THIS ART BURNING, a multimedia musical and literary event by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and the poet Michael Heller will be presented on Saturday, September 11 at 7:30 PM and Sunday, September 12 at 4 PM at the Performance Garage at 1515 Brandywine Street, Philadelphia, 19130. For tickets, contact the Festival Box Office at (215) 413-1318 or visit www.livearts-fringe.org.
Ellen Fishman-Johnson and Michael Heller have been working together since their first meeting at the Yaddo Artist Colony in 1990. They first collaborated on Heteroglossia (1991) for Tape, which earned them an invitation to perform Heteroglossia at the 1991 International Computer Music Conference in Montreal, Quebec, . Since then, the work has had many other performances. Their second collaboration was Freedom, after all? for Soprano, Strings, Percussion and Computer. It was premiered at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore in 1992. Their first Internet movie, After Montale, was created in 2002 and featured an original musical score that accompanied the paced visual presentation of the poem. Their largest collaborative undertaking to date was Benjamin, a multimedia opera based on the life and tragic suicide of Walter Benjamin, featuring six singers, a six-piece instrumental ensemble and pre-recorded sound. It was selected for presentation by the Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2000 and performed at the Old First Reform Church in Old City, Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer cited the opera for the “palpable commitment from its creators,” the work’s “ideal musical language” and for the collaborators’ creation of a score “that is perfectly communicative.” In 2006, they began working on This Art Burning. The words for the title come from Heller’s poem, “Autobiographia,” and reflect the highly intense personal, cultural and artistic dimensions of this creative interaction. In 2010 they decided to create a piece for violin and video featuring four poems. Violinist, Leah Kim will premiere this work on this concert.
