Special Events

Constellations: Thea Little x Dafna Naftali

Thea and Dafna are exploring Feng Shui concepts through
Aleotoric activation of Vocals, Words, Singing and Field Recordings.

THEA LITTLE

Thea Little grew up in New York City dancing as a child with NYCB and The School of American Ballet and teaching herself how to compose music since age 5. She continued to learn Classical, Modern and Contemporary Dance and Music to finally find her sweet spot of Interdisciplinary Performance and Directing. She holds MFA and BA degrees in Dance from Hollins University/American Dance Festival and Columbia University: General Studies. Singing and dancing in a 2013-2015 production with Panoply Lab and Lindsey Drury heavily influenced her work as does other performance art, experimental sound and opera, humor and healing. She has composed many times for LEIMAY Dance Ensemble and was Music Director for Shen Wei Dance Arts to help create Map set to a very intricate score by Steve Reich.

Little has performed more than 50 of her sound scores in the U.S. and Europe and she often composes vocal music for her dance collaborators to sing. Her multi-disciplinary group and solo work has been presented at a variety of different venues such as WUK in Vienna, The Traveling Trolley in Kingston, NY, the NYU Music Department, Asia Society, National Sawdust, The Beaux Arts Court in The Brooklyn Museum, The Hudson Eye in Hudson, NY and AUNTS hosted by The Chocolate Factory Theater. Thea feels proud to be a Board Member of New Dance Alliance and to be in her fifth year as a teaching artist with (IIAC) International Interdisciplinary Artists Consortium and (MAL) Moving Arts Lab organized by Peter Sciscioli every summer with the generous hosting by Earthdance. Thea feels grateful to have her work twice supported by Brooklyn Arts Council as well as from generous and kind individual donors over the years. After feeling curious about Feng Shui for six years, Thea took a deep dive into the subject the past 1.5 years and is now professionally trained by mentor Rodika Tchi and offering Advising sessions. Little feels passionate about creating art that explores the terrain of Feng Shui in unique and fun ways.

DAFNA NAPHTALI

Dafna Naphtali is a singer/instrumentalist/electronic-musician who composes/performs experimental, interactive electro-acoustic music, drawing on a wide-ranging musical background in jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music and using her custom Max/MSP programming.

She’s performed in the US, Canada, Europe, India, Russia and the Middle East, with current projects including: “Audio Chandelier” multi-channel audio works presented in US, Berlin, and Montreal (after 2019 Harvestworks New Works residency to be presented on Governors Island summer of 2020, but postponed due to Covid-19). Other projects include “Robotica” (music robots and voice) ; and her Audio Augmented Reality soundwalks “Walkie Talkie Dream Angles”, and “Walkie Talkie Dream Garden” site-specific interactive compositions written for the U-GRUVE AR platform for NY’s Washington Square Park, and the waterfront areas in Williamsburg Brooklyn and Hamburg Germany.

Dafna’s has long-running projects in live sound-processing of voice and acoustic instruments, as her a performable “instrument”. The current focus is on duos with acoustic instrumentalists –pianist Gordon Beeferman (CD “Pulsing Dot”), trombonist Jen Baker (Clip Mouth Unit), percussionist Luis Tabuenca (CD “Index of Refraction”), Chuck Bettis (electronics/throat – CD “Chatter Blip” and 2020 release “Microcosmopolitan”), saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Ras Moshe, saxophonist Edith Lettner (upcoming release on Clang label Fall 2020), and a longtime duo with Hans Tammen (Buchla, endangered guitar). Performing as a singer (unplugged!), Naphtali has interpreted the music of Cage, Stockhausen (Stimmung w/choreographer Daria Fain / Magic Names vocal sextet), Eisler/Brecht (Hollywood Liederbuch), and contemporary composers Joshua Fried, Shelley Hirsch, Kitty Brazelton, José Halac, Yotam Haber, Jonathan Bepler, she’s performed Spanish Civil War songs with the genre-transcending band Barbez, and organized “Voice Activated” public interventions for Make Music NY.