December 7th MAPP

Launched in 2003, the Mission Arts & Performance Project (MAPP) is a homegrown bi-monthly, multidisciplinary, intercultural happening that takes place in the Mission District of San Francisco. On the first Saturday of every even month of the year, the MAPP transforms ordinary spaces, such as private garages, gardens, living rooms, studios, street corners, and small businesses into pop-up performance and exhibition sites for a day/night of intimate-scale artistic and cultural exchange among a kaleidoscope of individuals and communities.

 
In Conversation with Dance by Ella Noe
Visual Exhibition & Painting Demonstration
 
Red Poppy Art House welcomes back artist Ella Noe, who brings to this month’s MAPP pure physical sensitivity. Movement, sound, and colors introduce the evening with a synesthetic experience. In Conversation with Dance gathers a series of works developed starting from a boundaries-free dialogue of Noe with the atavistic force of movement. The artist and the curator will be present during the opening reception.
 
“Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforce; space vibrates and resounds with color, light, and form in the rhythm of life.” — Hans Hoffmann

Movement can manifest in many forms—slow, active, regular, wild, linear, syncopated. Even when we see no movement outside, there is still a fire dancing inside of us. Since it ensues transformation (it’s the arrow that propels man into the future), movement is life.

Noe’s art is the fascinating encounter between two different forms of movement, apparently distant: the movement within the space and the movement on a canvas. As co-creator of a synesthetic experience, alongside dancers and musicians, Noe engages in a romantic conversation with dynamic energies. She is open to an improvisational dialogue with the participants. None of the participants know how the piece will develop nor how it will conclude. Their trust in the atavistic force of movement will guide them through a path built on unexpected gestures.

Colors and lines impress the dialectic forms of movement onto the canvas, in an attempt to record the impermanent art of dance. While portraying the dancers’ movement, Noe pours the emptiness and the fullness of space into the bi-dimensional experience of live painting.

The cross-pollination of the arts manifesting within Noe’s works suggests that a collective dialogue is more healing than a monologue, that feeling is more effective than listening, and that the experiences we live include many main characters, beside us. Finally, the sense of connection is the sound that keeps our own life moving on a shared stage.

 
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Ella Noe was born to Romanian parents in Israel and raised in four different countries in South America. As an adult, she lived in Spain, England, and Romania, finally landing in San Francisco 16 years ago. Her connection to the Bay Area has been critical to her art. Her working experience includes youth from a wide diversity of backgrounds—from Bedouin children in Israel to adolescent orphans in Romania. In the Bay Area, Noe has worked as a photography and art teacher for organizations such as MOCHA, MCCLA, and Red Poppy Art House. She was part of the San Francisco Studio School of Painting, Drawing, Photography and Mixed Media for over 10 years.

Noe believes our experiences in life shape who we are as artists. The search for movement in her work and the need to piece together elements from different areas to create a new reality comes from a constant moving from place to place and the disquiet of not having roots anywhere. This led Noe to have a very rich life in experience, and also constant questioning of belonging, of a search for depth, of connection of creating something that is greater than the sum of all the parts and all the experiences.
 
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My passion in life is creating movement, which is quite a paradox for an artist that works on the static medium of paint and canvas. I also love dancing myself, and my time dancing has inspired my work as a painter. I have been fascinated by dancers and wanted to experiment with capturing the energy and movement of dance onto the canvas. I had no rigid vision for an outcome, I just wanted to co-create an experiment in movement and expression, and invited a dancer into my studio to play with the idea of generating a conversation that would bounce off the dance floor onto my canvas and back.

We listened to each other’s sounds: music, yes, but also words, gestures, brushstrokes, and fed from one another’s expression and energy to learn about where movement generates, why we long to express it, and the dialectic between the paint and the pose, the pigment, and prancing.

Classical Revolution
Chamber Music
 
Classical Revolution was founded in the fall of 2006 with the goal of making classical chamber more relevant in our neighborhoods and communities. After a successful first year of weekly shows at Revolution Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District, the organization began to receive invitations to perform at other local venues including Amnesia and Red Poppy Art House, soon to be followed by the Legion of Honor and de Young Museum, and then places like Yoshi’s SF and Herbst Theater. In its 10th anniversary year, Classical Revolution undertook a cycle of Beethoven’s 9 Symphonies, performed at venues around San Francisco including de Young Museum, Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater, and a performance of the 9th Symphony at Grace Cathedral in front of a 1,000-person audience.

Press articles from The New York Times, Strings Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist brought wider attention to Classical Revolution’s efforts. As interest grew outside of San Francisco, the network of chapters began to develop, with over 40 cities hosting Classical Revolution around the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, as well as Indonesia, Argentina, South Korea, and Japan. Over 1,000 musicians have performed at more than 1,200 Classical Revolution events in over 125 different venues in the Bay Area alone.
 
FEATURING:
Charith Premawardhana – violin, guitar
Elektra Schmidt – piano
Scot Moore – violin
 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Originally from Athens, Greece, pianist Elektra Schmidt studied in Paris and is currently based in San Francisco. She enjoys performing chamber music as well as solo piano in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Schmidt serves on the staff for Red Poppy Art House and performs regularly for Classical Revolution events, as well as Flower Piano each summer at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens.

Vox Tremolo
Original Dance Music
 
Vox Tremolo (“the voice that trembles”) is the brainchild of bassist and composer Joe Lewis. Vox & Co. plays original music for the people—music for your imagination and your hips. This performance anticipates Lewis’ monthly residency at Revolution Cafe, showcasing new original grooves and compositions.
 
FEATURING:
Spencer Owens – guitar
Joe Lewis – bass
Sam Jones – drums
 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Joe Lewis is known to many as the godfather of Revolution Cafe’s beloved music program. His numerous collaborations include extensive work with groups such as fpodbpod, Family Folk Explosion, and Quinn DeVeaux. A Bay Area native, Lewis has been working and living in the Mission District for well over a decade, including a brief yet highly productive stint as proprietor and curator of Blue Six Acoustic Music Room on 24th Street.

Shimmering Leaves
Experimental Improvisation
 
Led by percussionist and cultural sensei Dave Mihaly, Shimmering Leaves is a semi-rotating group of some of the Bay Area’s most prominent creative musical minds performing original compositions and improvisations. Folkloric, futuristic, extemporaneous, poetic, painterly, tender, and pugilistic, Shimmering Leaves has released four recordings and performs regularly around the Bay Area and beyond.
 
FEATURING:
David Boyce – saxophone
Charith Premawardhana – viola
Joe Lewis – bass
Dave Mihaly – percussion
 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Dave Mihaly is a San Francisco-based composer and bandleader. He has played in many groups in the SF Bay Area and NYC and has performed all over the U.S., Canada, Europe, China, Australia, and New Zealand. Shimmering Leaves is a project he started in 2001 to feature his original compositions, songs, and sonic strategies. The most recent ensemble record, Light in the Ring, the Ali Suite, features David Boyce and Michael Cavaseno on the Calar label. Mihaly also appears with the group Unbound Worlds’ album Chengdu Dream, recorded at the He Duoling Museum in Chengdu, China.

San Francisco-based saxophonist David Boyce is well known for his ultra-kinetic musicality as a member of Sameer Gupta’s free jazz group the Supplicants, legendary jazz/hip hop trio The Broun Fellinis, and numerous other Bay Area bands.

 
Elena Mencarelli (visual art exhibition) is an artist and freelance curator. After having graduated with a master’s in visual arts from the University of Bologna (Italy) in 2016, she moved to San Francisco and has since collaborated with Red Poppy Art House Exhibitions. She had previously worked for gallery60six in SF, artist Anne Nowak, Spazio Testoni, and Spazio Nour. From 2013 to 2014, Mencarelli was the artistic director of Make Your Mark Art Gallery in Melbourne, AU. Her work was published in Make Your Mark Art Magazine (2013) and in the catalogue of the dual exhibition of M. R. Ballestra and Alan Sonfist—A Better Landscape (2016). Mencarelli is also the author of the essay Maria Rebecca Ballestra, A Phenomenology of Posthumanism (Mimesis Editore, 2019). Learn more here.
 
 
Charith Premawardhana (music performances) is the founder and director of Classical Revolution. Born in Sri Lanka, raised in Chicago, and residing in San Francisco since 2004, he studied at Oberlin Conservatory, Rice University, and San Francisco Conservatory. Premawardhana is proficient in the violin, viola, and guitar, having played all three instruments since an early age. His experience gained in running Classical Revolution has led to a keen interest in fostering a vibrant network of musicians, which he draws from in contracting concert appearances with performers such as Foreigner, Evanescence, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, and Pritam Chakraborty. He has recorded on dozens of albums including for the Mars Volta, Madeleine Peyroux, Third Eye Blind, and the Coup, and he has appeared on stage with artists such as Deltron 3030, Josh Groban, and Garth Brooks. Premawardhana maintains an active performance schedule that takes him to cities around the U.S. and abroad.

 
Time: 5:00pm visual exhibition / 5:30pm painting demo / 7:30pm performances
Admission: Free (donations welcome)

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