Liquid Music

STUDIO DIMITRI CHAMBLAS & LIQUID MUSIC PRESENT
Emily Wells: Regards to the End  

With special guest Darian Donovan Thomas
Curated by Kate Nordstrum as part of Studio Dimitri Chamblas's Chaillot Expérience
Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 7:30 pm
Chaillot théâtre national de la danse, Paris

“Dramatic, meticulous, and gothic.”–The New York Times

“A master of blending the worlds of classical and electronics.”–NPR

Dimitri Chamblas’s Chaillot Expérience spotlights his recent and current projects, collaborations, and ongoing partnerships at one of Paris’ most iconic theaters and cultural centers. Since 2018, Liquid Music and Studio Dimitri Chamblas have had a productive and dynamic relationship, with frequent invitations from one producer to the other. At the Studio’s request, Liquid Music selected a project for Chaillot that honors contemporary dance while centering music, recognizing both as vehicles to understanding and problem solving.

Visionary composer, producer, and video artist Emily Wells will expand upon her 2022 album Regards to the End—a loving ode to and dialogue with AIDS activists of the past that weaves a narrative of radical empathy and hope out of their resiliency. Wells asks what we can learn from the advocates and artists working at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the face of our climate emergency, and ultimately arrives at her thesis through movement, powerful video projections, and orchestral pop music that captures and “quietly transfixes” (New York Times) the heart. For this performance, Wells will be joined by composer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist Darian Donovan Thomas for a few select songs.

Wells’ video practice utilizes archival footage of early AIDS activism, extreme climate events, and modern and contemporary dance, revealing a dialogue between the three on movement, action, power, and awe-inducing scale. Featuring agnostic repetition and disparate speeds, the video installation creates a visual conversation with the audience, one that coheres the ideas in Well’s music and invites imaginations to stir association and memory in ways sound alone cannot.

Even under the weight of historical and current governmental denial and neglect, Wells refuses to give in to despair, singing in "The Dress Rehearsal": “Where nothing is still, love happened here.” 

About the artists

Forging a bridge between pop and chamber music, composer, producer, and video artist Emily Wells builds songs from deliberate strata of vocals, synths, drums, piano, string and wind instruments. Her evocative music (described as “visionary” by NPR) and performances (called “quietly transfixing” by the New York Times) impel listeners to be attuned. Wells’s latest release, the ten-song album Regards to the End, explores the AIDS crisis, climate change, and her lived experience watching the world burn. A work of radical empathy, Regards to the End foregrounds the power of art, critique, and care to connect and perhaps redeem us.

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist Darian Donovan Thomas was born in San Antonio, Texas, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He is interested in combining genres and mediums into a singular vocabulary that can express ideas about intersectionality (of medium and identity). Necessarily, he is interested in redacting all barriers to entry that have existed at the gates of any genre – this vocabulary of multiplicity will be intersectional, and therefore all-inclusive. 

Darian has been commissioned and premiered by Jennifer Koh, Ensemble Signal, Adam Tender, So Percussion, ~Nois Quartet, YOSA (the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio),  among others around the world. 

On any given night you can find Darian performing anywhere from a salon house show to grungy basements to a bar/venue to formal concert halls. He has toured with Moses Sumney, appearing on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ColorsxStudios, performed in three Tiny Desk concerts with critically acclaimed artists Arooj Aftab,  Balun, and Wild Up, and has toured internationally from Iceland with Apartment Sessions to Saudi Arabia with Arooj - performing at Coachella and Glastonbury festival along the way. In NYC alone he has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Appolo Theater, The Guggenheim, The Whitney, The Met Museum, and The Noguchi Museum. 

He presently performs with Arooj Aftab, Balun, Wild Up, MEDIAQUEER, String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and occasionally with Ensemble Signal and Bang On A Can. You can also find him performing his “Safe Space” solo set at different performance spaces around the country. 

From the À bras-le-corps duet created with Boris Charmatz in 1993 to the one with Kim Gordon in 2018, Dimitri Chamblas' career reflects a taste for encounters that he never ceases to develop. He has worked with a diverse array of artists, including Bret Easton Ellis, William Forsythe, Glen Keane, Benjamin Millepied, Mathilde Monnier, Alex Prager, Nile Rodgers, Claire Tabouret, and Virginie Viard. 

In 2015, he founded and ran the 3e Scène at the Opéra national de Paris, then became Dean of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 2017. Dimitri Chamblas defines his own cartography of creation, moving dance to places where it is least expected, such as inside high-security prisons, as witnessed by Manuela Dalle's documentary Dancing in A-Yard. 

His work has been presented at the Tate Modern (London), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Opéra national de Paris, Performa New York, NYU Skirball (New York,) and the Musée du Louvre (Paris).

Today, it's through his Studio that he develops his projects: takemehome, a piece for 9 performers in collaboration with Kim Gordon, the staging of Crowd Out, an opera for 1000 voices by David Lang, or Slow Show, a performance for fifty participants that slows down time and gives rise to an eponymous installation made up of a series of video portraits. As a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and artistic director, dance is the vehicle that allows Dimitri Chamblas to travel through various geographical and social contexts around the globe.