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RADICALS IN MINIATURE

Photos by Paula Court

Written & directed by Ain Gordon
in partnership with Josh Quillen

Contact: gordon@pupcs.org

 

RADICALS IN MINIATURE is a series of performance-odes to a cabal of personal icons who impacted latter 20th century “alternative” culture only to loose their toehold on immortality. Many of these figures flourished between 1967’s Summer Of Love (not everyone’s love) and the moment “AIDS” entered public usage (1982/83). Fifteen years that began with a flinging open of so many political/aesthetic/societal doors. Many of these figures were felled by the disease that capped the era. Others couldn’t navigate the winnowing force of the latter 80’s “professionalizing” what were once creative margins. Still others never even imagined consolidating their personal radicalism for the growing consumer culture - they disappeared when their “life-performance” ended. 

 

Together onstage, Gordon and Quillen (a gay man and straight man of different generations) speak, sing, play, interrogate & partner lovingly conjuring a panoply of “unfamous legends” via alternative elegies to the under-sung.

Lighting Design: Jennifer Tipton                                                      Projections: Ed Fitzgerald

Producer: Alyce Dissette

A Pick Up Performance Co. Production

 

Premiered Baryshnikov Arts Center (NY) May 2017
Developed at Baryshnikov Arts Center & Vermont Performance Lab. 

Tour Sites

  • June 12-13, 2018: Festival of Arts and Ideas, Iseman Theater, New Haven, CT

  • October 26, 2018: Williams College, Williamstown, MA

  • February 15-16, 2019: Connecticut College, New London, CT

  • February 23-24, 2019: Quick Center, Fairfield, CT

  • June 27 & 29, 2019: The Yard on Martha's Vineyard, Chilmark, MA

Josh Quillen has forged a unique identity in the contemporary music world as all-around percussionist, expert steel drum performer (lauded as “softly sophisticated” by the New York Times), and composer. His collaborations with other composers frequently incorporate the steel drums as a core element. A member of the acclaimed ensemble Sō Percussion since 2006, Quillen has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Lincoln Center Festival, Stanford Lively Arts, and dozens of other venues in the United States. In that time, Sō Percussion has toured Russia, Spain, Australia, Italy, Germany, and Scotland. He has had the opportunity to work closely with Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, Paul Lansky, David Lang, Matmos, Dan Deacon, and many others. Quillen started performing on the steel drums at Dover High School in Ohio, an interest that continued at the University of Akron, where Dr. Larry Snider founded one of the first collegiate steel bands in the United States. He traveled to Trinidad & Tobago in 2002, performing with the Phase II Pan Groove ensemble under Len “Boogsie” Sharpe. This interest in the traditional steel drum music of Trinidad ran in parallel with Quillen’s education in western music, first at Akron, and then at the Yale School of Music with marimba soloist Robert Van Sice, where he received his Masters degree in 2006. These interests led Quillen to break ground in the use of the steel drums in contemporary classical music. To date, he has commissioned over a dozen pieces for steel drums from composers such as Stuart Saunders Smith, Roger Zahab, Dan Trueman, and Paul Lansky. In 2010, Steven Mackey’s quartet It Is Time, commissioned for Sō Percussion by Carnegie Hall and Chamber Music America, featured Josh on a new microtonal lead pan in its Carnegie Hall premiere, receiving rave reviews in the New York Times. Quillen’s compositions for Sō Percussion are featured in Imaginary City, an evening length work that appeared on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival, as well as the site-specific Music for Trains in Southern Vermont. Other ensembles to play his pieces and arrangements include Matmos, PLork, The Janus Trio, Adele Meyers and Dancers, The University of Akron Steel Band, and the New York University Steel Band. An avid educator, Quillen is a performer-in-residence at Princeton University with Sō Percussion, as well as co-director of the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, an intensive workshop for college-aged percussionists on the campus of Princeton University. He is also co-director of the percussion program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and is the director of the New York University Steel Band.

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