Degenerate Art Ensemble

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More About

• Joshua Kohl
• Haruko Nishimura
• Cornish College
• Gavin Borchert

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What’s most stunning about the Young Composers Collective’s metamorphosis into the Degenerate Art Ensemble, since Joshua Kohl, Haruko Nishimura, and a bunch of Cornish College compatriots launched the new-music group 15 years ago, is not just that they’ve expanded into new realms of art, but how they’ve blended them. When the DAE creates a work, it seems, it’s not a matter of discrete processes: writing a score for a show, choreographing to it, designing costumes to dance in. Instead, these elements evolve together. You can’t pick them apart, since no element is a mere accompaniment, or byproduct, of any other. Everything you hear in their performances is the music. Everything you see is visual art. Every motion is dance. Even Nishimura’s whimsical doll-like charms onstage and her taste for the macabre seem to be not two opposed flavors bounced off each other, but some nameless new aesthetic all her own. See for yourself at this weekend’s Sonic Tales, billed as their “most ambitious work to date.” GAVIN BORCHERT
Fri., Oct. 30, 8 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 31, 8 p.m., 2009