Canvas Rebel: Meet Kä Neunhoffer

https://canvasrebel.com/meet-ka-neunhoffer/

We were lucky to catch up with Kä Neunhoffer recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kä, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

During the pandemic, I was at home to my family ranch in Texas. The entertainment world had ground to a halt and we weren’t sure when we would go back to work. While at home, I wound up spending a lot of time with my childhood friend, a choreographer named Libbie. We wound up really connecting over music and movement and began brainstorming a production for when things opened back up. In the fall we put together a small ensemble and crowd-funded a stage production which sold out two shows. After feeling the high of our success and realizing our creative potential, we decided to create a company and continue to create for screen and stage. Today we’ve had 10 productions, and are doing our first California-based project in Los Angeles in April. What was just stepping out on a branch with a friend is now a real way for us to create and employ other artists.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

From Kerrville, Texas, I got my degree at Berklee in Boston before moving to California where I started my pursuit of a career in film scoring. After a few years the credits started to build up and I have worked freelance since 2020. I’ve done dramas, thrillers, documentaries, TV, movies, and stage productions in my years here. When I’m not doing scoring, I write for my dance & music company, Hillshapes, or I write and record with my fellow female film composers in a quintet called Les Femmes Cinq with whom I have also n produced 2 live shows and a record.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is being in control of my own time and what I do with it. A lot of the things I make are, frankly, not worth the time. Investing in the skills to be an artist requires wasting a lot of time. So much of honing your craft is making things again and again going “nope that’s not right” until finally you get the idea out of your head and onto paper. It seems like now, especially with social media, we’re obsessed with seeing these completed masterpieces and are less open to the long road most people have to take to get there.

I ask myself “is it worth this much money?” when I charge clients, feeling a little selfish from time to time since I do something I love (I’m not saving anyone’s life, this isn’t brain surgery). To keep perspective, I always remind myself that it took years and years to even become mediocre. Is it worth the money, then? Yes. Nobody paid me for the first 15,000hrs of practice, so it makes sense that I charge what I charge for something half decent – I daresay sometimes even good.

It’s deeply satisfying to have a bottomless, deep, thankless appreciation for something. Caring about how I invest the minutes of my life is rewarding beyond money. Caring about my music is how I want to spend my life.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Back in 2020 I started the year with one of my most successful concerts to date in Los Angeles which was quickly followed by the shadow of the pandemic lockdowns. During the summer, I went home to my family ranch in Texas where I worked outside instead of staying in my cube in LA. While at home, I rekindled my friendship with a friend I grew up with who had just moved home. Libbie, a choreographer, and I had known each other since we rode the school bus home together in grade school.

Work had virtually stopped for both of us, every stage and theater was a hazard zone overnight. A lot of our time at the ranch in the evenings we would get to talking about our ideas, things we had seen, what were were listening to, and what inspired us. We realized we both had a similar creative journey coming from a small town in the country into the belly of the industrial art world. It was hard for us, but we realized that we also shared a lot of the same motivations and artistic opinions. On a whim, I wrote a piece of music inspired by my trip home and showed it to her. She started dancing and I knew she and I had tapped into some kind of creative vein.

Over the next few months, we filmed a screen dance and programmed our first stage ballet which premiered in October in Texas. We had to jump through a few extra hoops because of Covid, but we still managed to sell out two shows. When work halted, we decided to create our own work. 3 years and 10 productions later, we’re still working together in a codified business partnership. Somehow we turned that apocalypse into something productive in the end.