As part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art presented by the FETA Foundation, Swedish composer Adrian Knight joins four University of Miami composition grad students, for an evening of guitars, violin, saxophone, narration and lots of electronics.

By the fourth time the rows of fifth graders were exhorted to raise their voices, they were psyched. “Roooooaaaaaaarhhhh,” they again shouted. This time it worked. The community had spoken; bullying muscle-bound storm god Anzu was routed; the huluppu tree was liberated!

You actually could leave the kids home and still thoroughly enjoy Inanna and the Huluppu Tree. Combining music, dance, aerial acrobatics and theater, the piece was created by Miami Theater Center (MTC)’s founder, Stephanie Ansin and artistic collaborator, Fernando Calzadilla. Based on ancient Sumerian myths, and featuring original music by Luciano Stazzone with choreography by Octavio Campos and aerial choreography by Lleigh Reynolds, it is presented at the MTC in Miami Shores.

If yours are not among the busloads of South Florida schoolchildren lining up for weekday morning performances, bring them to a Saturday evening show. A well-produced study guide serves as a crib sheet to the unfamiliar names and the story line, while also giving props to Sumerian innovations: the wheel, writing, irrigation, arithmetic, the hover-craft. (Not really, but Inanna’s brother Utu’s nimble horseless chariot is slick.)

Actually, the play’s strongest take-away lies in its moral messages, rather than historical lessons. These are first intoned by Great Grandmother Earth, Goddess Ninhursag (Shaneeka Harrell), in a resounding invocation to the play’s principals, her offspring. And more injunctions percolate up during the course of a drama that is delivered in a flowing sequence of short songs, performed with varying degrees of finesse; a wide-ranging musical backdrop; and dances created by Campos in an appealing diversity of fanciful styles — Middle Eastern-ish.

As the play opens, three masked acolytes peer through a richly painted scrim and nervously ask, “Where is he? Where is he?” A restive crowd in the ancient city of Uruk impatiently awaits the coronation of a new king, Prince Gilgamesh (Rico Reid), son of the late king. But he is AWOL, and the play’s namesake character, Inanna (vivacious Diana Garle) — goddess of love, war, fertility, plus a few other divine attributes — is desperate. She has descended with haunting luminosity from heaven to crown Gilgamesh, and he is a no-show. What’s a goddess to do? Stage a diversion.

Enter the huluppu tree. Uprooted and washed adrift in a river of the Urukians’ tears (grieving their king’s death), this sapling was rescued by Inanna, and, after a three-generation divine family dust-up, she plants it next to the temple to serve as a time-marker for the arrival of a new king. Thus, we have our diversion.

But in drama, as in life, plans go awry. Replete with golden fruit and elegantly crafted in graceful wooden arcs and poles, the huluppu tree stands commandingly center stage. It grows thicker and denser before our eyes. An attractive nuisance, however, it soon hosts an unwelcome encampment of three lively new deities (the Sumerians had thousands of them), two of whom flap, roar, swoop and somersault in the air: Luckner Bruno’s thunder-cracking Anzu and acrobatic goddess of merriment and laughter, Siduri (Ana Mendez). They are lifted and propelled with skill and strength by unseen stagehands. (Tip of the hat to Cirque du Soleil, Crouching Tiger and MTC technical director, Ron Burns.)

These oversize characters, each with a distinctive trick bag, neglect official duties to instead cavort, vie for position and devour the tasty huluppu fruit (a few of which they toss into the audience). Among these three freeloaders, the “pharmacist” Ningizzida, (Troy Davidson) eloquently exploits his jokester role and his signature props: a roulette wheel of maladies and herbal remedies and a multi-pocketed cloak of herbs. Inanna is stymied by these loafing lodgers, but then Prince Gilgamesh, the would-be king, returns from his pilgrimage and is put to the test: Can he turn out the freeloaders and restore order to the kingdom? Can Inanna keep him on track, avoiding violence? Will the audience repeatedly surge to his aid? (Does Superman wear a cape?)

Some of the larger-than-life characters are effectively amped-up with computer-enhanced voices and, in the case of Anzu, by that glorious steroidal body armor, enormous wings and yellow-feathered legs. Subtleties of staging and delivery are interwoven amid broader styles of engagement with an indulgent and mostly guileless audience, reared on The Lion King, Star Wars and Xbox. The assembly eagerly embraces this combination of old and new stylings.

In the music, sound design, choreography and deep, richly layered set, we inhabit an ambiguous milieu, but when did you last encounter “authentic” Sumerian music or dance? A combination of live percussion (musicians perched in a Mondrian-like scaffolding within a luminous cathedral of modulated blue light) and commissioned music evocative of such diverse sources as John Williams’ extra-terrestrial scores, early rap and Putamayo’s Arabic Groove carries us through tonal moods that complement the drama. Never outright campy, the playwrights, director, choreographer and actors give an occasional wink to avoid sanctimoniousness, even as they preach that old time religion.

Confession one: My wife and I have no children. Confession two: We cheered with the best of them. You will too.

May 1 – June 2, 2013 at the Miami Theater Center, 9806 N.E. 2nd Ave., Miami Shores; at 10:00 a.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 7:00 p.m. Saturdays; cost is $20; 305-751-9550; www.mtcmiami.org.

A new performance and theater work from local choreographer and writer Rudi Goblen set in a support-group meeting for the broken-hearted, directed by Michael Yawney, presented by Miami Light Project.

Argentinian Aslan reinterprets the master of jazz-tango fusion Astor Piazolla with his quintet, in the last performance of MDC Live Arts season.

Part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art, presented by the FETA Foundation, the Treble Girls feature Anne La Berge on flute and electronics, Diamanda La Berge Dramm on violin and vocals.

The MDC Live Arts series closes its 2012-13 season with the Brooklyn-based bassist and Argentinean bandleader Pablo Aslan and his quintet performing Piazzolla in Brooklyn this Saturday, April 20, at The Colony Theatre. Aslan’s work from his 2011 recording and follow-up to his Latin Grammy and Grammy-nominated Tango Grill, continues a tradition in fusion of jazz and tango first explored by Astor Piazzolla, tango composer and bandonéon virtuoso, the father of nuevo tango in the 1950s.

After World War II both jazz and tango moved out of the dance halls and ballrooms and into the popular clubs and concert halls, both becoming music to listen to with a much more diminished role for dancing. What saxophonist Charlie Parker and the other early beboppers were doing for jazz, Argentinean Piazzolla was doing for tango.

Piazzolla, while living in New York, was looking for commercial success in the United States, which led to his jazz/tango work Take Me Dancing, recorded in 1959. His nuevo tango introduced sax and electric guitar to tango, mixed electric and acoustic instruments, and fused harmonic and melodic structures.

Miami Herald, JazzTimes and Artburst contributor and critic Fernando González wrote in his 2013 Grammy-nominated liner notes for Piazzolla in Brooklyn that “the Piazzolla of Take Me Dancing was a musician desperately juggling artistic ambitions and subsistence needs. He was back in New York City, where he had spent most of his childhood, but now with a wife and two kids, and looking for a fresh new start for a sputtering career.

“The pearl of this work was supposed to be Take Me Dancing, a recording of both originals and jazz standards interpreted by his Jazz Tango Quintet, comprising electric guitar, vibes, piano, and bass, plus small percussion.”

The recording was anything but a commercial success, and as González recalls, even Piazzolla remarked how dreadful it was. However, his ideas about jazz-tango served to inspire Aslan to reevaluate the work and give it an open-minded listen. A master himself in the fusion of the languages of jazz and tango for the last 20 years, Aslan revisited Piazzolla’s pieces with the sensibility of jazz.

In his interview with González, Aslan says of Take Me Dancing that “the themes and the ideas were very strong and original, but some of them just went by too fast. I felt there were many places where the music could be opened up and developed further. That was the Eureka moment, when I realized that the material in this record had a potential that just needed to be unleashed.” González further says that the arrangements by Piazzolla for nine of those original 1959 pieces became the “road map” for Aslan’s Piazzolla in Brooklyn. Besides having the earlier work as a guide, one important element that Aslan had that Piazzolla didn’t was “an ensemble of musically bilingual players as knowledgeable and comfortable with the vocabulary, syntax, and rhythms of tango as they are with jazz.”

Piazzolla in Brooklyn should not be confused for a tribute album or a remake. Instead it is the culmination of an ongoing conversation between jazz and tango, over 50 years in the making.

As part of MDC Live Arts’ commitment to create meaningful educational experiences, two classes will be offered for MDC students, geared towards providing a musical and historical framework to this fusion of jazz and tango. In the first class, González leads a multimedia, curated listening session that will explore the music of Piazzolla within the history and evolution of tango. The second class is a live music clinic led by Aslan for NWSA music students that traces the innovations and techniques that popularized tango and jazz in the Americas. Both events offer students a unique opportunity to draw connections across cultures, nations, generations, and genres.

MDC Live presents Pablo Aslan Quintet on Sat., April 20 at 8:00 p.m., the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd.,, Miami Beach. Tickets are $25 for general public and $10 for MDC students; 305 237-3010; www.mdclivearts.org.

Space and sound are closely related, even if it often goes unnoticed. Over the course of two weeks, many of the performances at the Subtropics Festival in Miami Beach confronted this relationship.

Paula Matthusen, a former Miami resident, spent hours recording sounds in New York City’s historic engineered underground, including Old Croton Aqueduct, which was used in the 19th century to deliver water to the city. Her surround-sound composition prominently featured the acoustic hallmarks of water dripping in caves, even incorporating sounds of a tour guide at one point. But particularly striking were the shifts to a new space. The sonic difference between an underground tunnel and the outdoors is significant, and without a visual aid, the listener is struck by the contrast.

At one moment, we abruptly moved from the watery echo of the aqueduct to silence. The background sounds disappeared, replaced by a loud, violent metallic sound, like a hammer striking a metal pipe. In a soundscape composition, these are the equivalents of themes and melodies, and indeed Matthusen described her piece as a “theme and variations.”

Water was also prevalent in Dafna Naphtali’s performance. Naphtali is a New-York based vocalist who uses computer processing to significantly alter her voice during performance. In one piece called “Dripsodisiac,” she made sounds with her voice that recalled dripping water. The computer then took those sounds, repeated them, and spun them around the speakers that surrounded the audience, creating a wet, sonic space that falls somewhere between a natural environment and a digital one.

Ron Kuivila performed a piece from his laptop that incorporated dial tones, ring tones, and FAX machine sounds from different countries, combining them with actual analog telephones stationed around the room, the sort you will remember if you were alive in the 1970s. The dial tones and the ringing telephones with their bell gave a nostalgic quality to the piece, a reminder that sounds can go extinct like wild animals. Now we can hear them in a gallery, but how much longer will they be found in their natural habitat?

These performances took place at Audiotheque, a studio in the ArtCenter South Florida building at 924 Lincoln Rd. Gustavo Matamoros, the sound artist and director of Subtropics, has turned it into a performance space that seats around 40 people, surrounded by speakers. The intimate atmosphere complements the music, allowing the electronics to stay at a comfortable volume while still conveying subtle nuances. And the audience feels at home, enough to ask a lot of questions after the performance.

The festival included several performances at other locations, including Matamoros’s trio Frozen Music at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens, also featuring David Dunn and Rene Barge. On a beautiful sunny day, children climbed around the many nooks of the garden, and speakers surrounding the open grassy lawn produced an urban collage of sounds. Chief among the mix was a six-hour recording of Dunn’s electronic automaton, which produces a never-repeating, chaos-driven stream of beeps and hums and bloops, sort of like Finnegan’s Wake performed by an Atari.

The sounds were reminiscent of mockingbirds, and much like Natali’s water drips, they produced a curious effect that sounded both natural and synthetic at the same time. The same can be said of the Botanical Gardens, a beautiful space that achieves much of its beauty through human manipulation of nature, and that can’t entirely escape the rumble of busses and traffic on the surrounding streets.

In a different context, these same sounds can kill. In a lecture the day before, Dunn had described his fascinating work recording the communicative sounds of bark beetles — a parasite that is devastating hardwood forests across North America. Before Dunn, no one realized how chatty the beetles were, as the sounds are very quiet and can only be picked up by special microphones embedded in the tree. Working with biologists, Dunn developed his electronic automaton in part to kill the beetles. By piping the sound into a tree, the beetles become disoriented, uncommunicative, and unable to reproduce.

The Subtropics festival will return in two years, and while at times it may be challenging and provocative, it will absolutely not affect your reproductive abilities.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to catch more music and sound art along these lines, check out Phill Niblock’s piece Aomoni Water playing at the 24/7 outdoor Listening Gallery (underneath the awning) at 800 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach. On Sat., April 20, you can check out The Treble Girls at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, 2000 Convention Ctr. Dr., Miami Beach ,at 5:00 p.m. –  a mother-daughter duo featuring flute, violin, voice, and electronics. Part of the 12 Nights of Electronic Music and Art, a production of The Feta Foundation; 12nights.org; $7.

Image: Dafna Naphtali

When performances are “based on” something, we all get that the inspiration is real, the interpretation not recognizable. Then there is the up-coming concert from the Montreal dance company Compagnie Marie Chouinard, which will feature a truly novel way of re-imagining an original work. As one of the last of Tigertail Productions offerings this season, the piece “Henri Michaux: Mouvements” is both avant-garde and accessible. It is based on a 1951 French book, which combined poetry and 64 pages of India ink drawings, black-and-white images that were, according to the choreographer Chouinard, a “feast of bursting lines, spots and kaleidoscopic arms,” which she then translated to a dance for the stage. True to the source material, the dancers are all dressed in black, the stage is white, and they morph into silhouettes – they are animated drawings, dancers, and moving art works all at once. Not surprisingly, Chouinard — who establisher her company in 1990 and has won numerous awards since then — has a background in set, costume and lighting design as well, which all comes out in her complete and stunning creations. “Mouvements” comes to the Colony Theatre (1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) on Friday and Saturday, at 8:30 p.m., with an opening each night of “Etude for Duets”; cost is $25, $35 $50; tigertail.org, www.mariechouinard.com.

See also the interview with marie Chouinard in the Miami Herald, www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/11/3338438/poems-drawings-inspired-new-piece.html

Traditions are kept alive by constant change. The roots music of the 21^st century is being created as much with electric guitars, sequencers and laptops as with drums and flutes.

That’s one of the ideas behind The Rhythm Foundation’s Heineken TransAtlantic Festival, coming this weekend, which this year features as headliners the Argentine-Uruguayan electro-tango group Bajofondo and the Colombian electro-tropical Bomba Estéreo, as well as the duo Zuzuka Poderosa & Kush Arora, Miami’s own trio The Hongs, Krisp, Beat Machines, the neo-funk boogie big band Psychic Mirrors and DJ Mr Pauer.

“Simón [Mejía] started the group with the idea of mixing roots music and electronic music before I joined,” says Liliana “Li” Saumet, Bomba Estéreo singer and lyricist, speaking from the band´s bus on route to a show in San Francisco. Saumet was born in Santa Marta, on the Atlantic coast of Colombia, a place with deep African traditions. “It’s not that I bring the folklore to Bomba Estéreo, the idea was there. It’s just that when I sing, you can hear la costa because that’s what comes natural to me. That sound is what I grew up with.”

In fact, Saumet says her singing approach refers to that of the cantadoras, the troubadour women in Afro-Colombian culture who, in their singing, preserve and pass on the stories of their people. “They are my reference, especially La Niña Emilia [1932-1993],” says Saumet. “And they have a distinct way of singing, very deep but also without a musical training, and that’s what came out when I started singing. It’s the singing of my roots. That and rap are my main references.”

Now, in her work with Bomba Estéreo, Saumet might be also updating and keeping alive the cantadora tradition.

Bomba Estéreo was founded by Mejía, a visual artist turned full time bassist, programmer and producer, and released its first recording in 2006. It drew from traditional music, most obviously cumbia, but also DJ culture, electronic and hip hop. The result was both substantive and danceable, fun. Since then, the group became a hit at festivals — and SXSW and has just released Elegancia Tropical, its  third recording.

They are textbook headliners for the TransAtlantic Festival, which The Rhythm Foundation started in 2003 as a way to connect with new audiences as well as celebrate the traditional.

It was an “interesting time in Miami,” says Laura Quinlan, director of The Rhythm Foundation.  “It was the time of the Internet boom and new media and there were all these really cool people moving in from Latin America, interesting, creative people who were setting up companies, business and art galleries. It was a real revitalization in the city. But our audiences were not reflecting that. As an organization we were not connecting with this renaissance.

“And there was also this new sound I personally loved, which was the mix of electronica and World Music,” says Quinlan. “Now this sound has become kind of standard but I remember the first time I heard [the Tijuana-based] Nortec Collective, the birth of Latin-tronica, I couldn’t believe it. Now it’s not so shocking, you hear it in car commercials — but I still love it.”

Since its first edition, the TransAtlantic Festival has featured artists and groups such as Seu Jorge, DJ Da Lua, Bossacucanova, Chambao, Juana Molina, Ojos de Brujo, Aterciopelados, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80, and Nortec Collective.

“When you are programming and running a cultural organization you have to keep your circle open, you have to stay open to new sounds, new collaborators, new partners or your impact in the community starts to shrink,” says Quinlan. “That openness has always been central to TransAtlantic.”

Meanwhile, Saumet sees the work, and success, of Bomba Estéreo as part of a larger picture.

“It’s something that’s happening not only in Colombia but México, Perú, Venezuela, Argentina, all throughout Latin America,” she says. “We are looking to our roots, to our culture not just rock and we coming to what is ours. And I think the perspective has changed too. We used to look North, to the Anglo world. Now I think the Anglo world is also looking at us.”

The 11th annual Heineken TransAtlantic Festival features Bajofondo, with an opening set by The Hongs, on Friday at 7:00 p.m. Bomba Estéreo, Zuzuka Poderosa & Kush Arora, and an opening set by Krisp, take the stage on Saturday at 7:00 p.m. At the North Beach Bandshell, 7275 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach; tickets cost $23 for each night, or $35 for the weekend (there will also be a launch and a wrap pert, free); 305-672-5202 ; transAtlanticfestival.com.

This preview also appears in the Miami New Times.

Choreographer and dancer Emily Johnson’s critically acclaimed work The Thank -you Bar was a Bessie-Award winner that placed her on the international stage. The piece explored ideas of displacement, longing, language, history and pre-conceived notions about native culture in Alaska. Now, Johnson is back with a second in this series, Niicugni, where she delves into how places and moments are vibrant mirrors that both reflect and project all that has come before and will follow.

Niicugni comes to Miami courtesy of Tigertail Productions this Friday and Saturday.

Johnson grew up in Alaska, before moving at the age of 18 to Minneapolis where she is now based. She is of Yup’ik descent and has strong emotional ties to the landscape of South Central Alaska and the Yukon delta. She was immersed in the family rituals of hunting and fishing, then smoking, drying, canning and freezing food. This experience of physically preparing one’s own meals informs some of the more obvious set pieces, namely the fish-skin lanterns that cover the stage.

Niicugni means “listen” in the Yup’ik language.  But in less literal terms the word is a entreaty to pay attention, to have cognizance of all that is around us. The work exists in layers of dance, live music, story telling and those fish-skin lanterns in a space occupied not just by the performers but the audience as well. It will be performed by Johnson and includes dancer Aretha Aoki, composer James Everest, violinist/electronic musician Bethany Lacktorin and lighting designer Heidi Eckwall.

En route to Miami from her starting point last week in Arizona, Johnson stopped at a roadside restaurant with wi-fi in Mississippi to answer some questions.

Referring to the title of the piece, Niicugni — in our current society there are so many demands placed on our attention. We have 24-hour news sources and streaming and so on. Yet it seems that even with the constant sharing of information, we only seem to know the most functional things about each other.  How do you address this?

I try to look at the world from the corners of my eyes, with an encompassing view, rather than a dead on, tunnel like search. This way of looking, of paying attention, makes me realize that I am within the context of what is around me.

This is what we need to see — that by not paying attention we harm everything, the world, ourselves, our relationships.

When the BP Deepwater Horizon was gushing oil into the gulf I stood at Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis. It’s a creek that feeds into the Mississippi River, which of course, feeds into the gulf. I stood there and because of that creek, I felt immediately close to the horror of the oil spill. And because I could feel that connection, I had to do something. I got online; I found an organization I could volunteer for even from far away. I’m not saying I made a huge difference by myself, but it’s this kind of connection to place, events and people, that can create a collective change.

In your production notes you ask if, in the moment of a performance, the audience “recognizes the importance of everyone in the room.” It’s an interesting question in terms of the evolution on how we view and experience performance art. Why do you think it is important that we are aware of each other during a performance?  

The isolated, personally involved experience doesn’t just happen in theaters — it happens in grocery stores and on streets. Sometimes I will catch myself — I’ll come out of a store and realize that I didn’t actually notice anyone else in there! How could I walk past several people, have an exchange with someone at a cash register and still not fully acknowledge anyone? How disrespectful! That this happens in many theater-going experiences is absurd to me.

The inclusion of local people in this show is actually an essential element of Niicugni. We gather volunteers who work with me and then perform for a short moment during the piece. They sit in the audience and at pre-determined moments, come onto stage for usually simple, and I think beautiful, moments.

Unfortunately, in Miami …. I do know that [this] will be in a much smaller way.

Your 12-minute video on how to create fish-skin lanterns was fascinating.  Your personal and historical account of how “Salmon Brings Us Together” is worthy of its own spread in National Geographic. How is this part of the piece? 

There is the story of the fish, there is my history with fish and family, there are all these lanterns that were made by volunteers across the country; their time and effort embedded onstage. There are the processes Aretha and I go through and imagine as we dance and tell stories. There is the always-changing interaction with the audience.

There is such an integral tapestry of the outdoors and natural spaces in this work.   Is it hard to translate those natural wonders to a traditional indoor theater space, create that same sense of awe?

What I describe as “wondrous” is actually very routine: salmon migration, for example. I am always trying to create an experience for audiences and part of that experience is about where we are and what is outside of the theater walls. I do try to bring the outside in.

Can we see the wondrous routine of this? The cycle? Of work … of eating, of living, of dying? Isn’t this cycle (symbolic of all cycles) enough to make us all want to make the world a really beautiful place to live?

Emily Johnson/CatalystDance will perform Niicugni on Friday & Saturday, March 22 & 23, 8:30 pm, at the On-Stage Black Box at Miami-Dade County Auditorium, 2901 W. Flagler St., Miami, Tickets are $30 General Admission; $20 students and seniors; tigertail/org/events_niicugni.html.

A version of this preview first appeared in the Miami Herald, March 20.