Photo credit (pictures 1-14): Sabrina Wong (www.sabrinawongphoto.com, sabrina@sabrinawongphoto.com)

swissnex San Francisco presents two inspired sides of Swiss avant-garde violinist Charlotte Hug's work.

A conceptual exhibit environment conceived and initiated by Rita Jurt, “My Street” pairs up Charlotte Hug's “Son-Icons”, three-dimensional, highly graphic musical scores, with the work of Bay Area photographer Kirstyn Russell. Rita Jurt, a Swiss violin teacher dedicated to creating improvisational musical settings for children based on graphic musical notation, first brought Hug and Russell together to collaborate on the concept she had elaborated for "My Street" in Switzerland, where the exhibition was first presented.

Hug, Russell and Jurt will present their work and explain how it has lessons to offer for collaboration within contemporary, "grown-up" creation. Charlotte Hug will then perform "Anderwelten" (Other Worlds), a new score for viola and voice in which the musician directly interacts with the physicality of her Son-Icons and of swissnex San Francisco’s performance space.

The exhibit will be shown at swissnex until October 24th, and can be visited by appointment.

PROGRAM
6:30 pm:      Doors open, exhibit, networking
7:00 pm:      Presentations by:
                                  o Charlotte Hug
                                  o Kirstyn Russell
                                  o Rita Jurt
7:30 pm:       Performance: "Anderwelten" by Charlotte Hug
8:30 pm:       Exhibit, networking, food and drinks
9:30 pm:       Doors close            

	Charlotte Hug is a musician, composer, and visual artist living in Zurich and London. Hug often seeks out unusual venues for her performances, places that lend surprising acoustic, visual or emotional accents to her playing - from the icy caverns of the Rhône Glacier to an acoustically insulated S&M torture chamber in Zurich's red light district. In addition to her solo activities, Charlotte Hug is a member of the London Improvisers Orchestra and collaborates with other composers as well as with the Swiss Centre for Computer Musik. She improvises, both freely and conceptually, with such performers as John Butcher, John Edwards, Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols, Evan Parker, Elliott Sharp and Phil Wachsmann. Her domain encompasses the most diverse fields, including composition, improvisation, electro-acoustics, performance, music for film and musical theatre, as well as visual art and sound installations.
	Rita Jurt is a Swiss viola player and teacher at two music schools in her home country. She explores both the baroque and modern viola repertoires in various orchestras. Her teaching is inspired and influenced by contemporary art, music, improvisation and theatre. A late-nineties collaboration with Charlotte Hug (“The Sounding Snail”) ignited key changes in her work with students, leading her to devise methods for them to develop their own works, be it pieces of music or performances. Jurt met photographer Kirstyn Russell in 2005, when she resided in Berkeley. Their meeting triggered “My Street”, and Jurt later asked Charlotte Hug to join the project.
	Kirstyn Russell is a photographer whose work has been shown internationally. Russell received her BFA from New York University and her MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts Kirstyn started taking photographs when she was fifteen at Berkeley High School. She currently teaches at several local colleges in the Bay Area and is working on landscape projects taking on geographic and psychological edges.

Charlotte Hug elsewhere in the Bay Area:

NEXMAP Binary Cities #5: Sonic Forecast and Sonogram world premieres

Saturday, October 4th, 2008  start 8:00 PM
Location: Counterpulse
1310 Mission St. (near 9th), San Francisco, CA 94103  Directions here

Inspired by the Myanmar (Burmese) anti-government protests led by students and Buddhist Monks in September 2007, Sonic Forecast integrates new and traditional performance practice in a seamless tapestry of timbres, resonance and spontaneous response between live musician, pre-recorded viola and manipulations, live video and stocked images; a live electronic sonic and visual repartee using the Max-MSP software.

Charlotte Hug viola & voice (Zurich)
Linda Bouchard live electronics (SF/Montreal)
Luis Maurette live video (SF/Buenos Aires)

Sonogram is a new work by Laetitia Sonami and Sue Slagle (aka SUE-C) inspired by gestation and the abstract ways through which we conceptualize and perceive the beginnings of human life. As collaborators, Sonami (sound) and Slagle (image) construct languages and landscapes where audio-visual perspectives shift to tell stories and create possibilities. Employing a multitude of hand-made and machine-made media, Sonogram is an exploration of the tiny universe from which all of us once emerged.

Laetitia Sonami electronics (San Francisco)
SUE-C live video (San Francisco)

This performance is supported in part by the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a Subito grant from ACF-SF and support from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Produced by NEXMAP. Complete information on the NEXMAP homepage.

Charlotte Hug at CNMAT, University of California in Berkeley: Other Worlds of the String Instruments

Sunday, October 5th, 2008  From 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Location: Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT), University of California at Berkeley 1750 Arch Street, Berkeley, CA 94720   Directions here

Charlotte Hug,  Swiss violinist, composer and visual artist, shows her work: site-specific musical performances and compositions, graphic scores and room-scores, with a special focus on enhanced string techniques.

Event type: talk   Admission:free 

This event is supported by the Arts Council of Switzerland Pro Helvetia and Suisa.

Complete information on the CNMAT homepage.