Industrial Foundations – An Interdisciplinary Project

“Industrial Foundations” is a collaborative project between New Mexican composers, dancers, and performers that will be presented three times at the end of August 2017 throughout the state of New Mexico.  Venues include the historic Albuquerque Railyards, Rio Grande Theatre in Las Cruces, and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe.  University of New Mexico faculty members and renowned composers, Peter Gilbert and Karola Obermüller, will compose an electroacoustic piece for the New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble Collective to perform. Choreography and movement direction will be done by Naomi Elizabeth Montoya and Rhea M. Riley.

Obermüller and Gilbert have collaborated on numerous projects including the multi-media, live-electronic chamber opera “dreimaldrei gleich unendlich”.  We have asked them to create a work that responds to unique locations in New Mexico with a significant piece for our group to perform with spatialized multi-channel electronics.  They said, “The Albuquerque Railyards are a fascinating and enthralling location.  They bring some of the magical vastness of New Mexico’s dramatic but inhospitable landscape indoors and humanize it with an industrial foundation. Interestingly, the history of decay there has begun to inflect the crisp man-made lines in the place, ultimately connecting the industrial back to the natural.”  In addition to spatialization and movement, a sense of experiencing different cycles of time (like the life-span of man-made structures vs the mountains we see out the crumbling windows, for instance) will be an important way for the music to connect to the physical space surrounding us.

Because our venues are primarily not traditional concert spaces, we can arrange the musicians and loud-speakers in such a way as to allow the audience to move through the piece while it is happening, something like a mobile.  In addition, Naomi Elizabeth Montoya and Rhea M. Riley will be developing movement and dance to further connect the moment with the space.