On 2 February, TORCHES continues with a conversation with Paul Pinto, a composer, writer, performer of multidisciplinary music, opera-theatre, and installation.
Paul Pinto creates multi-disciplinary music, opera-theatre, installation, and performance, sometimes with his longtime friends thingNY and Varispeed. Some highlights include Meredith Monk's Indra's Net, Patriots with Jeff Young, Gelsey Bell's mɔɹnɪŋ, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, the cyclorama video installation Whiteness with Kameron Neal, an ongoing re-arrangement of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, and his first opera Thomas Paine in Violence. He sang and danced on Broadway in Dave Malloy's Great Comet of 1812. Recent and upcoming projects include Water Music (an album and soundwalk on Gold Bolus Recordings), String Quartet No. 3 ‘Octet’ (Rhythm Method and Bergamot Quartets), The All-Father (a new take on Wagner’s Ring Cycle), and the operatic monodrama Mano a Mano, directed by Kristin Marting. A child of immigrants, born and raised in Richmond Hill, Queens, Paul now proudly calls Jersey City his home, because that's where his wife, child, and vegetable garden are.
TORCHES: 30+ Years of Downtown Performance
As co-founder of HERE Arts Center—described by the Obie committee as “a lasting home for the weird and wild in downtown performance”—Kristin Marting spent the past three decades immersed in making, witnessing, and supporting groundbreaking performance in New York City. TORCHES is a much needed exploration of New York City’s unique and influential downtown performance world from the 1990s through the 2020s. Part memoir, part oral history, and part cultural inquiry, TORCHES offers in-depth video conversations with more than thirty of the most imaginative and boundary pushing artists working in the field today. TORCHES is both a living archive and an offering for the future. Learning about these artists and their work is not just looking back; it can ignite what’s coming next. They are not only inventors of form—they are keepers of community, fire-starters for our future. See more about the project on the TORCHES website at torchesnyc.org.
Comments
The article is just the start of the conversation—we want to know what you think about this subject, too! HowlRound is a space for knowledge-sharing, and we welcome spirited, thoughtful, and on-topic dialogue. Find our full comments policy here.