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.
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.
Different Ships, Same Boat
Through powerful spoken word, music and song, Different Ships, Same Boat unfolds through a series of chapters — each curating moving, real-world stories to explore a facet of the ways we risk, live, love and laugh. Literary performer Regie Gibson and composer/storycatcher Guy Mendilow introduce each chapter, guiding audiences with podcast-like narration, at turns humorous, poignant or poetic, over an evocative musical score. With stories from WWII Hungary to modern small towns and cities in the US, along with music and song spanning lyrical American Blues to Ottoman Jewish cantigas in the endangered language of Ladino, Different Ships, Same Boat offers a stirring exploration of the joys, tensions and complexities of who we are, and who we wish to be, to ourselves and to each other.
Accompanied by Listening Labs