B is for BIKES!

B is for BIKES!

B is for BIKES! is the Midwest premiere of world-renowned composer Mauricio Kagel’s iconic work Eine Brise (A Breeze): A Fleeting Action for 111 Bicyclists, performed in October of 2016.

Co­-curated by The New Philharmonic’s Vimbayi Kaziboni and Paige Reitz, B is for BIKES! is a combining of contraries: art/sport, sound/music, freedom/discipline. Eine Brise embodies Kagel’s quintessential questioning of convention, while embodying an ethos of unity through community via communal participation in his works. This is the spirit that the collective of The New Philharmonic stands for--art as community, art as politic, art as revolution. B is for BIKES! highlights cyclist and pedestrian awareness in the urban landscape of Omaha through aesthetic means. The project engaged over 100 volunteer cyclists to perform the piece while riding down Maple Street, the main thoroughfare of the Benson neighborhood.

Currently Assistant Conductor of Ensemble InterContemporain (Paris, France), Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Orchestras at Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA), Artistic Director of the New Philharmonic (Omaha, NE), and formerly Assistant Conductor of Ensemble Modern and Conductor of the International Ensemble Modern Academy (Frankfurt, Germany), Artistic Director of The What's Next? Ensemble (Los Angeles, CA) and a Fulbright Fellow in Central Asia, American conductor and Zimbabwean native Vimbayi Kaziboni (b. 1988) has been described as a conductor of "great intensity, without distancing, maneuvering, without indifference" (Neue Musikzeitung, Cologne).

Paige Reitz is an Omaha-based artist and organizer who works actively to interrogate art as an instrument for social change in her capacity as the Deputy Director at the Union for Contemporary Art. 

Photos: Alex Matzke