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Avy K Productions founded by Vadim Puyandaev, Erika Tsimbrovsky, and Laura Maguire, Avy K Productions brings together local and international artists to create improvised multi-media performances. Avy K’s signature audio-visual-kinetic approach combines contemporary dance, live painting, installation, music, and video.

Erika Tsimbrovsky

is an innovator in the field of improvised dance performance. Born in Kazakhstan, she studied modern and contemporary dance in Belarus, Moscow, and Amsterdam. In Israel she co-founded the award-winning experimental performance group EVM Laboratories to research the interaction between diverse media structures and to develop specific improvisational performance techniques. Avy K Productions is the San Francisco-based incarnation of her and visual artist Vadim Puyandaev's twenty-year collaboration, featuring their signature “audio-visual-kinetic” approach, which brings together contemporary dance, live painting, evolving material installation, video projection, and live music to create unique and vital performances. The core idea is to facilitate a dialogue between artists of different media and unite them under a common theme. Everything occurs in real time so a conversation between artists can emerge.

She has worked collaboratively in multimedia performance with a variety of artists, like Peter Chaika, an outsider artist with Down Syndrome, Slava Ganelin, the legendary pioneer of the Russian avant-garde jazz movement, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, formerly of Kronos Quartet, film artist Paul Clipson, composers Ken Ueno, Matt Ingalls, and Alexander Sigman, choreographer Scott Wells, visual artist and long-time collaborator, Vadim Puyandaev, and many others.

Her work aims to achieve a dynamic equilibrium where balance is found in the shifting contradictions. Themes she explores and are most often found in her work are the presence of ancient archetypes in our urban reality; the flow of information from past centuries into our technological and mass media world; and the intersection between the rational and the irrational within ourselves and nature.

Currently, dance installation projects are her primary focus. She is interested in exploring her ideas in different sites (open/alternative spaces, galleries, museums etc.) that invite new ways of perceiving dance and other traditional art mediums (painting, sculpture etc.).

With Avy K Tsimbrovsky premiered her work in the Bay Area with The Garden (2007), presented at Stanford University and Noh Space; Scrap Soup (2008), premiered at Theater Artaud; Nocturnal Butterflies (2009), also at Theater Artaud; Full Moon Syndrome (2010), premiered at WestWave Dance Festival; The Book (2010), a series of performances culminating in an installation-performance at SOMArts Center in July 2011; Rustling Silk (2011) presented by CounterPULSE as part of the Summer Special Program; Ir-Rational (2012) premiered at ODC Theater; The Book: ‘Page Two’ (2013) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this page included an installation/performance with Puyandaev’s sculptures; PSi19 at Stanford Now Then (2013); LAByrinths: audio-visual-kinetic #1 (2013) installation/performance at the Center for New Music in SF; Minotaur(2015) at NOHspace, SF; Avy K/Erika Tsimbrovsky have made a collaborative work “ Mutually Assured”(2015) with Bay Aria choreographer Scot Wells, that was premiered at ODC Theater, SF.

She was awarded the Commons Curatorial Residency at SOMArts Main Gallery for July 2011 for The Book. Recently, Tsimbrovsky was awarded the Paul Dresher Ensemble Residency for Minotaur, as well as the CHIME mentorship program for Ir-Rational.

Since 2007 she has received funding from from the Stanford Arts Initiative, CA$H grant, the Zellerbach Family Foundation (2008-9,20011-12), the Guzik Foundation (2009), and Lincoln University (2009-10). While in Israel from 2000-2006 she received numerous grants from the Ministry of Culture for EVM Laboratories.

Vadim Puyandaev

(visual artist/performer) has worked as a painter, sculptor, and designer for over twenty years and has been participating in multi-media dance performances since 1994. His fine art has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Russia, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, France, Spain, Canada, and the US. Puyandaev had also produced numerous pieces of monumental art, including a commission to design a bridge over the Red Sea in Israel. With Tsimbrovsky, he is a founding member of the creative collectives EVM Laboratories (Israel) and Avy K Productions (US), dedicated to investigating what emerges in performance at the nexus of different genres. www.vadimpuyandaev.com

Laura Maguire

originally hails from Ireland, where she studied Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue her graduate studies and received a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University in 2005. She has taught in the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) and Structured Liberal Education (SLE) programs, as well as in the Department of Philosophy at Stanford. After moving to the Bay Area, Laura studied many forms of dance and movement, most notably Argentine Tango and Contact Improvisation. In 2009, she started the Tango Contact Jam, a weekly event dedicated to exploring the fusion of those two dances. She co-produced a number of multidisciplinary dance performances with Avy K Productions, which she co-founded with choreographer Erika Tsimbrovsky and visual artist Vadim Puyandaev. With composer/musician Alex Pinto, she was co-founder and co-director of SF Offside, a jazz festival with an exclusive focus on Bay Area composers and musicians, and for two years she was the music programmer for small underground venue, Viracocha.

For over five years, she has been writing about local musicians and composers under the moniker Live ‘n’ Local SF. From 2010-11, Laura lived in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai where she taught Contact Improv and formed the Dance Chiang Mai community network, which now has over eight hundred members. She also worked with with local performing arts collective CNX Art Connex, and produced several multidisciplinary art and performance events, featuring artists from Thailand and all over the world. Since returning to San Francisco in 2011, Laura has served as Director of Research for the nationally syndicated public radio program Philosophy Talk. Her philosophical writing appears regularly on the blog, Philosophers’ Corner.