Productions
Guy Mendilow Ensemble (GME) produces live, original multimedia performances and thoughtful residencies. Through riveting scores, narration blending memoir and poetry, and theatrical projections, GME explores real-world tales of choices people make in times of personal or societal change, especially unexpected grace in upheaval.
Led by composer/educator/facilitator Guy Mendilow, GME is a cutting-edge collaboration of international musicians, composers, visual artists, writers and theatrical designers.
GME’s music layers intricate percussion, nuanced vocal harmonies, and pan-cultural influences over a Western classical foundation. Touring since 2004, GME is recipient of funding awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Boston Foundation and Western Arts Alliance for artistry, cultural preservation, and strengthening of communities through the arts. GME operates on the conviction that moving, multidisciplinary stories can be powerful agents for conversation: A coming together to listen to one another and share our stories in the service of exploring who we are and who we wish to be, building an understanding of how the other has come to believe what they believe and know what they know.
Elizabeth Friar Photography
Productions
The Forgotten Kingdom
Dreamlike theatrically projected sand animation, narration blending memoir and poetry, and a riveting musical score reframing Ottoman Jewish women’s song render an interwar letter from a mother to her daughter, in the form of a book of memory so that — years later, once grown — the daughter would remember how it felt to live in her parents’ vibrant, multiethnic Mediterranean world, before its unraveling.
Different Ships, Same Boat
Different Ships, Same Boat is an interactive, multidisciplinary performance combining powerful spoken word, music and song to explore the multifaceted ways Americans risk, live, love and laugh. Unfolding through a series of chapters — each curating real world stories — literary performer Regie Gibson and composer/storycatcher Guy Mendilow guide audiences with podcast-like narration, at turns humorous, poignant or poetic, over an evocative musical score. With stories from small towns, cities and ports of entry, along with music spanning lyrical American Blues and songs from older homes from which today’s Americans came (e.g. Ottoman Jews from present-day Greece and Hungary), Different Ships, Same Boat offers a stirring exploration of the joys, tensions and complexities of who we are and who we wish to be.
As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Different Ships, Same Boat invites audiences to celebrate not only America but Americans. This is for those craving a powerful artistic performance of captivating music and stories — a moving, finely-crafted, anthology that connects audiences to American histories, perspectives, and experiences both familiar and different from their own.
Accompanied by Listening Labs
Radio Play(s) Series
Like a stage-performed podcast, each Radio Play(s) episode unpacks a timely theme through a collection of stories whether told through the spoken word, musical segments or theatrically projected sand animation. A continuous score unites each episode, drawing on classical, contemporary and Ottoman Jewish influences and performed by a world-class, multiethnic sextet. Radio Play(s) addresses mounting civic/racial tensions in the US. Co-directed by Guy Mendilow and Regie Gibson.
Episodes are often accompanied by Listening Labs
Around the World in Song
Joyous, interactive performances nurture children’s musicianship and multicultural inquisitiveness. Through traditional and original songs and stories from around the world, together with purposeful movement, Around the World in Song gives children tools to engage even more actively with music they love and to tap into the thrill of their own musical discoveries. Fun and pedagogically thoughtful, Around the World in Song is built on principles of Dalcroze Education and Fred Rogers’ philosophy.