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| Jazz great offers first look at Japanese-infused martial arts ballet New York, NY - In the ongoing, season-wide theme of Cool Japan: Otaku Strikes!, Japan Society offers a unique work-in-progress presentation of Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon!--a multidisciplinary homage to Japanese action manga (comic books). Composer-creator Fred Ho joins forces with playwright Ruth Margraff to create a theatrical blend of original music, multi-martial arts choreography, sword fights and state-of-the-art visual design. Featuring fully staged and realized excerpts, live music and an in-depth discussion with the artists moderated by Baraka Sele (curator/producer of New Jersey Performing Arts Center World Festival), performances run Fri. & Sat., April 29-30 With a score fusing traditional Japanese music and soul-jazz, Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon! pays homage to the 1970s Japanese manga series Lone Wolf and Cub (Kosure Okami)--a raging cult hit that has inspired many works and adaptations across genres over the past few decades, including the Hollywood blockbuster Road to Perdition. In this stage version by Ho and Margraff, director Sonoko Kawahara and marital arts choreographer Tsuyoshi Kaseda collaborate to tell the tale of a violent and beautiful assassin whose journey traverses a terrain of deception, revenge, double crossing and death. Bringing to life the musical score, Fred Ho conducts a 5-member ensemble featuring bass, percussion, keyboard, alto sax, fue & shakuhachi, and 20 string koto. Chinese-American baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, and political activist, Fred Ho is one of today's leading Asian American artistic talents. He heads the Afro Asian Music Ensemble and the Monkey Orchestra and has written over a half-dozen operas, music-theater epics, cutting-edge multi-media works and oratorios. He wrote the first contemporary Chinese American opera, A Chinaman's Chance, which was staged at BAM in the late 80s. His prodigious body of work has been presented in prestigious venues all over the world. He has received commissions and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, World Music Institute, NYSCA, Meet the Composer, NEA, Brooklyn Arts and Culture Association, New York Theater Workshop, HERE Arts Center and Aaron Davis Hall. With numerous books to his name, he was lead editor for the anthology Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America (AK Press) and edits the popular and best-selling annual Sheroes/Womyn Warriors calendar. Fred Ho resides in Brooklyn, New York. Playwright Ruth Margraff is artist-in-residence with HARP/HERE and Big Red Media. Her works have been developed and produced in New York City by BAM, The Public Theater, Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, Guggenheim Museum, New York Theatre Workshop, DTW, and P.S. 122 as well as across the country. She has also worked extensively at international venues including theaters in Serbia, Turkey, Russia, and Greece, and in 2003, she traveled to the National Noh Theater in Tokyo, Japan to study Noh, the structure of which has greatly informed her recent writing. Margraff has been the recipient of three Rockefeller commissions, a Jerome fellowship, McKnight advancement grant, Bellagio residency (Italy), NYSCA individual artist grant, NEA/TCG playwriting residency with HERE Arts, and an ITI/TCG travel grant (to Bosnia, Greece, and Turkey). She has taught at UT/Austin, Brown, and the Yale School of Drama. The Moscow Times has called her work “audaciously original” and LA Weekly noted “the sheer beauty of Margraff’s free-wheeling adaptation creates a hypnotic montage of words and literary images”. write your comments about the article :: © 2005 Jazz News :: home page |