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No Exit begins year sixteen with New Season, New Sounds

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by Mike Telin

After celebrating its sixteenth season with a deep dive into the world of Surreality, No Exit begins their 16th concert season on Thursday, October 17 at 7:00 pm at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Recital Hall with  “New Season, New Sounds.”

The evening will feature works by No Exit’s percussionist/composer Katy La Favre as well as Josef Marek, Hannah Kendall, Arthur Hernandez, James Praznik, and Timothy Beyer. The program will be repeated at 7:00 pm on Friday at Waterloo Arts, and Saturday at SPACES Gallery. All performances are free.

“After last season’s Surreality programs, we were so energized because the reception was so great. We want to continue to entertain, maybe enlighten, and even make some people angry,” the group’s artistic director Timothy Beyer said during a recent telephone conversation. He added that this program, which includes three world premieres, is anything but boring.

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No Exit concludes Year of Surreality with “Breaking the World”

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by Mike Telin

For the past eight months No Exit has been celebrating their 15th anniversary with their most ambitious project to date: Surreality. “We hope people will enjoy exploring the irrational, illogical, inexplicable, strange, and utterly fantastical world that is Surrealism,” artistic director Timothy Beyer told us in October.

On Thursday, May 23 at 7:00 pm at Heights Arts, No Exit will conclude their Year of Surreality with “Breaking the World.” The free program will feature new works by Jerome Begin, Lauren Pearl, Stephen Haluska, and James Praznik, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s Erratum Musical, and a simultaneous poem recited by Gunnar-Owen Hirthe, James Praznik, and Timothy Beyer. The program will be repeated at 7:00 pm on both Friday (at Praxis Fiber Arts) and Saturday (at SPACES Gallery).

In a recent telephone conversation Beyer said that this week’s program is a culmination of the ensemble’s season-long exploration of Surrealist techniques and topics, including games and thought exercises, state of consciousness, and dada, which is not technically Surrealism, but is related.

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No Exit: wonderfully head-scratching “Piano Dada”
at Heights Arts (Mar. 16)

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by Mike Telin

For the recent set of concerts in their season-long celebration of the surreal, No Exit turned to two pivotal events in the history of dadaism for inspiration — the 1920 Festival Dada and the 1923 Soirée du Coeur à Barbe. This program, “Piano Dada,” included works of poetry, theater, and music that were performed at those historic Paris festivals. I attended the performance on March 16 at Heights Arts.

As the title suggests, the program featured a healthy dose of music for the piano. And Shuai Wang proved to be a worthy interpreter with her impressive and committed performances throughout the evening.

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No Exit: Piano Dada at Cleveland Museum of Art

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by Mike Telin 

This week No Exit will continue their season-long multifaceted exploration and celebration of Surrealism on February 9 at 7:30 pm in Gartner Auditorium with “Piano Dada.” The free concert takes an entertaining dive into the realm of dreams, the irrational, the unconscious and the inexplicable.

“We’re very excited about this concert because it is our Cleveland Museum of Art debut,” No Exit’s artistic director Timothy Beyer said during a telephone conversation.

The program will include five works for solo piano performed by Shuai Wang — Francis Picabia’s La Nourrice Américaine (fast) and La Nourrice Américaine (slow), Darius Milhaud’s Caramel Mou, Georges Auric’s Adieu, New York!, and E.L.T. Mesens’ Drie Composities Voor Klavier — as well as a video of Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Anthem.

Beyer noted that with the exception of Milhaud, Picabia, Auric, Mesens and Tzara were not composers per se. “They were artists. But these are great pieces that represent the beginning of avant-garde conceptualized music, which is prevalent today — John Cage took his cues from the Dadist’s playbook.” [Read more…]

No Exit with Zeitgeist: Surreality — the Unconscious at SPACES (Dec. 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

It’s got to be a daunting task to create something even more surreal than what we wake up to every morning in our 21st-century world, but Timothy Beyer and his No Exit new music ensemble are pulling that trick off with élan in their Surreality project during this, their 15th season.

The second chapter — a collaboration with No Exit’s St. Paul, Minnesota counterparts, Zeitgeist, which I caught at SPACES on December 2 — began with a trilogy of movies by Beyer, James Praznik, and Luke Haaksma, and progressed to Zeitgeist & Philip Blackburn’s Between Here and There. That virtuosic concerto for unlikely “instruments” was performed in front of Revelations of the Unconscious Mind (A Surrealist Dreamscape), a center-of-the-gallery, beach-like installation devised by Leila Khoury and Kristen Newell, and studded with objects that shouldn’t be there.

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No Exit & Zeitgeist delve into “The Unconscious”

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by Mike Telin

No Exit continues their Year of Surreality this week with “The Unconscious.” The ensemble will be joined by longtime collaborators Zeitgeist for a program featuring four world premiere films — The Birdhouse, conceived and written by Timothy Beyer and filmed by James Praznik, breathing room by Luke Haaksmsa, In Fourteen Steps by James Praznik, and Between Here and There, a collaboration between Zeitgeist and composer and multimedia artist Philip Blackburn. The free, 7:00 pm performances will be held on Thursday, November 30 at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Recital Hall, Friday, December 1 at Waterloo Arts, and Saturday, December 2 at SPACES.

As part of “The Unconscious,” Cleveland-based artists Leila Khoury and Kristen Newell have created Revelations of the Unconscious Mind (a surrealist dreamscape), which will serve as an exhibit unto itself as well as a performance space. The exhibit is on display at SPACES through December 15.

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No Exit: “Surreal Games” (Oct. 14)

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by Mike Telin

To celebrate their 15th anniversary No Exit has created their most ambitious project to date. Their season-long series Surreality encompasses a range of artistic media to present an immersive, multidisciplinary exploration of surrealism as expressed in music, art, film, poetry, literature, and performance art.

The series kicked off with “Surreal Games,” which took its inspiration from the parlor games and thought exercises employed by the Surrealists. The program featured world premieres of musical works interspersed with poetry, as well as a corresponding art installation titled Collaborage, which was on view at Heights Arts. I attended the performance at SPACES on October 14.

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No Exit: zany, creative, impressive & local (Mar. 26)

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Plenty of pre-recorded concerts have offered audiences some sort of new and compelling experience. But few organizations have mined that format with as much joy and silliness — and in general, personality — as Cleveland’s new music ensemble No Exit. That trend continues with their latest video, released on March 26 and centered around music by Cleveland-area composers.

You won’t want to miss the opening remarks, which turn the obligatory into a comedy routine. One of the best lines delivered by the shadowy head of artistic director Tim Beyer: “Recently, we’ve been flooded with letters from little boys and girls from around the country, all of them asking the same question: Tim, how can we give money to No Exit?”

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No Exit January Concert: premieres & drolleries

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by Daniel Hathaway

New music concerts can run the risk of sinking under the weight of their own self-importance, especially when “world premieres” are involved. Happily, while No Exit takes itself seriously, it goes about its business with a redemptive playfulness, as demonstrated in several of the entries in the hour-long concert that debuted on the ensemble’s YouTube channel on January 29.

Artistic director Timothy Beyer set the tone for the opening work by Jeremy Rapaport-Stein, appearing like the floating head of the Wizard of Oz in a quasi-film noir introduction. Beset with a parched throat, he turned the emcee job over to a ventriloquist’s dummy, who carried on in time-honored vaudeville style while Beyer drank a glass of water. [Read more…]

No Exit presents “New Year, New Works — a Virtual Concert + Commentary Experience”

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by Mike Telin

“Like for a lot of ensembles, this season turned out differently than what we had imagined it would be,” No Exit artistic director Timothy Beyer said during a recent telephone conversation. “All of the music we had planned, we couldn’t do. They were all ensemble pieces, and we are not getting together as an ensemble this season, so we had to commission solo pieces on the quick — we needed to find composers who would not only write something good but also deliver it on time.”

On Friday, January 29 at 7:00 pm, No Exit will present “New Year, New Works — a Virtual Concert + Commentary Experience.” The program will feature world premieres by Tyler Adamthwaite, Inga Chinilina, and Jeremy Rapaport-Stein as well as music by Iannis Xenakis and Giancinto Scelsi. The free performance and program book are available on the ensemble’s website and Facebook page.

“Tyler, Inga, and Jeremy are very gifted and wrote some interesting pieces,” Beyer said. “I’m sure that listeners are going to really enjoy what they experience.” [Read more…]

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