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Carmina Escobar (1981) is an experimental vocalist, improviser, and performance artist from Mexico City who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Jeffrey Fleishman from the Los Angeles Times has written that Escobar "can make her voice sound like insects dancing on dry leaves or a rocket ship dying in space."[1]

Escobar studied music in the Escuela Superior de Música of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City where she was trained through the classical canon, "but her soul and voice--she was labeled a soprano and mezzo-soprano--felt constricted by what she called music 'that’s mostly male, mostly European.'"[2] These constrictions led her to explore other possibilities of the voice, extended techniques being a prominent one, and to seek additional training from artists living in Mexico City such as Hebe Rosell and Juan Pablo Villa. In the United States and in other locales, Escobar continued her vocal experimentation techniques with additional training with Jaqueline Bobak, Meredith Monk, Jaap Blonk. Escobar is a graduate of the MFA program in VoiceArts at the California Institute of the Arts.[3]

Escobar is on the Voice Arts faculty of California Institute of the Arts where she teaches on "voice technique, experimental voice workshops, contemporary vocal music, and interdisciplinary projects regarding the voice".[4] She is the co-founder and was a long-term vocalist of "LIMINAR," a contemporary music ensemble based in Mexico City.[5][6][7] With Madeline Falcone, she is the co-founder and co-director of Boss Witch Productions, "an artistic production company focused on the intersection of experimental sound art, ritual performance, video art, and transmedia collaboration with natural landscapes and unusual performance sites."[8] Escobar, alongside Micaela Tobin, is also one of the founders and workshop facilitators of Howl Space, "a community-based learning resource that reframes vocal pedagogy through holistic, process-based approaches to discover the multi-faceted possibilities of the voice and unveil the creative process."[9]

Beyond her teaching and production practice, Escobar has gained national and international recognition for her vocal, scenic, electronic music, and filmic work. Until the organization and community events space went defunct in 2018, her work was shown regularly with the Los Angeles based Machine Project.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16] One of the pieces that was produced by Machine Project was Escobar's large-scale in situ performance spectacle Fiesta Perpetua! a communitas ritual of manifestation in Los Angeles's Echo Park in 2017,[17] which was later re-staged as part of Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA in 2018, funded by the Getty Foundation and organized by REDCAT.[18] Of Fiesta Perpetual! Yxta Maya Murray has said that Escobar "mesmerized a crowd of onlookers with a series of esoteric songs" as she was "accompanied by the 40-member Oaxacan youth brass band Maqueos Music, conducted by Yulissa Maqueos."[19] Escobar is also widely known for her body resonance work known as Massagem Sonora, which Fernando Vigueras has described as "a sort of exercise that analyses and reflects upon the body, understanding it as a space that reveals, measures and recognizes itself throughout its resonance." Massagem Sonora, or Sonic Massage, gained attention through its role in a large scale collaborative project in 2013 through the Getty Foundation's funded Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. and in tangent with The Machine Project Field Guide to LA Architecture.[20][21][22]

In 2018 Escobar premiered her performance piece, Pura Entraña / Pure Gut, developed during her residency at MacDowell and in collaboration Mexican instrument maker and musician Jerónimo Naranjo, among other collaborators. Escobar and her collaborators suspended a piano 6 feet above Los Angeles' REDCAT's stage floor, which was activated by the musicians while its sonic emissions dialogue with the vocalist performers onstage, Escobar herself and one of her constant collaborators, the artist Dorian Wood.[23]

An equally or perhaps more ambitious project, Bajo la sombra del sol / Under the Sun's Shadow, a Boss Witch Production, premiered in 2021 also in REDCAT and it consisted of a immersive installation and film projection alongside live performance by an ensemble of artists from different disciplines: music, voice, dance. As described on the REDCAT's website, Bajo la sombra del sol "is a performative hypertextural scenic work by Carmina Escobar that is staged, makes communion with, and gathers multimedia material at the natural landscape of Mono Lake, California."[24] This multimedia material gathered can be considered an experimental film that Escobar directed in Mono Lake under great duress, the Covid-19 pandemic and the fires that raged throughout California during the summer of 2021. But the locale of Mono Lake, which has been "relentlessly whittled into its current state of environmental calamity by humans," was the perfect site to explore one of Escobar's artistic and philosophical interests, the "concept of darkness, of the shadow, of inhabiting shadows and casting shadows."[25] For Bajo la sombra del sol Escobar brought back two key collaborators, Jerónimo Naranjo who constructed a series of insturments, including a large-scale drum that stands as proxy for the sun, and Dorian Wood who is a central character in the piece, both the film and live version, alongside other collaborating artists.[26]

Escobar has been awarded several grants and residencies including the Performer's Grant by the National Endowment of the Arts in Mexico twice, the 2014 NFA Master Artist Grant, the MacDowell residency in 2018, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in Music/Sound in 2020, the National Performance Network Creation Fund Award in 2020, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts residency in 2021.[5][27][28][29][30][31]

References

External Links

Official Website

Vimeo Page

Soundcloud Page

Boss Witch Productions

Howl Space

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