Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency 2025 Awards

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Animal J. Smith – Chia Amisola – Cyrah L. Ward – Jean Carla Rodea – L&M – Matt Robidoux – Merlin Coleman

Animal J. Smith

Nothing, and Then Suddenly Something (or The Myth of Animal J. Smith) is a multimodal performance blending theater, electronic and analog music, muscular poetics, polemical song, and layered film and projection. Conceived by the Europe-based queer collective ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS (Chris Gylee and Aslan), the work reimagines the life of the enigmatic performance artist who vanished after his last public appearance in San Francisco in 1997. Tracing his road back to art after losing his Lower Manhattan home in 2001, the piece uses forward-facing technology for wired and wireless international collaboration among the artists. Animal J. Smith

Chia Amisola

Chia Amisola’s Lost World Archive is a collaborative, site-specific installation and performance envisioning a civilization lost to computational collapse. Part fictive laboratory, part archive, it unveils ‘recovered’ artifacts exploring tensions between generativity and refusal, rebirth and repetition, ecology and mutation. Through performance-lectures, workshops, and participatory research, audiences encounter IoT (Internet of Trees) antennas, vaporware-filled televisions, and websites that enact borders—speculative relics from a vanished future. The work invites reflection on how technologies might be archived and reparations imagined for worlds both familiar and distant.

Cyrah L. Ward

Created by Cyrah L. Ward and Gerson Lanza, Footprints: Meditations n’ Migration explores the shared histories of migration among Black and Afro-Latinx peoples. Through tap dance, Afro-fusion movement, oral storytelling, and the sonic landscape of jazz, the work examines migration as both alluring and daunting, exhilarating and exhausting. This evening-length piece draws on individual dialects, shuffling feet, and layered rhythms to illuminate the many experiences found in the act of migration.

Jean Carla Rodea

Inspired by breath in all its forms—from quiet exhalations to drifting fog—Jean Carla Rodea’s Brume, commissioned by Splinter Reeds, explores air as both bodily experience and elemental force. Supported by a 2024 Musical Grant Program award from Intermusic SF, it uses spatialized sound, light, and video to transform the Dresher space into a resonant human/nonhuman phonatory system. Incorporating voice, clarinets, bassoon, tenor saxophone, electronics, and field recordings, Rodea weaves asynchronous sonic storytelling, exploring breath, air, and vocal resonance as evolving motifs in a dynamic multilogue.

L&M (Liam Herb and Milo Moyer-Battick)

meet you at the park? During their DEAR residency, L&M will design and build an indoor skate park of minimal ramps and obstacles, transforming them into playable instruments amplified through homemade synthesizers, effects, and computer programs. Local skaters will be invited to skate during the event, activating the ramps as part of a live sound installation. L&M will collaborate with Bay Area artists on construction, layout, and painted surfaces, blending sculpture, movement, sound, painting, and relational aesthetics — amplifying the community-driven act of creating safe spaces for skaters to gather and practice.

Matt Robidoux

lichen forming (for aluminum corn) by Matt Robidoux explores symbiotic relationships between organic forms and technological systems, drawing on Stockhausen’s moment form, where each section is its own ecosystem. Using cast aluminum corn controllers, the piece blurs boundaries between natural and artificial realms. During his residency, Robidoux will expand the work into an evening-length collaboration with Bay Area artists 5K Candle (video synthesis), Dana Hemenway (sculpture), and Cat Lauigan (textiles). Combining motion capture, spatial audio, and reactive projections, the team will create an immersive environment where movement, sound, and light interact in constantly shifting ways.

Merlin Coleman

Merlin Coleman’s 40-minute, non-linear song cycle DISPATCHES from the CHARCOAL FOREST for six voices and quadraphonic soundscape reflects on fire, emergency, and aftermath. Drawing on interviews with firefighters, cleanup crews, and ecologists—along with 911 dispatch calls and fire-and-brimstone preaching—the work surrounds the audience with sound as singers move among them. Developed with a sound engineer, choreographer, and six professional singers, it will be staged in the round over the next two years.