Tag Archives: roulette

arts and culture, Civics and Urban Life

Roulette: One Year in Brooklyn

Happy Anniversary to Roulette.

I can’t believe it’s been a year since Roulette, an experimental music collective formerly located in Manhattan, set up shop in Brooklyn.

Clearly they’ve expanded the size and scope of their organization with a new 450 seat theater. But their mission, to provide opportunities for innovative composers, musicians, sound artists and interdisciplinary collaborators, stays the same.

First a little history. In 1978 three composers, Jim Staley, David Weinstein and Dan Senn, launched a new music composers’ collective they named Roulette. Weinstein had recently composed Café Roulette, an homage to Dada and to chance operations in music.

That  75-seat space in Lower Manhattan made a big name for itself in the world of experimental music and new jazz. The move to Brooklyn a year ago signaled an expansion in size, scope and ambition. They write in a birthday note on their website:

This last year was a breath-taking, nerve-wracking, exhilarating realization of the implications of our name. We moved from a 74 seat loft to a 450 seat theater, doubled our budget, presented over 150 music, dance and Intermedia performances, hosted fifty arts and community organizations, and our audience grew from 4,000 to 21,000.

Our new theater is an architectural gem with splendid acoustics and superbly equipped — thanks to the generosity of individuals, foundations, corporations, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Steve Levin, our New York City Council Member, and the New York State Council on the Arts. This season we will install an eight-camera robotic system which will make Roulette one of the few facilities in the city capable of complex videography, instant editing, and live broadcast.

In an astonishingly short time Roulette has become a cultural and social nexus for our neighborhood — the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership identifies Roulette as a keystone organization in its Strategic Plan — and has taken a prominent position in the cultural life of New York City.

The tote bags pictured above, designed by Christian Marclay, are for sale at Roulette.or

arts and culture

John Cage’s 12-Hour Empty Words at Roulette on August 3rd

File this under: I went with my family to see John Cage perform Empty Words at the Hunter College Auditorium when I was a kid. I was bored out of my mind but somehow I understood that we were seeing something amazing

On August 3, at 8PM at Roulette I will have the chance to experience all 12 hours of Empty Words again.

Varispeed, a group of composer-performers, will perform Part I of their 12-hour arrangement of John Cage’s Empty Words, a landmark text-based work from the mid-70s that transforms speech into music and brings to light the beauty and power of the human voice.

Performing this piece is quite an undertaking.

In Part I, Cage’s text “establishes a distinctly non-syntactical speech rhythm with words and phrases arranged through chance operations from Thoreau’s journals.” The vocalist-performer-arrangers of Varispeed (Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Paul Pinto, Brian McCorkle, & Gelsey Bell) and special guests augment their voices with a bevvy of electronics, “while spatializing sound and action into a Cagean feast for the senses.”

Varispeed is a newly formed collective of composer-performers from experimental theatre group Panoply Performance Laboratory, ensemble thingNY, and Why Lie? that creates site-specific, sometimes-participatory, oftentimes-durational, forevermore-experimental events. Their new arrangements in Perfect Lives Manhattan made Time Out New York and New York Times’ critic Steve Smith’s “Best of 2011” list.

Empty Words will continue in three more installments during the evening. Parts II & III will be performed at nearby Exapno (33 Flatbush Ave, 5th floor) at 11 PM and 2 AM, respectively.

And the final installment occurs at 5AM in the morning on the Brooklyn Bridge:

Part IV will be a sound walk across the Bridge at 5 AM. All parts are free and open to the public.