Information
1993 DOCUMENTATION
Bonneville Salt Flats (1993)
Jimmy & Elizabeth Miklavcic
Photograph: Christopher Pfeiffer
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Contact Information
Office: (801) 707-9930
e-mail: info(at)anotherlanguage(dot)org
www.anotherlanguage.org
ANOTHER LANGUAGE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
National Advisory Board
Charles Amirkhanian
Executive Director
Other Minds Festival
San Francisco, CA
Jeff Carpenter
Multimedia Specialist, NCSA
Urbana Champaign, IL
Kent Christensen
Artist
New York, NY
Karly Rothenberg
Faculty Member and
Industry Event Coordinator
AMDA College & Conservatory
Sun Valley, CA
Utah Advisory Board
Pauline Blanchard
The Pauline Blanchard Trust
Wayne Bradford
Systems Administrator
University of Utah
Harold Carr
Software Architect
Oracle Corporation
Board of Directors
Kathy Valburg
Another Language President
Ice Skating Director
Sylvia Ring
Retired OR Nurse
Jan Abramson
University of Utah
Office of Sponsored Projects
Sponsored Projects Officer
Staff
Jimmy Miklavcic
Founding Co-Director
Elizabeth Miklavcic
Founding Co-Director
Gallery
Art-of-the-Month
Another Language Performing Arts Company's Art-of-the-Month was created to publicly feature a variety of visual art expressions created by the directors of Another Language. Exhibiting abstract acrylic to digital paintings, and running the gambit in-between, this gallery exhibition offers the viewer an online gallery experience with a new addition each month. The Art-of-the-Month web program began September 2010, and features a variety of paintings, showing a body of work spanning decades. Extensive visual art galleries are available to supporting members in the Membership area of the website.
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Colored Geometry 1 (2021)
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By Elizabeth Miklavcic
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Colored Geometry 2 (2021)
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By Elizabeth Miklavcic
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Colored Geometry 3 (2021)
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By Elizabeth Miklavcic
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Colored Geometry 4 (2021)
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By Elizabeth Miklavcic
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A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc. Abstract fractals – such as the Mandelbrot Set – can be generated by a computer calculating a simple equation over and over. – Description from Fractal Foundation Website
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Spotlight
Quivering Lip Artwork
July 2022
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Pictured: Elizabeth & Jimmy Miklavcic
Photo: Elizabeth Miklavcic
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EXPRESSIONS IN AUDIO
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Surf's Up! We've been experimenting with waves, sound waves that is!
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Although we can't close our ears, we learn to close our auditory attention, more out of sanity than anything else, since there is so much excess and unnecessary noise in our lives.
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The history of musical explorations for us goes way back with the studying of piano (Beth) and guitar (Jimmy). Jimmy created his first electronic music piece while taking electronic music class at Cabrillo College in 1977. The first synthesizer he composed with was an electronic kit from Godbout Electronics. It was 6" x 4" x 2" knobs and a banana plug to slide up and down a magnetic strip.
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He joined with Meridith Hankenson and Jacques Saffel, shortly after landing in Salt Lake City, and formed an improvisational electronic music band called Subminiature Basic. A particular composition from that period, What's Behind the Door? was later used for Beth's choreographic work, She Was Such a Good Little Girl.
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Later, Jimmy spent many hours recording in our attic sound studio with bassist John Merk. The two worked impulsively and eventually went by the name, Mobius Lips.
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Jimmy created the music for the solo he choreographed on Elizabeth in 1980. A Dog's Breath Comes In Green was performed in the concert, Open Aire, One on April 10, 1981 at the Utah Art Center (now known as Utah Museum of Contemporary Art - UMOCA). The concert included dance students from the University of Utah, Children's Dance Theater, as well as company members from Ririe-Woodbury and Repertory Dance Theater.
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Elizabeth created her first original musical collage for her dance You Can't Hug Children with Nuclear Arms for our Experimental Floss performance on January 12, 1984 at the Ladies Literary Club, co-produced with Tina Karlsson. The Experimental Floss performances ran from 1982-1985. Jimmy created the original sound score for What? another dance Elizabeth choreographed for an Experimental Floss concert, which was held at the Salt Lake Art Center in May 10, 1984.
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Our process for the creation of the music for What? was one of talking about qualities, but then leaving specifics open. At that time, Jimmy's sound studio was upstairs in the house we rented. As he would work on sound sketches, Elizabeth would yell up to him through the stairway, "That's it!" Through that improvisational form of working, Jimmy came up with a piece for the first solo, consisting of drum rhythms. Then he composed a completely different piece for the second solo. The duet section consisted of a meld of the qualities of the two.
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The drum section, as well as the drum parts in the whole work, was composed and performed with a Roland Drumatix. It is a small programmable drum machine with a standard trap set instrumentation. The Drumatix was played through an old Yamaha amplifier designed for organs. It had a pair of high frequency tweeters that rotated to produce a tremelo effect. Jimmy's goal with the drum solo was to create a punctuated sonic environment for the solo dancer.
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In the second section, Jimmy minimized the drums to a slow single pounding, similar to that of a hammer on steel. Using this as the base, Jimmy created long drone-like humming sounds using a Mini Moog analog synthesizer. This created a more haunting audio environment for the second solo dancer.
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After the two solos, the dance transformed into a duet, at the same time the music also took on an orchestrated structure. Beginning with a heartbeat style bass drum, other percussive and rhythmic sounds, produced with a Sequential Circuits Pro One Synthesizer, were added to build layers. Accents of reverberated vocal contortions were added, as well as, the increased frequency of cymbal crashes helped What? build to an abrupt end.
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Elizabeth and Jimmy worked together on another original sound score for a commissioned choreography for the Youth Performing Arts School in Louisville, Kentucky in 1985, titled Out of this Comes... We took several songs from a popular album at the time and edited out all the vocal parts. We then edited and looped the remaining instrumental sections and created a nearly fifteen minute score.
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Elizabeth composed, performed and edited the sound score for Chrysalis. It was mainly a vocal composition with sounds of a music box and time-manipulated spoken word. Jimmy and Elizabeth co-designed the set and Jimmy's design allowed for a stand alone piece as an installation, as well as, an independent performance set. A Chrysalis Project was installed and performed at the Salt Lake Art Center for the February 7, 1986 grand opening reception of James Pridgeon's The Big Picture. The installation ran in the gallery for the duration of the exhibit, Elizabeth gave a talk about the creation of the work, and she gave four performances on varying days and times throughout the month of February. A Chrysalis Project was, also, the featured work for Another Language Performing Arts Company's debut in 1985.
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Music For Bubble Biters (Debut)
Cinema In Your Face 1987
Photo: John Brandon
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Pictured Lft-Rt: Jimmy Miklavcic, Tony Weller,
Tammy Tudor, Paul & Rene Arner,
Elizabeth Miklavcic
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Music for Bubble Biters is a composition by Jimmy that uses bowls of water as instruments. It was first performed at Cinema in Your Face in 1987. There were many, many subsequent performances, including a standing ovation at the Bit And Spur in Springdale, Utah for Phillip Bimstein's New Music Across America Festival. Unfortunately, no video documentation exists of these two performances. Another performance of Bubble Biters for the Composer to Composer Conference in Telluride, Colorado, organized by Charles Amirkhanian and John Lifton in 1991, also received a standing ovation. The story of this composition culminated in the creation of Music for Bubble Biters: The Mockumentary directed by Elizabeth Miklavcic. The 2 Disc DVD set includes a historical compilation of many past performances accompanied with performance photographs.
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Another Language Performing Arts Company hosted two experimental music festivals, Sounds That Art Makes. The first in 1987 at the Art Barn, which featured Charles Amirkhanian. The second Sounds That Art Makes in 1990 at the Another Language Performance Studio at 345 Pierpont Avenue in the Salt Lake City Artspace Complex. This festival featured Henry Kaiser and Jin Hi Kim.
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Sounds That Art Makes
Art Barn September 25, 1987
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Pictured: Charles Amirkhanian
Photo: John Brandon
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Beginning in 2003, Another Language Performing Arts Company's Interplay Real-Time Distributed Surrealistic Cinema performances heavily emphasized original music and spoken word featuring collaborators such as Harold Carr, Flavia Cervino Wood, Alex Caldiero, Kate Macleod, Eliza Wren, Alexis Levitt, Diane Hsu, Scott Deal, Charles Nichols, Junko Simons, Robert Putnam, plus many more. Musicians, actors and dancers performed in various separate rooms within a building or at many sites around the globe. All connected in real time through the Internet.
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The Telematic Cinema performances, Duel-Ality 1.0 & 2.0 and XYZ featured original music created and composed by Jimmy and Elizabeth (us). "0,1" a composition recited in binary, may have been the actual inspiration to begin more in-depth creation of musical works of art.
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Music has been a very strong component of the work we have created through the years, so it makes sense that in our advancing years, we would move into a studio phase and focus on creating, composing, editing and mastering original audio pieces. These new compositions come under the band name of Peon Clover, but are interwoven in the projects of Another Language Performing Arts Company and Miklavcic Art & Media.
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Our first Peon Clover CD Running Over Worms was completed in 2011 featuring such hits as Deep Thought Thinker and Bug Splatter. Bug Splatter was the score for a work we created in 2016 for Weller Book Works 100th Anniversary of the Birth of DADA!!! Produced by Catherine and Tony Weller and held at Weller Book Works on February 6, 2016. In a review by Alexandra Karl for Catalyst Magazine she stated:
"Beth and Jimmy Miklavcic (of Another Language) projected videos of abstract design onto themselves, as they spun with increasing momentum around a bolt of fabric. The onomatopoeia of the phrase 'baked-on-batter-bug-splatter-splat' echoed through the piece, and prompted the audience to contribute spontaneously: the hallmark of a successful performance."
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In 2012 we had recorded a trove of audio explorations. It had become a consistent thing that we were doing and moving more into the forefront of our creative expressions. When we were about to begin creating our second CD project, shit-hit-the-fan and for the next decade all that progress had to be set aside for other priorities. More shit-hit-the-fan during the Trump years that killed all creative desire, followed by the dreaded Covid pandemic. While we were hunkering down in isolation, we picked back up our 2012 recordings and began listening to the pieces we'd made. We purchased hi-end music editing software such as Logic-Pro and iZotope RX, and we spent the next two years painstakingly editing and re-editing pieces.
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Jimmy has been learning a lot about Mastering and the concepts of layering audio track dynamics, a carry over from other creative art forms such as choreography, distributed cinema, and visual art creation. We processed our voices with many effects, looped various tracks, mixed the tracks into a cohesive sonic story, sculpted the audio using equalization and mastered the project into its final artistic form.
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As of August 2022, we have approved our final draft of Peon Clover's second CD Quivering Lip, which will be manufactured soon and available for purchase through Miklavcic Art and Media or as a membership incentive to help support Another Language Performing Arts Company. We hope you will take a gander through such hits as, Man on Demand, Laugh A Moon, and Sitting In The Trunk.
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It may take us another decade to complete our next CD with audio improvisations we recorded in 2012 with Harold Carr, Flavia Cervino Wood, Steve [Doc] Floor, Alexis Levitt, and Hanelle Miklavcic, but we hope we can move faster on the third slated Peon Clover CD project. Here is to creativity in all its forms, without boxes nor limitations.
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By Elizabeth and Jimmy Miklavcic - Founding Co-Directors
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- Download Newsletter PDF -
MEMBERSHIP
Another Language Performing Arts Company is a non-profit 501(c)(3) arts organization. Part of our mission is to combine different art forms in innovative ways and broaden access to cutting-edge performance art with today's technology. We have been able to pursue this mission with the generous support of our national, state and local granting organizations, and our contributing members
Please help us continue our innovative and ground-breaking work by becoming a contributing member. Simply select the link below and contribute now.
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BENEFITS
5x7 Cards by Jimmy Miklavcic
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First Contact
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Clouds Over The Oquirrhs
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Anomaly
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Two Stories
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