Laine Rettmer

Film | Stage

Laine Rettmer is a video artist and opera director whose work explores performance, gender, and methods of social control. Her work has been shown at The Clay Arts Center (2018), the Museum of Fine Art (2017), the

Boston Independent Film Festival (2017), FPAC (2017), Manifesta (2016), Yuan Art Museum (2016), Yve Yang Gallery (2016), Perkins and Ping (2016), Present Company (2015), NADA NY, NADA Presents, (2014). For the past four years she was the resident stage director for the New York based company LoftOpera, with whom her Macbeth last December received a Freddie Award for best new production, and her Barber of Seville was named one of the top 10 classical music productions of 2014 by the New York Times. She has also worked extensively on new opera with companies such as New York City Opera, Ecce Ensemble, Guerrilla Opera, Rhymes with Opera, and Fresh Squeezed Opera. Recent awards received include a MAP Fund grant for a collaborative opera, Standby Snow: Chronicle of a Heat Wave, a Fellowship from the Center for Arts Design and Social Research, a Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, an Art School Alliance Fellowship from HFBK Hamburg and a residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland. Rettmer is currently a Residential Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and teaching at Northeastern University. She holds a BFA from New York University and a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts.

Oliver Hagen

Conductor

Conductor/Pianist Oliver Hagen was born in New York City in 1986. In 2010 Oliver was named Assistant Conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. In this position, Oliver mainly assisted music director, Susanna Mälkki; he also worked there with Pierre Boulez, Peter

Eötvös, Ludovic Morlot, and Matthias Pintscher. In April and May of 2012, Oliver served as Assistant Conductor at the Paris Opéra Comique, conducting staging rehearsals for a world premiere opera by Marco Stroppa, Re Orso. Earlier this year, Oliver made his début with the musicians of the National Orchestra of Lyon, conducting Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with former Bayreuth soprano, Anja Silja. Since 2010, Oliver has appeared in concert with American and French ensembles such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Linea, Ensemble soundinitiative, the Firebird Ensemble, and the Orchestra of the League of Composers. Oliver conducted the Ecce Ensemble for the first time in March of 2012.

In the summers of 2010 and 2011, Oliver was Assistant Conductor to Pierre Boulez, David Robertson, and Peter Eötvös at the Lucerne Festival Academy; Oliver conducted the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble in concert in 2011, performing Stockhausen’s Kontra-punkte and Kreuzspiel. As part of his duties as Assistant Conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Oliver served as Assistant Conductor for the Paris Conservatory Orchestra on several concerts.

Oliver holds a bachelor of music degree in clarinet and composition, and a master of music degree in conducting—both from the Eastman School of Music.

Colin Gee

Movement

Born in California and trained as an actor at the Dell’ Arte School of Physical Theater (1991-1992) and the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris (1994 – 1996), Colin Gee was the founding Whitney Live artist-in-residence at the

Whitney Museum of American Art, and the 2009 visiting artist-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine. He performed as a clown in the Cirque du Soleil production Dralion (2001-’04), and has created works for film, performance and opera since 2002.

Works in 2014 include concert/opera Mouthpiece XX (story, direction, and performance, composed by and performed with Erin Gee) with Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, at Vienna Konzerthaus; and Mouthpiece VI+I, (composed by Erin Gee) performed with Fonema consort in Chicago. Also in 2014 he delivered the Lorado Taft Lectureship on Art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In 2011 Gee was awarded a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for Frontier, a solo theatrical opera. Previous residencies for Frontier include NYU / Gallatin, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, New York Theater Workshop, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center and the Whitney Museum. Workshop showings of Frontier have taken place at New York Theatre Workshop, Watermill Center, and LaGuardia Performing Arts Center.

In 2013 In the first place…, an EMPAC Dance Movies Commission was installed at EMPAC, and the video series I, who am the chorus, was produced by Wayne Ashley’s FuturePerfect. Two Satires (2012), a musical character study composed by Martin Brody, was performed in March with the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic at the American Academy in Rome.

The Fabulist (2011), an evening-length work on the Fables of Jean de la Fontaine was commissioned by, and premiered at, the French Institute Alliance Francaise in New York. It was also included in the Kids Euro festival, produced by the French Embassy in Washington DC, also in November 2011.