), Once With Me, Once Without Me (December 2016) by Pam Tanowitz in collaboration with Sho Shigematsu/OMA, and the opening processional performance Tide by Side (December 2016). Faena Forum also hosted Madonna’s Tears of a clown, a special event during Art Basel Miami 2016 to benefit her nonprofit organization Raising Malawi.

Underscoring Faena District’s mission of fostering collaboration between some of the most talented and creative minds who challenge existing concepts of a culture, entertainment and art, Faena is proud to support Una Marea Creciente through the donation of Faena Forum for the performance as well as FAENA ART matching the foundation grant of $30,000.

Artist Bios

Through nearly two hundred works composed for a wide range of performance genres, Orlando Jacinto Garcia has established himself as an important figure in the new music world. The distinctive character of his music has often been described as “time-suspended, haunting sonic explorations.” He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards from a variety of organizations and cultural institutions including the Rockefeller, Fulbright, Knight, Dutka, Civitella Ranieri, Bogliasco, and Cintas Foundations, the State of Florida, the MacDowell and Millay Colony, and the Ariel, Noise International, Matiz Rangel, Nuevas Resonancias, Salvatore Martirano, and Bloch International Competitions. Widely recorded, most recently he has been the recipient of four Latin Grammy nominations in the best Contemporary Classical Composition Category (2009-11, 2015). Born in Havana, Cuba in 1954, Garcia migrated to the United States in 1961, and is currently a resident composer for the Miami Symphony Orchestra, and Professor of Composition and Composer in Residence for the School of Music at Florida International University.

A native of Bahia, Brazil, Augusto Soledade is the Founding Artistic Director and resident choreographer for Miami’s award-wining Brazzdance Company. Hailed as a story-teller of choreographic ideas, and a pioneer of diasporic Afro-Fusion styles, he is a six-time recipient of the Miami Dade Choreographer’s Fellowship, as well as numerous awards from the Florida Department of Cultural Affairs. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, he has taught at FIU and Smith College, and is currently an Associate Professor in Dance at Nova Southeastern University.

Campbell McGrath is the author of ten books of poetry, including Florida Poems, Seven Notebooks, and most recently XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century (Ecco Press, 2016), a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has received many of America’s major literary prizes for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Knight Fellowship, and a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, as well as in scores of literary reviews and quarterlies. A resident of Miami Beach, he teaches at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.

Jacek J. Kolasiński is an interdisciplinary artist and curator, whose work is rooted in an international dialogue between two worlds: the “Old World” of Europe in his native Poland, and the “New World” of the United States in multicultural Miami. These convergent worlds create a running theme that surfaces in many of his works: the search for identity in the vortex of cultural displacement. Through his creative work, Kolasiński has tested complex trans-disciplinary collaborative productions, multimedia installations, single and multiple channel video projections, 3d digital fabrications, as a well as community based, and site-specific projects in Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Australia, Latvia and China, among others. He is the founding Director of the Ratcliffe Incubator of Art + Design in the FIU College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, and an Associate Professor of Art at the Art + Art History Department at Florida International University, where he has served as the Department Chair for half of the decade.

John Stuart is a futurist, innovator, designer, registered architect and an artist involved in collaborative research projects fund by Van Allen Institute, The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Science Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Knight Foundation, and The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Stuart has produced three books and has lectured and taught widely in the United States on technology, architectural history, design, urbanism, innovation and identity, and is currently working on projects that point to new directions in interdisciplinary innovation and research that engage music, design, art and environmental sciences. He is Professor in the Department of Architecture at FIU, Associate Dean for Cultural and Community Engagement in the FIU College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, Executive Director of the Miami Beach Urban Studios, and Director of the CARTA Innovation Lab for 3D-Printing.