Guy Mendilow Ensemble

Guy Mendilow Ensemble (GME)  produces live, original multimedia performances and thoughtful residencies. Through riveting scores, narration blending memoir and poetry, and theatrical projections, GME explores real-world tales of choices people make in times of personal or societal change, especially unexpected grace in upheaval. 

Led by composer/educator/facilitator Guy Mendilow, GME is a cutting-edge collaboration of international musicians, composers, visual artists, writers and theatrical designers. 

Touring since 2004, GME is recipient of funding awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Boston Foundation and Western Arts Alliance for artistry, cultural preservation, and strengthening of communities through the arts.

Production examples include:

• The Forgotten Kingdom Dreamlike theatrically projected sand animation, narration blending memoir and poetry, and a riveting musical score reframing Ottoman Jewish women’s song render an interwar letter from a mother to her daughter, in the form of a book of memory so that — years later, once grown — the daughter would remember how it felt to live in her parents’ vibrant, multiethnic Mediterranean world, before its unraveling. 
   
• Different Ships, Same Boat Different Ships, Same Boat is an interactive, multidisciplinary performance combining powerful spoken word, music and song to explore the multifaceted ways Americans risk, live, love and laugh. Unfolding through a series of chapters — each curating real world stories — literary performer Regie Gibson and composer/storycatcher Guy Mendilow guide audiences with podcast-like narration, at turns humorous, poignant or poetic, over an evocative musical score. With stories from small towns, cities and ports of entry, along with music spanning lyrical American Blues and songs from older homes from which today’s Americans came (e.g. Ottoman Jews from present-day Greece and Hungary), Different Ships, Same Boat offers a stirring exploration of the joys, tensions and complexities of who we are and who we wish to be.
  Accompanied by Listening Labs
   
• Around the World in Song Series (for children ages 5-10): Joyous, interactive performances nurture children’s musicianship and multicultural inquisitiveness. Through traditional and original songs and stories from around the world, together with purposeful movement, Around the World in Song gives children tools to engage even more actively with music they love and to tap into the thrill of their own musical discoveries.