INFO
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. full bio
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. 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 performances with Avy K Productions. With composer/musician Alex Pinto, she was co-founder and co-director of SF Offside, a jazz festival with a 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 worked with local performing arts collective CNX Art Connex, and produced several multidisciplinary art events. 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.
