Circus, Cabaret and Sound. Sxip’s Hour of Charm.

Sxip Shirey is a composer/producer/performer based in New York City. His music is featured in the international circus theater production “LIMBO” which is a co-production between Underbelly (UK), Strut N Fret (Australia) and South Bank Center (UK). Shirey teaches “Text and Object Oriented Composition” at the Norwegian

Theater Academy in Fredrickstad Norway. He has toured as support act in the U.S. with Amanda Palmer and the Dresden Dolls. His band Luminescent Orchestrii toured internationally and has released 3 albums. Shirey has been a featured performer at TED. He wrote the music for the short film “Statuesque” written and directed by Neil Gaiman and starring Bill Nighy, and presented on SKY TV in the UK. He recently led his band at Madonna’s Birthday Party in the Hamptons. Shirey is a 2011 United States Artist Fellow.

He is currently creating the music for “Excuse Me There’s a Faggot in My Closet,” a new musical by writer Craig Harwood. Last summer he debuted “The Gauntlet,” a unique situation for choir in which the audience walks through two lines of hocketing singers. It was produced by Make Music New York and Friends of the Highline and debuted on the Highline itself.

Lady Rizo aka Amelia Zirin-Brown is a NYC based performance artist, comedienne, singer, composer, and actor.   Received with critical raves three years in a row at the Assembly Festival in Edinburgh, she won the inaugural Time Out London and Soho Theatre Award, and the 2013 London Cabaret Award.  She is also a Grammy winner for a 2010 collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma on the Holiday album Songs of Joy and Peace.

http://www.ladyrizo.com/bio/

Composer/Performer Ned Rothenberg has been internationally acclaimed for both his solo and ensemble music, presented for the past 33 years on 5 continents.  He performs primarily on  alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, and the shakuhachi – an endblown Japanese bamboo flute. His solo work utilizes an expanded palette of sonic language, creating a kind of personal idiom all its own.  In an ensemble setting, he leads the trio Sync, with Jerome Harris, guitars and Samir Chatterjee, tabla, works with the Mivos string quartet playing his Quintet for Clarinet and Strings and collaborates around the world with fellow improvisors.  Recent recordings include this Quintet, The World of Odd Harmonics, Ryu Nashi (new music for shakuhachi), and Inner Diaspora, all on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, as well as Live at Roulette with Evan Parker,  and The Fell Clutch, on Rothenberg’s Animul label.

Taylor Mac (who uses “judy”, lowercase sic, not as a name but as a gender pronoun) is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer.  “A critical darling of the New York scene” (NY Magazine), judy’s work has been performed at New York City’s Lincoln Center, The Public Theatre and Playwrights Horizons, London’s Hackney Empire, Los Angeles’s Royce Hall, Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Sydney Opera House, Boston’s American Repertory Theatre, Stockholm’s Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, San Francisco’s Curran Theater and MOMA, and literally hundreds of other theaters, museums, music halls, opera houses, cabarets, and festivals around the globe.

http://www.taylormac.org/

Multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter/composer and native New Yorker Rachelle Garniez has been described as “a certified free spirit” (The New Yorker) and a “diva with a difference” (Billboard Magazine). Her original lyrical and melodic story-songs have been described as “romantic, rhapsodic and casually hilarious” (The New York Times).

http://rachellegarniezcom.virb.com/

Vibraphonist and band leader of Slavic Soul Party.

“Superb, technically ingenious… passionate and serious, but also playful and funny. …when Moran’s short-fuse pauses ignite into four-malleted pyrotechnics, it’s like hearing an angel have a seizure.” -Village Voice

http://www.mattmoran.com

Una Mimnagh on the corde elise. Una is Sxip‘s favorite aerial artist,
http://www.circusuna.com/

Spencer Novich is an internationally acclaimed clown and physical theater artist.
https://www.spencernovich.com/

Steve will be performing a piece on charting his wife’s contractions during her pregnancy