Hello, I’m Jonathan Shapiro. I’m not such a big fan of presenting myself with the traditional artist bio anymore, so this is more of an informal introduction. If you are looking for an artist biography, you can find one in German here and one in English here. You can find pictures and videos by following the menu above.
I suppose, in the best case, I would like to consider myself as one who takes part in creating art. The art that I take part in creating is performative art. I am coming at this from a musical background, specifically drums and percussion. Very often, the works that I am involved in go beyond the border of presenting sound in a pure form, an involve a selection of elements such as light, electronics, video, movement and performance. Dramaturgy, in a variety of senses, plays a big part in many of the works I am involved in.
I was born in 1982 in Washington D.C and started playing drums when I was 11. When I was 16, I attended the Interlochen Arts Academy for my last two years of high school. In 2000 I moved to New York to study classical percussion at the Manhattan School of Music. It was there that I began to occasionally study with Steve Schick, a musician and artist who was, and is, a huge inspiration to me. During my time in NY I also became a fellow at the first three Bang on a Can Summer Institutes. My ongoing contact with Bang on a Can and associated artists during my New York years was also very influential on my concept of what contemporary music and performance art can be. In 2005 I began my master’s and doctoral studies in contemporary percussion performance at Stony Brook University. My professor, and dear friend, Eduardo Leandro, broadened my horizons and opened up my awareness to so much music and art beyond that of which I was familiar with at the time, particularly to the large scene for music and art in Europe, to which I had had little contact to up until that point. With a new curiosity for the artistic activities in Europe, I visited the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 2006 and was a fellow at the International Ensemble Modern Akademie at Klangspuren Schwaz in 2007.
In 2008 I move to Lübeck, Germany to start my own family. Shortly after my arrival in Germany I joined the Hamburg based Ensemble Intégrales. Through my association with Ensemble Intégrales, which retired it’s active status in 2012, I met many of the people that would lead to the formation of the Decoder Ensemble and Radar Ensembles, both of which are active to this day. Particularly in my work with the Decoder Ensemble, we began going further and further beyond the borders of music, reaching into the spaces of performance art, performative installations, body movement, multimedia events, raves and dreams. Together with Decoder, as a well as independently, I have been working regularly with such artists as Heinrich Horwitz, Brigitta Muntendorf, Alexander Schubert, Stephanie Thiersch, Trond Reinholdtsen, Rosa Wernecke, Sarah Nemtsov and Patricia Carolin Mai.