Music

Toychestra is our all-women toy instrument ensemble. We are based in Oakland and have been together ten years! We practice Wednesday nights at my house over beer and gossip. We play mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area and Europe, at venues including galleries, clubs, community centers and schools. Highlights include our 2006 appearance on SPARK (Watch the performance.) the Lab's "Live Art Lab" festival, (S.F., Spring 2000), the opening of "Juvenilia" (S.F., Fall 2000) and “Bay Area Now/Under the Radar 1” (Fall 2005) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the collaboration with Dan Plonsey and Fred Frith (S.F. Bay Area, May 2003-May 2004), the group's five European tours and the recent "Musiques et Jouets" festival (Cite de la Musique, Paris, Winter 2004). We have five releases, three on Lyon’s S.K. label. At left, we can be seen enjoying the spa lifestyle in Switzerland. Click on the picture to go to the Toychestra web site (also designed by lexawalsh.com webmaster Dan Nelson.)
Kačkala (pronounced "Kotch-colla") is our all-women a capella ensemble, based in Tábor, CZ. You might wonder how I can be in two bands at opposite ends of the world at one time. First of all, I used to live there, and might live there again. Meanwhile, everybody is flexible and the girls let me fly in for our annual summer tour. Petra used to be in Toychestra too; Hilary is the rocking drummer of Sabot; the Kubešovi sisters come from a long line of musicians; Ruby (not pictured) has written some of the most beautiful Kač songs ever, but is on hiatus; Ramblin' Rose (not pictured) geared us up in our fabulous fashions. Anyway, click on the picture to enter the dusty world of Kačkala and listen to our new CD Vox on Prague's Silver Rocket Records.
Thanks to Suki O'kane & Allen Whitman, I worked on the music of Theatre of Yugen's The Cycle Plays. I had the pleasure of playing with Suki & Allen (why didn't we do this soooner?), and gear & crank master Larnie Fox, among other delightful musicians. The magic performance date was 07/07/07.

I have been guest vocalist with the Czech bands C, from Tábor, Esgmeq, from Cheb, & Waave, from Tábor. If you google them you might find my tracks.

Performance

My collaborative performances explore the layering of gestures, traditional, found and electronic sounds, projected images plus found and manipulated educational and etiquette texts.

Brief synopses of selected performances:

Foghorn
Lexa Walsh and George Cremaschi, 2002

An investigation of water and the (landlocked) Czech obsession with the sea, using video footage of the recent European floods, and music by George Cremaschi and Giacinto Scelsi.

The piece begins with recorded sounds resembling footsteps crunching in rocks, live sounds being created on stage and video footage of brisk walking on a wet path. A female character (Cinderella/bride/flight attendant/flood-ready), dressed in mosquito netting, walking with rocks in her rubber boots, enters the space and hands out paper bags (resembling air sickness bags) printed with the words “Ahoj” and “The air is our sea” (the first, a Czech greeting, the second, a Czech expression).
The male character pulls the boots off the female character, pouring the rocks from her boots into a metal bucket.
A minimalist segment is broken by the quick appearance and disappearance of an unrelated character.
The male character offers cups of questionable water from the recently flooded lake. A video of hands opening airline hospitality accoutrements. The female character stands with her back to the audience, mimicking the video.
Both characters prepare for the flood. They put on checkered shirts, wheelbarrow through the space, come back with raincoats and begin moving many sandbags in front of the video image of raging waters, until the image is covered.

Moom Pitcher
Lexa Walsh & George Cremaschi, 2000

Various gestures and sounds mock and play off each other in an absurdist domino effect.

For example:
The amplification of burning, popping popcorn makes one character think there’s a war at hand, she crawls along the ground in fear.
A man stops her in her track several times asking advice about such subjects as the proper way to introduce a friend.
At an overhead projector, the woman has scratched out a vaguely visible text – it slowly comes back into focus: Directions to skinning and stuffing a small rodent.
The man comes frighteningly close to the audience with the gesture of blowing his trombone into their tender ears. He stops just short with a small blip. She, meanwhile, cuts words violently at an amplified paper cutter, giving him answers to questions he hasn’t asked.

Strop
Theater Parapet
Lexa Walsh, Petra Podlahová, George Cremaschi, 1999

A search for a sense of place, home, and domesticity, personal and symbolic borders, and a visit by the angel of etiquette, Emily Post.

Scene 1: Two faceless, nameless, genderless characters poke around in the darkness to find a nesting place, and marking the perimeter of the space with a chalk-drawn circle. Constantly interrupting each other's privacy and borders, eventually only one of them gets to stay.
Scene 2: The character who has stayed inside the border attempts to make a “home” out of the space within the chalk-drawn boundaries, while the character who remains itinerant speculates about what a good life it must be on the “inside”. Finally an unexpected meeting takes place. Scene 3: Trapped together, both characters study domesticity via a lesson on table etiquette by Emily Post, with the aid of a large-scale slide presentation and sound piece.