Pamela Z Performance at Akua

Internationally acclaimed composer and artist Pamela Z performs a new composition responding to Torkwase Dyson’s sonic sculpture Akua—Dyson’s sound-based installation in New York City. 

Akua is Dyson’s first comprehensive investigation of sound and a new chapter in her sonic practice. For this special outdoor performance, Pamela Z engages directly with the sculpture’s custom eight-channel speaker system, layering Z’s operatic soprano voice with gestures that activate custom electronic instruments. The performance will create an immersive experience that builds a dynamic conversation between the two artists’ interests in the relationship between sound, movement, and space. 

Pamela Z is a composer, performer, and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses specialized software and controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. In addition to her performances, she has a growing body of installation works using multi-channel sound and video.

Attend in person at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, Bridge View Lawn. Registration is suggested but not required. Limited seating inside the sculpture is available on a first-come, first-served basis. We encourage the audience to bring a blanket to sit on the lawn.

Accessibility: Email Rashel Pedderson, Senior Project Manager, at [email protected] with questions and requests for accessibility. Please send any needs for services or accommodations to support your participation in this program, including ASL interpretations, hearing aids, and simultaneous translation, by September 12.

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. She frequently creates compositions of three “hypershapes”—a rectangular box, a triangle, and a trapezoid. Each form references a historical person who escaped confinement through a space of that shape: for example, Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years in a trapezoidal attic crawlspace. As representations of spaces used for escape, migration, and transformation, Dyson’s hypershapes embody a Black experience defined by constant shapeshifting and change.

Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan – performing in international festivals and venues including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (NY); La Biennale di Venezia; San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox, the Japan Interlink Festival; Other Minds (San Francisco); and Pina Bausch Tanztheater’s Festival (Wuppertal, Germany). She has received commissions to compose live and fixed-media scores for choreographers and film/video artists. Her large-scale, performance works, including Memory Trace, Baggage Allowance, Voci, and Gaijin, have been presented at venues like the Kitchen in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Theater Artaud (Z Space) in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, as well as at theaters in Washington D.C. and Budapest. Her one-act opera Wunderkabinet inspired by the Museum of Jurassic Technology (co-composed with Matthew Brubeck) premiered at The LAB in San Francisco, and was presented at REDCAT in LA and Open Ears Festival in Canada. She has shown work in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York), the Whitney Museum (New York); Savvy Contemporary (Berlin); the Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs NY); the Dakar Biennale (Sénégal); Krannert Art Museum (IL), the Kitchen and Merkin Hall (NY).

Ms. Z has received commissions from chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, The Living Earth Show, Eighth Blackbird, Bang On A Can All Stars; Ethel, Del Sol Quartet, California E.A.R. Unit; Left Coast Chamber Ensemble; and Empyrean Ensemble. She recently composed a work for soprano Julia Bullock and the San Francisco Symphony. She has collaborated with a wide range of artists including Joan La Barbara, Joan Jeanrenaud, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), Miya Masaoka, Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Iova Koga (Inkboat), and Luciano Chessa. She has participated in New Music Theatre’s John Cage festivals, and has performed with The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

Pamela Z is the recipient of many honors and awards including the Rome Prize, MIT McDermott Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Dorothea Tanning Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, United States Artists, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; Creative Capital; the MAP Fund, the ASCAP Music Award; an Ars Electronica honorable mention; and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.