NATASHA TSAKOS' ZERO: THE 21st CENTURY PRINCE

Dear Friends, Up Wakers, and Zeronomers - ZERO and its Green Team would like to thank you for your 7 minutes (and more) last Sunday. Let us Continue...., React with ZERO and let's together move, shift, change and shape our New Planet. 7 minutes every Sunday - 7:53pm to 8:00pm turn off all the lights and give the planet a break.

Thank You-Sincerely,
ZERO and The Green Team

For more info or to contact ZERO and Team: UPWAKE

Natasha Tsakos is a Swiss Artist from Geneva, Switzerland. Natasha was introduced at a very early age to the world of Music, Opera, Ballet, and Film which has been a great window to her imagination.

Natasha made her public debut at age 12, adapting Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" into an original and modern comedy taking place in court. At 13, she discovered Courteline, a French novelist, and decided to memorize, interpret and direct his play "Peace at home". The success of the performance rooted her decision to pursue this career. Independently from her studies, Natasha was attending College level theater classes.

Natasha lived in London, France, Guatemala, and the USA. This gave her the chance to learn and fluently speak French, Spanish and English, though she prefers silence.

Upon arrival in Miami, Natasha studied editing with Mark Boswell at the Art Center of Miami Beach. At 16, she was invited to film and interview Miss World Jacqueline Aguilera Marcano and Miss World Guatemala, Maria Gabriela Rosales. Her documentary was awarded and previewed at the Benefit event of "Nuevos Horizontes" in Antigua.

Her early experience inspired her to explore the many facets of Production. From Film, to Theatre, she also tackled the Visual Arts in an original way. Inheriting the talents from her mother, Catherine de Saugy, acclaimed European painter, Natasha created in 1999, a psychedelic hand painted clothing collection presented by renown fashion designer Gerry Kelly.

She now uses her artistic skills to illustrate her books, create incredible make-up schemes and conceptualize her work through story boards.

She was accepted the same year at one of the nation’s top conservatory: New World School of the Arts and graduated with a BFA in the year 2000.

Natasha has now written 12 original works, directed 20 plays including her own and is the lead performer of nationally acclaimed performance troupe Circ X, a voice over artist at the premiere voice over studio: The Kitchen, a member of Octavio Campos' Hybrid Theater Company Camposition, has been working on her one person show "Up Wake" commissioned by Miami Light Project and co-commissioned by the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts since 2002. Up Wake World Premiered in Nov/Dec 2006 at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts with a successful sold out run. While preparing to perform with Cirque du Soleil for the Super Bowl Opening Ceremony February 4th 2007, Natasha is currently working in taking Up Wake on a Worldwide Tour.

[ INTERVIEW ]

Natasha Tsakos is a Conceptual Director, playwright, actor, and a clown. She will be the first to admit the latter. I met Ms. Tsakos in 2000 when Kokoff was still living out of a suitcase; nothing has changed. Tsakos is a diverse talent who has successfully exploded onto the Miami theater scene with a sold out run of her latest production: Up Wake, presented and commissioned by the Miami Light Project and the new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. A worldwide tour is now in the works. Dean Jorge Guerra of the New World School of the Arts has commented: “Better than Ionesco….,” and Octavio Roca of the Miami New Times says, “Tsakos is like a female Bill Irwin, or like Marcel Marceau on ecstasy.”


RP: Where is Kokoff the clown?

NT: Kokoff is in my closet, with Marceau, my cat. (Kokoff also secretly advises Zero... shhhhhhh... it’s our secret)

RP: Natasha, your performance world is infinitely at play. Tell us about that explosive chain of moments when you’re on the stage. Is it still a child like game for you to access your imagination or is it different now?

NT: A child. me hihihihihihihihihihihihihoiahahahahahahahahahaahhohohohhohoHohohohhhihihihihihhhhhhhhhhhohoihohhhhhhahahahahahahaahahahahaahahahahahahgigglegigglegigglegigglggiglgiglgiglgiglgiglgighihihihihihihihih.... ...yes, more than ever...

RP: What inspires you?

NT: Life. Dreams. Beauty. Greatness. And all that exists beyond our wildest dreams.

RP: How has traveling influenced your creative life?

NT: The physical travels? Or the mental travels? (I have many reward points for the last ones.)

RP: You studied editing with Mark Boswell. He was also a professor of mine at the Alliance Film & Video Co-op on Lincoln Road – Miami Beach. At the time of my meeting him in 1993 he was preparing to shoot his super 8mm extravaganza: The Subversion Agency. How and when did you get interested in editing and film?

NOVAKINO Presents: Mark Boswell's The Subversion Agency



NT: I think it was a natural progression at the time, from having a camera to wanting to edit…

RP: What was it like studying film with Boswell? Any anecdotes?

NT: My memory works in a strange emo-synthesis process, a sort of consumption-absorption- to-sensation metamorphosis (without the psychological weight). Mark Boswell: Hmmmm.... I remember: gray- hair- spiky- American- cool- far- creative - mission.

RP: What films were you watching at the time? Any influences there?

NT: My life was one... still is!

RP: You made a documentary after your film studies. Is this field a further pursuit of yours? What have been some of your experiences working outside the theater? Filmmaking on your horizon?

NT: We are currently making a documentary about the making of Up Wake, which consists of 4 years worth of footage, and will be submitting it to Sundance next year. Yes, I am interested in all realms of Human Inventions: Architecture, Science, Physics, Philosophy and the Study of Pink Elephants.

RP: You are currently preparing for a world tour of UPWAKE. Will this start mainly in the U.S? Tell us about the upcoming schedule and places you’ll visit?

NT: UP WAKE has been voted Best Performance of the Year by South Florida's Sunpost. After a successful sold out run at the Carnival Center (2nd largest Performing Arts Center in the Nation) UP WAKE will be touring Mexico in 2 weeks and has been invited to Asia's and India’s Largest Festival of Technology on January 08. UP WAKE will open the Sobay Festival of the Arts in Miami, in February 08. Currently negotiating Europe and my Moon Tour. Of course….

RP: What is the writing process like for you? Does it start with an abstract idea? Where do you write?

NT: When I write, I don’t write. The hand, finds the pen, the pen finds the hand, the fingers hold on, on holds the finger, the mind leaves, and all is suddenly better. When I am conscious of what I write, that’s when I know it is not worth writing. Right?

RP: What are some of the themes you have explored through playwriting and why?

NT: I love inventing language, re-de-un-structure grammar, tease our sacred orthography
and confuse myself immensely. I take great pleasure in sensical nonsenseness. Truth. Absurdity. Fool. Lunacy. These are words I may leave intact in the dictionary.

RP: Which are your favorite playwrights/writers?

NT: Edmond Rostand, Eric Emmanuel Schmidt, Christian Bobin, Antoine de Saint Exupery....

RP: What is storytelling to you?

NT: ...If you please: Draw me a Sheep.

RP: The Up Wake journey, what has it been like? Where did ZERO come from?

NT: Up Wake is still a Journey. Wonderful, Exhilarating and Magical. A great process, with amazing collaborators, deeply moving audience, and a fantastic roofless twilight school of ethics, imagination, spine, value and friendships.

ZERO comes from void and infinity. From the need to de-segragate and de-genderize ourselves, Zero is the pure form of a little, simple and vulnerable individual struggling to go from point A to B while an amalgam of frequencies interfere, elevate and distract him. Zero is the Little Prince of the 21st Century, a corporate clown, a simply delightful creature of hope and humanity. The perfect image of you and me.

RP: Production wise, behind the scenes, who are some of the key talented people on this great show?

NT: There are 19 people behind the Up Wake 3D curtain! Waow.... where do credits begin? I mean can I include my door who cried one morning, and the minuscule seahorse that rides a unicycle on the electric wire outside my window? Alright...

If you insist:

Octavio Campos (Co-Director, Choreographer)
Nathan Rausch / ZendeN Multimedia (Sound Designer)
The Lavoisier X-Perience (Original Tailor-Made Music)
Ray Aloy (3D Animator)
George Delacadena (3D Animator)
Melissa Camic (3D Animator)
Oscar Baracaldo (3D Animator)
Shattered Images Animation Studio (3D animation studio / Up Wake part II animation)
Travis Neff (Lighting Designer / Production Stage Manager)
Carolina Pagani (Production Coordinator, Installation Artist, Set Designer, Photographer)
Gerry Kelly (Haute Couture Costume Design)
Tammy Apóstol (Haute Couture Costume Design)
M. Tate Tenorio (Chair designer)
Aubrey Zappolo (Green Screen Project Director & Up Wake Documentarian)
Circ X/ Diana Lozano (Sponsor, Green Screen Costume Producer )
Jorge Valdes-Iga (Green Screen Director of Photography)
Capsule Media: Pascal Jaquelin (Animation Supervisor)
Capsule Media: Gigliola Gennaro (Animation Supervisor)

RP: How do you treat silence and where do you find it? Is it created?

NT:

Inside.
Outside.
Above.
Beyond...
in me.
and you.
Shhhhhh.......Lets’ listen to it...

RP: Is silence really golden?

NT: No. It’s an expression! Silence is silence.

[ NATASHA TSAKOS' MANIFESTO ]

I am alone, on a path leading toward a little light, walking with my suitcase and my theater. Together we create worlds of wonder, reverie and contemplation.

Theater is the listener of my passions, my dreams and my absurdities.

Sometimes the Musician of Life takes the simple instrument that I am and composes… At that moment, time is lost and I am found. At that moment, I know that my life is not a notion but a feeling that I experience.

Theater is intimate, personal yet universal. It is a mean of communication and we must use it to change and inspire Society.

No, theater is not dying. Theater is too comfortable, too rich and too corrupted, that is the truth.
As a believer of life, hope and humanity, I will keep questioning. I will keep making you dream. I will keep provoking you, the audience, the reader, so You can also reanimate values lost amongst Mediocrity and save what was one the ultimate of refinement.

Should the street be my only stage, so will I make it the best stage, and you, my best listeners.

Theater is not show business nor simple entertainment. Theater is poor, ugly, hard, profound and beautiful… I am not looking for fame or money, these elements are superficial, selfish and limited.

So I shall continue walking on that path alone, toward the light that justifies the sweat, the tears, the disappointments and the moments of joy, finding great minds and souls and sharing a world of purity.

Natasha Tsakos

Watch Natasha's amazing performance show, UPWAKE on YouTube.

PEOPLE: STEFAN RUIZ

Actress, Yadhira Carrillo © Stefan Ruiz, from the exhibition The Factory of Dreams, 2005.


Stefan Ruiz was born in San Francisco, California. He studied painting and sculpture at UC Santa Cruz and spent one year studying painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Italy. After graduation, he travelled to West Africa to document Islam’s influence on traditional West African art. As a result, Ruiz began specializing in photography and applied his experience as a painter to his photography. On returning to California, he began showing the photos he had taken while in Africa. This resulted in a grant from The Color Purple Scholarship Foundation to pursue his independent work.



Kazakh Portraits


At this time, he also began seven years of teaching art to the inmates from the main line and on death row at San Quentin State Prison. In addition to teaching, he began shooting portraits for magazines. He has now been photographing professionally for 12 years. From December 2002 to January 2004, he was the Creative Director of COLORS Magazine. His work has been shown in the Havana Biennale (Cuba, 2003), PhotoEspaña (Madrid, 2003), and Howard Greenberg Gallery (Tokyo, 2000).




Stefan Ruiz’s first book is about people – about the diversity of the world and the fragility of the human condition. It’s also a portfolio of work by an emerging photographer, with a distinct and original way of seeing the world and of making photographs.




Bodies of work from diverse places and locations – from a Rwandan refugee camp to Birmingham in Britain’s West Midlands, a Cuban asylum to a dance hall in Mexico City – are sequenced into a single essay, linked by Ruiz’s singular aesthetic point of view, his preoccupations with issues of racial and physical identity, his particular identification with people’s vulnerability, and with details of his own autobiography.



Merv Griffin

These are raw and edgy photographs in which people reveal themselves. They are often uplifting, certainly beautiful, yet we often feel we are on the edge of madness. It seems clear that Ruiz identifies with his subjects, even when he displays a trace of irony (for instance in his portraits of participants in the Texan Miss Rodeo contest), yet they are never exploitative. His ability to make pictures that show sincere respect, yet that manage to be so revealing, is a central characteristic of his talents. He has conjured a world that is uniquely his own.

The book deals with several themes, all rooted in his own story. Born in California of Mexican and Italian parents, he is torn between the perspectives of a Mexican underclass and the classical values of old world Europe. A key figure – even though Ruiz doesn’t tell us much about him – is his grandfather Leo. The first photograph in the book (and the earliest photograph included) is a portrait of Leo, and the last is a portrait of him in his coffin.

Stefan Ruiz's pictures reveal the fragility of the "family of man." With photographs of his own family, Mexican soap stars, Cuban mental asylum patients, Texan cowgirls, and Rwandan refugees, among celebrity portraits including Liza Minnelli, James Brown, and Jenna Jameson, this essay is the remarkable first book of a uniquely talented image-maker.

Ruiz chooses to shoot on a large format 5”x4” plate camera, which imposes formality and the discipline of carefully composing each shot. Porfolios of his editorial and commercial work can be found on The Katy Barker Company website below.


STEFAN RUIZ
THE KATY BARKER COMPANY

JOSE BEDIA HANGS OUT AT VERSAILLES ON 8TH STREET. MIAMI, FLORIDA.

Hermano Maximón


Born in 1959, he is a Havana native. Bedia was trained in a traditional academic style, but his work promotes his interest in the indigenous cultures of Africa, America, Mexico and South America. He graduated from San Alejandro in Havana and is considered part of the '80's generation.



Algo incontrolable


The artist lived and worked at the State University of New York and with the Dakota Sioux on the Rosebud Reservation. Bedia returned to Cuba where his work was influenced by native Cuban religions.



Aquellas Extrañas Confluencias


His works have been included in the Biennials of Sao Paulo and Venice and many of the large scale exhibitions of Latin American Art such as the 1993 exhibition of Latin American Artists from the 20th Century at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bedia lives in Miami.



Final de la Partida


Tan rapido que apenas

José Bedía's latest solo exhibitions include: Ultimo fruto de temporada, Iturralde Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, You Had to be There, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL, Nsila - El Camino: José Bedia and the Spirit's Path in Congo Art, Cantor Art Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. His latest group exhibitions include: Visual Poetics: Art and the Word, Miami Art Museum, FL, Drawing Conclusions, Buena Vista Building, Miami, FL.


Figura predestinada


LIVES:
Florida

EDUCATION:
Superior Institute of Art, Havana, 1981.
School of Art of San Alejandro, Havana, 1976.

AWARDS:
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation International Fellowship, 1994.
Premio de la II Bienal de La Habana, Cuba 1986.
Gran Premio del Salon del Paisaje, Havana, 1982.

HARRY CALLAHAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHER AT WORK

Eleanor - New York 1945


Harry Callahan (1912–1999) was one of the most influential photographic artists of the twentieth century. A master of modernist experimentation, Callahan explored a range of subjects—from landscapes to city streets to portraits of his wife—and techniques throughout his career.



Eleanor and Barbara - Chicago 1953


Born in Detroit, Michigan. He is recognized as one of the great masters of photography. He has been a part of countless exhibitions worldwide including retrospectives at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has received numerous awards including the National Medal of Arts, Distinguished Career in Photography Award, Friends of Photographers Lifetime Achievement Award, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award.



Detroit 1943


By 1946, he was appointed by László Moholy-Nagy to teach photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Callahan retired in 1977, at which time he was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design.



Atlanta 1984


Callahan left almost no written records--no diaries, letters, scrapbooks or teaching notes. His technical photographic method was to go out almost every morning, walk the city he lived in and take numerous pictures. He then spent almost every afternoon making proof prints of that day's best negatives. Yet, for all his photographic activity, Callahan, at his own estimation, produced no more than half a dozen final images a year.



Atlanta 1985


He photographed his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara, and the streets, scenes and buildings of cities where he lived, showing a strong sense of line and form, and light and darkness. He also worked with multiple exposures. Callahan's work was a deeply personal response to his own life. He was well known to encourage his students to turn their cameras on their lives, and he led by example. Even as he did this he was not sentimental, romantic or emotional. Callahan illustrated the centrality of Eleanor in his life by his continual return to her over 15 years as his prime subject -- she was subject more than model -- but the images are not about who she was, what she did, what she thought as an individual. Callahan's art was a long meditation on the possibilities of photography as it might be used playfully, but not naively.



Untitled#5


Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960. He photographed her everywhere--at home, in the city streets, in the landscape; alone, with their daughter, in black and white and in color, nude and clothed, distant and close. He tried every technical experiment--double and triple exposure, blurs, large camera and small. The attitude of respect and warmth permeates the endeavor.



Kansas City 1981

In 1950, his daughter, Barbara, was born, and even prior to her birth she showed up in pregnancy photographs. From 1948 to 1953, Eleanor, and sometimes Barbara, were shown out in the landscape as a tiny counterpoint to large expanses of park, skyline or water. No matter how small a part of the scene they are, they still dominate the viewer's perception.



Morroco 1981


Callahan left behind 100,000 negatives and over 10,000 proof prints. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which actively collects, preserves, interprets and makes available materials that are essential to understanding photography and its history and which holds more archives and individual works by 20th-century North American photographers than any other museum in the world, maintains the photographic archives of Harry Callahan.



Untitled#6-1950


Harry Callahan produced several monographs of his work including Harry Callahan (1996), Water’s Edge (1980), Harry Callahan: Color (1980), Callahan (1976), Photographs: Harry Callahan (1965), The Multiple Image (1961), and On My Eyes (1960). His work is held in the collections of numerous museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the George Eastman House, New York.

CHRIS RUBINO: FAQs in HONG KONG

Frequently Answered Questions is the first solo show of Chris Rubino’s work in Hong Kong.

Hosted by the Academy of Visuals Arts, the exhibit will consist of all new print work, mostly one of a kind screenprints. The work and the exhibition is inspired by overheard conversations (in public) as well as conversations directed at/or with the artist, all of which have taken place in the past year. The work is an abstract narrative within six 30 foot prints as well as a number of smaller heavily layered images.

Chris Rubino is a New York City-based artist/designer whose work has been exhibited in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and the U.S. He recently has created Commercial artwork for such clients as The New York Times, Banana Republic & The NY Public Theater. He also runs a Brooklyn-based silk-screen studio named Studio18Hundred that makes limited edition posters for bands such as The Rapture, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Vetiver.

Some of his work can be found in a number of recent book publications including Die Gestalten's A Book Designed to Help, Romantik, IDN Iconography, Maximalism & Sonic/Visuals for Music. A series of his posters has recently been added to the permanent collection at the Museum of Design in Zurich.

Chris Rubino was chosen as a 2006 ADC Young Gun.


FAQs: Frequently Answered Questions
October 9th to November 4th 2007
Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong