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Random Acts of World Music and Butoh

Siren Irina Mikhailova of Lumin

By Yvonne Lai

Rule of thumb for those seeking a creative oasis: If you come across a good source, you should remember the way back. One such lush space is the 264(i) World Remix series dreamed up by the soundlab cluster of San Francisco’s CELLspace dwellers. This world music series saw an amazing beginning with its premiere event on June 1 with the Ali Khan Band (AsianWeek “Happy Dancing,” May 25). Will it outdo itself with this one? For one thing, this upcoming happenin’ on July 27 doubles the fun as the CD release party of Lumin’s latest album Hadra.

Lumin is Jeffrey Stott on Middle-East strings, percussions and samples, Michael Emenau doing programming, samples and percussion, and Irina Mikhailova on vocals. Since 1998, this musical entity has boldly navigated the uncharted, merging waters of modern electronica and the Middle Eastern musical tradition. Upon the release of their debut album Datura, Lumin has appeared in several underground and above-ground festivals, such as Burning Man and Dragonfly.

Stott is an accomplished player of traditional Middle Eastern and Indian instruments including the oud, baglama, yali tambur, and the santoor, as well as a range of percussion instruments. As a digital technician, he has composed for large-scale theater and dance productions. Emenau’s background in classical and jazz music fed into his 5-year stint as a studio musician in Japan, where he played and recorded extensively in the acid-jazz field and other electronic genres. Mikhailova, a native of Kazakhstan, was trained at the St. Petersburg Academy of Music and raised with a range of musical traditions including Balkan, Middle Eastern, Russian and Asian. Since moving to the Bay Area and unleashing her haunting melodies as a part of Lumin, she has also joined the renowned Balkan women’s choir Kitka, and toured internationally on solo projects.

To celebrate the birth of Hadra, members from Lumin’s extended families of Kitka, Stellamara, D’Yara and Edessa will bring their unique voices to the space.

Of course, it ain’t a show without the butoh. Okay, that’s a lie — because the happenin’ this Friday would have been an amazing vision of fusion sans special guest performance by The Human Sewing Machine. But World Remix is truly taking the idea of creative convergence to another level by introducing a culturally Japanese performance discipline into the mix.

CELLspace’s own Delphine Mei and Issac Immanuel round out the line-up. The Human Sewing Machine marks the second collaboration between the two artists. Previously, they had dada-ed together at the San Francisco Dada Festival in June to a very different audience and tune. Friday night at CELLspace, they will have the challenge of working with pre-existing music that is much more meditative, with driving rhythms and operatic vocals, than what they performed as “dadaists.”

“Lumin’s music is very different from the sound structures we have utilized in the past,” says Mei and Immanuel. “Working within their given musical structure was a challenging and broadening experience. This brought out things within us that had not surfaced prior; this became a process of working with, as well as contrary to, the music in creating choreography.”

For this performance, which is by nature physically existential (“I live the awareness of my body in space and time, therefore I am.”), they enlist the help of well-regarded butoh performer Ledoh, who has been living and playing in San Francisco for over a decade. According to Ledoh, butoh is the first original art form to come out of Japan in 400 hundred years. Developed during the post-apocalyptic 1950s in Japan, it can be seen as an expression of life after the bomb. One of the only identifiable conventions of butoh is a white make-up that performers sometimes put on their faces and bodies; beyond that, the identity of butoh is as slippery as an eel for the uninitiated.

Dan Hermon on Butoh.net writes, “To dance butoh is to dance like no other dance on earth. It has no physical technique or common terminology for the dance itself. It is a dance unto itself, for it is the unique expression of the dancer unencumbered by language and tradition and constraint.”

For Ledoh, the butoh performer needs only a space to come into and focus within, a framework, however loose, however arrived at. “[Sometimes] I would go into a space [a college campus courtyard, for example], perform for half an hour and then just leave and not talk about it,” he says. “The point is never talk about it, and let the performance speak for itself.”

I’ll take that attitude, and leave you with this invitation: Come support a community that supports random acts of [kindness,] world music and convergence.

264(i)World Remix and Lumin CD release party, July 27, 8:30 p.m., at CELLspace, 2050 Bryant St. at 18th St., San Francisco. Featuring Lumin, Hadra Ensemble, D’Yara and the Human Sewing Machine. For more information, go to www.cellspace.org.