Paul Chavez


Paul Chavez is an American composer of dance music, and a sound designer for installation and theater. He often composes under the project name FeltLike. Chavez has worked in the Los Angeles, California area since 1990 where he did some of his first works at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions where he started as a sound engineer. Chavez's music is influenced by the minimalism of Steve Reich and Paul Dresher and the experimental music of Robert Ashley and Laurie Anderson. His work has been featured at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles and his recent score for the Arcane Collective's dance work Cold Dream Colour was created in collaboration with U2's The Edge.
Chavez has developed a style of composition over the past twenty years that involves creating the initial sound score independently from the choreography. The score is then brought together with the dance just prior to the performance and a sound collage is created. Often the work is mixed and modified live during the dance performance using multiple playback sources such as multitrack computers, CDs, and live instruments.

Biography

Chavez began writing music for dance in college at UC Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies, where he studied with composers John Carbon, Hagar Kadima and installation artist Ann Hamilton. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition from there in 1987. A native Californian, Chavez's music is strongly influenced by his engineering, visual arts, design and architecture background.

His past performances with the group The 4GUNAS included theatrical, tableaux vivants of his design that underscored the sculptural nature of his work. Chavez has worked extensively in scoring the work of several choreographer/dancers who specialize in the Butoh style of dance, including Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg, Melinda Ring, Morleigh Steinberg, and Sarah Elgart. He has also collaborated with Shel Wagner Rasch and Stephan Koplowitz, Dean of the School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts.

Selected works