This week on Chasing Artists with XENJA, we chat with musician, composer, and performance artist Cellista about her new multi-media operetta Pariah. Guest Bio Cellista is a Los Angeles-based performance artist. Her critically acclaimed stage poems (narrative multimedia works) juxtapose seemingly disparate elements. The works are acts of resistance art. Employing a politically concerned, observant, and revealing voice, the pieces investigate the ruptures of daily life. Cellista posits that creating art is a radical act. An act that illuminates fragmentations, and allows the community -- as witnesses -- to attend to collective wounds, and to transfigure them. Her most recent work, Pariah, is an operatic fairytale with semi-autobiographical overtones. It explores issues of othering and exile within our communities. Cellista explains "I placed myself within Pariahto reflect on (not represent) my own experience as an artist. Pariahha’s allowed me to examine my own feelings of loneliness and othering. Through Pariah, I am confronting myself." Pariah features collaborations from notable soprano Carla Canales and composer Mazz Swift, and is accompanied by a book co-written with philosopher Dr. Frank Seeburger, and a dance film written and directed by Cellista. Cellista’s penchant for performing music in unconventional spaces, and her devotion to collaborating with artists across media, and genres, disrupts the world of the classical performing arts. She defies standard categorization, her sound brims with a dissident voice informed by her classical foundation and her desire to tear that very foundation apart. Fresh off her 2021 Lincoln Center debut, Cellista is a sought after collaborator. She has worked with Grammy-nominated artist Tanya Donelly, producer John Vanderslice, Troyboi, Don McLean, Casey Crescenzo (The Dear Hunter), Van Dyke Parks, Tony! Toni! Toné! and Pam the Funkstress. Her compositions and performances have been heard on film and TV including PBS; and she has appeared as an extra on the TV shows Better Things and Will & Grace playing her cello. Her interdisciplinary exhibit The End of Time premiered alongside renowned visual artist Barron Storey’s solo exhibit Quartet at Anno Domini art gallery in downtown San Jose with her chamber music collective the Juxtapositions Chamber Ensemble. The dual exhibition, created in tribute to French composer Olivier Messiaen’s seminal chamber work The Quartet for the End of Time, received critical acclaim. She is an elected chapter governor of the Recording Academy and a former San Jose arts commissioner. She received a masters in business from the Berklee College of Music in 2020. She is the founding artistic director of House of Cellista in Longmont, Colorado; a microcenter for the arts which advocates and offers subsidized housing to working artists. Cellista was born in Colorado, on February 21, 1983. She plays a Luis & Clarke carbon fibre cello, and an 1885 Czech cello named Chordelia. Links to Guest cellista.net wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellista facebook.com/cellista.music instagram.com/xcellistax twitter.com/xcellistax medium.com/@xcellistax Links to XENJA @iamxenja www.xenja.org www.xenja.bandcamp.com Produced by XENJA Music by XENJA Audio Editing by High Noon Audio
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Nov 19 202132 mins