Seattle-based art performance band Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) is in the midst of creation of their newest work Sonic Tales. The New Museum hosts the ensemble for a week of audience interactions, rehearsals, and experiments culminating in two nights of performance that will showcase this piece in progress.

This work sets DAE’s surreal dance theater style and hallucinatory visuals against a backdrop of driving rhythms, soaring melodies, and atmospheric soundscapes, telling interwoven short stories in the form of bizarre invented fairy tales. Influenced by punk, protest, cartoons, ghost stories, and nightmares, DAE takes the viewer into otherworldly landscapes full of compelling characters and music that reveal secrets to the audience.

A talk about the creation of Sonic Tales—including discussions about DAE’s music, performance, and design—will follow the performance. DAE’s videographer and set designer will be present for this discussion. DAE’s general production blog can be visited at http://www.degenerateartensemble.com/daewp08.

FREE WORKSHOP OPPORTUNITY
Also, be sure to get in on the action by participating in the free A/V workshop led by Degenerate Art Ensemble on Saturday, April 11, at 3 p.m. This all-ages workshop will lead participants will generate audio recordings to be included in the presentations of Sonic Tales, in addition to performing in a short music video, Bagel Boy. For more information about the free workshop and how to RSVP, please see Degenerate Art Ensemble A/V Workshop.

Degenerate Art Ensemble is a performance company that uses music and dance to transform traditional genres into multidimensional, explosive, and expressive works. They are known to morph and transform—from a dance company to a punk/jazz band to a forty-five-piece orchestra—and never lose their ability to electrify audiences and create experiences that bring them to new territories of perception.

“For more than twelve years The Degenerate Art Ensemble have stampeded over every artistic boundary they have found before them. [T]he music is so rampant with ideas that it peoples the theatre of the imagination with its own compelling actors.”
— Wire Magazine