Charles Atlas + William Basinski in Performance

Doors at 7P, performance at 8P. Advance tickets recommended.

Taking picture making in time and space into the realm of choreography, New York–based artist Charles Atlas has uniquely bridged the worlds of visual arts, technology, and dance. Atlas wears many hats, among them filmmaker and videographer in the sphere of visual arts and filmic collaborator for dance performances on stage and for television.

As an essential, one-night-only component of Strange Pilgrims, The Contemporary Austin presents a new performance with Atlas center stage, joined by avant-garde composer and musician William Basinski. The two last performed together as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Atlas and Basinski will use video technology, live music feed, and other elements to create an immersive, thought-provoking experience.

About Charles Atlas

New York-based artist Charles Atlas is an innovator in the worlds of visual arts, technology, and dance. Beginning in the 1970s, Atlas was a pioneer in the genre known as "media-dance," in which the choreographer and filmmaker collaborate to construct the composition and movement of the dance for the frame of the camera lens. From 1973 to 1983, Atlas was filmmaker-in-residence for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a relationship that resulted in a decade of innova­tive filmic dances. Over the years, Atlas has collaborated with artists, performers, choreographers, and dancers including Marina Abramović, Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Antony Hegarty, and Yvonne Rainer, in addition to Cunningham.

Live performance has always been a crucial component of Atlas's production and practice. Perhaps Atlas's most well-known production in this realm is his critically acclaimed tour with the group Antony and the Johnsons in fall 2006, which culminated in the concert-film documentary Turning, live performances featuring Antony's songs with Atlas's hauntingly beautiful remixing (in real time) of thirteen women around themes of identity and gender.

About William Basinski

William Basinski is a classically trained musician and composer who has been working in experimental media for over 30 years in New York and, most recently, California. Employing obsolete technology and analogue tape loops, his haunting and melancholy soundscapes explore the temporal nature of life and resound with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time. His epic four-disc masterwork The Disintegration Loops received international critical acclaim and was chosen as a top album of 2004 by Pitchfork Media. Basinski also created the music for the Robert Wilson opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic.

Also don't miss: New and recent work by Charles Atlas is on view through January 24, 2016, at the Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin as part of Strange Pilgrims, organized by The Contemporary Austin.