Isaac Silber

silberis1@gmail.com

Sound Designer



UNCLE! Performance by Sacha Yanow at the KitchenFebruary 2024

Uncle! is an experimental reimagining of the cultural tradition of the Purimspiel—the comic dramatization of the Book of Esther, performed in celebration of the Jewish holiday Purim. Through language, light, sound, and movement, Yanow shapeshifts in and out of a diasporic werewolf ancestor figure Uncle Mordechai, weaving together aspects of Purim, personal history, and the experiences of their actual uncle working as a pulmonologist during the initial decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In a ritual portrait of intergenerational loneliness and longing that draws from Jewish incantation, Yiddish theater, and drag performance, Uncle!toggles the thin line between humor and grief, reframing the narrative of Purim and prompting us to consider its significance today in relation to anti-Zionist and queer lineages of care and resilience.

I contributed original compositions, live sound design and sound mixing for the performance. 

Two Little KidsPerformance by Anh Vo and 
Ethan Philbrick at the American Academy of Arts and LettersJune 2023
Two Little Kids is named after a short story written in the late 1930s by Vietnamese poet Thach Lam. The story depicts a dull small town withering away within the historical backdrop of the French colonial occupation. The story has no progression; people wander in and out of the picture, appear and disappear with no dramatic consequences, zombie around under utter despair and hopelessness. Extrapolating this condition of bare-life into post-war contemporary Vietnam, in which I believe most people do not live but only know how to survive, “Two Little Kids” uses dance as a medium to make felt the monotonous oppressiveness that is the weather of war. To me, war does not haunt as an event of the past. Rather, in a relentless ongoing-ness, war permeates the air as the weather, exerting an atmospheric pressure whose totality is impossible to bear. 

Two Little Kids is presented as part of The Kitchen's Dance and Process, co-organized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Dance and Process stages an interrogation of methods of choreographic and dance practice, whereby artists challenge default structures in their own work and the field at large. For this iteration of Dance and Process, The Kitchen partners with the American Academy of Arts and Letters who hosts the program during the Spring of 2023. While in residence at the Academy beginning in February, a cohort of artists Martita Abril, Jonathan González, and Anh Vo engaged in a group process of sharing work in progress and receiving feedback facilitated by Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen, culminating in public performances of new works June 3–4, 2023. Initiated first in 1990 under the name Working in The Kitchen, Dance and Process is The Kitchen’s longest running series.

This project was supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.

I contributed sound system installation, and live sound design/scoring using feedback from a constellation of microphones, mixing boards, analog and digital effects processing units. 

Non-Binary PussyPerformance by Anh Vo and Kristel BaldozSeptember 2023
Centering around the provocative yet elusive "non-binary pussy," the project is a revolutionary concert that fuses pop entertainment and political propaganda to produce an immersive experience and, ideally, a collective transformation.


Written and Edited by Anh Vo
Performed by Anh Vo and Kristel Baldoz
Music Produced by Isaac Silber
Videos Directed by Amanda Ugorji
Additional Editing by Nicki Wong
Additional Writing by KYLE b. Co.

I produced original recordings for the performance, evolving over previous iterations of this project. 
Yellow (For Love)Performance by Anh Vo at Performance Space New YorkMay 2022
Yellow (For Love) is a durational ritual offered together with Red (For Communism). This color duology echoes the historical dichotomy between red music and yellow music in Vietnam - the former refers to revolutionary music while the latter refers to soft ballads that were banned for more than decade after the Vietnam War.  

I contributed the sound design, and produced an original sound piece to accompany the performance. 

This performance was included in the New York Times’ list of best dance performances of 2022. 

BabyliftPerformance by Anh Vo at Montréal, arts interculturels November 2022
Anh Vo’s evening-length solo, BABYLIFT, attempts to conjure the ghosts of the Vietnam War (a.k.a. the Resistance War Against Imperialist America). Named after a 1975 mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to Western countries—which resulted in a plane crash that killed 78 of those children— BABYLIFT is first a memorial to the unmourned and unremembered. Striving to queer linear masculinist history, Vo weaves together cultural memories of the US Civil Rights Movement, freedom fantasies of the 1960s, contemporary pop culture, and current leftist activism. Set to a disorienting soundscape, BABYLIFT juxtaposes repetitive ritualistic movements with sexually provocative gestures, speculating on the erotic of haunting that can be both terrifying and pleasurable.

I contributed the sound design, live scoring and sound mixing, and original music for the performance.