Squonk’s Pneumatic Presented By Pittsburg Cultural Trust

PITTSBURGH CULTURAL TRUST ANNOUNCES

SQUONK IS BACK

WORLD PREMIERE INSTALLATION

OF PNEUMATICA SCHEDULED FOR

DOLLAR BANK THREE RIVERS ARTS FESTIVAL

10 Days of Free Music and Art | June 6 – 15, 2014

Pittsburgh, PA—The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presents Squonk’s new outdoor work, Pneumatica, as part of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival. Squonk’s Pneumatica will be made of air, powered by air, and about air. The Squonkers will pump up the volume with live original music while inflatables pump up and immerse the audience and permeate the air from June 13 – 15, 2014, at downtown Pittsburgh’s Point State Park.

Squonk has created seven new works since 1994 with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, which have toured Europe and Asia as well as Broadway and off-Broadway in Manhattan, New York. This successful 20-year history includes the premiere of the truck-mounted GO Roadshow in 2012 that has gone on to show in 14 cities in 10 states for a total of 100 shows.

“We are thrilled to welcome Squonk back to the festival with such a special world premiere,” says Veronica Corpuz, Director of Festival Management and Special Projects, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. “We hope that festivalgoers will see the beauty of this installation, which encompasses the theme of aesthetic creativity meeting environmental sustainability, as well as integrating both music and art.”

Pneumatica is a free public work that embraces new materials and technologies and a new sense of crowd-sourced dynamics and multi-sensory theater, responding to site, weather, audience, and neighborhood. Pneumatica takes theater out of the theater using novel elements of street theater, pop-up art installation, and solstice celebration. Squonk will hoot and whisper, bellow and caress, using the very medium of sound: air. Biomorphic shapes will grow, powered by blowers and vortex fans, and culminate in the 40-foot high Lady Pneumatica, blossoming and opening up to the sky. Squonk’s original music will incorporate the swoops and eddies of air with electronic bagpipes and a vertical accordion that will be Lady Pneumatica’s lungs, played like a piano while it rises and falls with her breath. Playing with visual puns, air will be used to activate costumes—the star costume will inflate like a blowfish, and head tubes will be activated musically with wild guitar and bass riffs.

Squonk recently returned from Manhattan, where The New York Times called them a “multi-media troupe of infinite jest” from Pittsburgh with “images of strange and startling beauty….” Pneumatica will push physics and civic interdependency into tangibility, with wind powered turbines, tentacles and a whirl of inflatables, all pulsating to live original music. For more information on Squonk, visit www.squonkopera.org.

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