As part of my research during my residency at HCL, I organized an exhibition featuring works by Danielle Paz, Danny Volk, Marilyn Volkman and myself.  As a group of peers, we are in constant dialogue with each other and our works.  These transactions of ideas, criticism, advice, and viewership infiltrate our work from time to time, creating hybrids of my work, her work, his work, etc; mimicking the history of cinema and the occurrence of the meta moment.

The following is an edited transcription of a conversation the four of us had in the planning stages regarding the title of the exhibition on September 4, 2011. It became a record of our thoughts
behind our choice to title the show Did You Know Nicole Kidman Acts in Her Own Work?, offering insight into the relationship we have with each other, the materials we use in our work and the history behind the making of these and all works before.

All of this moment is housed in twelve inches of me.
I can’t change the way the time happened.
These things aren’t fragile. Photography tells us to protect these things, video tells us that we can do them over and over again. It’s a history of cinema, but then it’s a history of the interaction through cinema.

This is common language at this point. We are not
presenting anything new. We are specific in the way it affects us.

Downplay the trauma. Qualify emotions. Like, there’s no universal element in trauma.

Trauma is a stereotype.

“Did you know Nicole Kidman acts in her own work?”
It’s an obvious question that has something under it.
A beautiful obviousness. You don’t quite know yet.
The expectation of hearing that- is that it’s something else.
It’s earnest. It’s indisputable.

The statement, in general, speaks to ownership, which is this other thing in video and film- for people that make it- that act in it, and all of these components of the making of it.

There’s this thing we do in popular viewership-

“No, this is Nicole Kidman’s film.”

Because she’s the protagonist, the narrative surrounds her.
It became hers. It becomes a conversation about who owns this film.
Who owns this piece?
Do I own Basic Instinct? Do you own the clips you are taking?

Constant configurations of two. Three is complicated. Four is equal. Triangle? Rectangle. Diagonal. There are no diagonals in a triangle. You hit a wall.

(Untitled) Teachers

Teachers give showings.
Pointing at the big wide
world!
the banner reads.

Thank you.
you pulled me out of the
valley

All y’all good guides keep the mountains with your
carved molds. I know
detailing fresh replicas is
your way of keeping notes,
but I just want you to know
I couldn’t have lived
without you turning them
over, offering them
as furniture for our journeys
together.

My feelings about our visits
come slower in the mail
than the learning-to-look
rate because I’ve been
walking our old places on
the way to the grocery and
stuff. Now I wear those
jagged scenic halos you
gave me like flat gravel.
shame.

But Oh, God last night I
remembered our mountains!

You stood there looking
like the difference between
working and going
somewhere. out loud you
told how habits eat up hills
and shit out quick paintings
of flashy games. real
cheap you said with your
eyes. And then you were
shouting. Distractions! they
get in your mouth like grit
& [my oh] it makes bad
songs in
your teeth!

Untitled (Architects)

dear architects,

walking up to see your place is so important.
we all know it would be more
the main thing if we paid enough people
to keep
reminding us.

 also, someone on the radio said getting
the best-necessities is always better
with an adventure in front. I think that’ll
be true
forever. so
give it.

Don’t hear me wrong, I know you’re
always jumping when the phone rings
but what I’m saying is please don’t let
that get in the
way of letting the grass
grow in front of the
cottages.

yours,

E——

“Post-Paleontology grew from a distant source: an earlier work featuring a collaboration of Ensemble Recherche and the Freiburger Baroque Orchestra, fusing the most up-to-date performance techniques on modern instruments with historically-informed performance practice on early instruments.  The Baroque flute, viola da gamba, Baroque lute, and harpsichord included in the earlier work served as both a sonic inspiration and an impetus for the title.  A flashback to my childhood in New York reveals a resemblance between the darkened display cases of the musical instrument section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the yellowing typewritten placards accompanying the fossils at the American Museum of Natural History.

But perhaps modern instruments are no less fossils themselves: the performers of the pioneering Ensemble Dal Niente nevertheless play a violin from 1840, a piano and contrabass clarinet designed at the turn of the 20^th century, a folk guitar from the last half-century, and percussion instruments from diverse times and places around the world.  I sought to bring out these anachronisms by asking the performers to act on their instruments with an assortment of objects ranging from Styrofoam to an electric milk frother.”

In re-imagining the work for Dal Niente, only the ghosts of the Baroque instruments remain, along with the instruments from the recent past.  The new work focuses on the contrabass clarinet, a species of dinosaur itself, whose curved metal tube resembles the crest of the extinct Parasaurolophus.  Recent paleontological research suggests that the crest was an air chamber used for the dinosaur’s mating call.  Could it have sounded something like a screaming contrabass clarinet?

Two years ago, I was sitting in our band’s van on our way to St. Louis. The keyboardist, Jim Dinou, put in a CD that he and his group, Impossible Recording Machine, had recently composed. The moment the first song began, my body stopped moving, much like a pointer dog that has found its mark, becoming completely stiff with focus. My brain was on pause, it was completely zoned out; it stayed that way until the album came to an end fifty minutes later. The music on the album is really the only tangible inspiration I can claim for Assignment #403. I was, of course, influenced by great artists and performance styles and techniques, as well as the countless, fantastic people in my life. These things have always will always inspire me and the work I do, but this album alone planted the seed.

A few facts about the show:

There are no words. It is a story. It’s choreographed to music. Maybe it’s considered a dance show; maybe. There will be 17 performers, lots of shadow puppets, and some video projection.

Before the show begins, there will be six “trailers” anticipating the feature presentation. Each trailer is a tune from a different local musician, and each tune has a choreographed story assigned to it. The musicians to be featured in these trailers are: Charles Kim, Jeff Thomas, Mark Messing, Charles, Otto, Mikhail Fiksel, and Kevin O’Donnell.

This list of artists and performers keeps growing. Here is who we’ve got at this point:

Sam Polce, Felicia Bertch, Samantha Schutte, Amanda Link, Sarah Fornace, Eric Prather, Adam Verner, Mark Chaitin, Alex Balestrieri, Missi Davis, Anna Stevens, Alice Wedoff, Tara Smith, Noel Williams, Kathryn Hribrar, Joe Lewis, Taylor Bibat, Dav Yendler, Drew Dir, Jason Beeson, Amy Allen, Ted’s mom, Liam, Caitlin Shier, Steve Keller, Derek Conrad, Anna Glowacki, Audrey Foster, Austin Oie, and me. Whoa!

More to come about the process. Hopefully some video action too.

Thanks for reading!

Neither composer-designer-tech whiz Alexander Overington nor cellist-singer Teddy Rankin-Parker has a background in classical opera, but both come armed with extensive experience in myriad pockets of music theory and practice. Rehearsals began with the question of what, in fact, this performance would entail. Dramaturgs Majel Connery and Amy Stebbins furnished a diverse collection of samples from traditional opera, pop music, avant-garde music-theater and the like. A lively discussion ensued as to whether this project might take the shape of a music-theater piece, a commentary on the making of a music-theater piece, or a commentary on witnessing a music-theater piece; the role of each performer, be it static or dynamic, concrete or improvisatory; the importance of form, content, and presentation. Are we interested in satisfying or toppling an audience’s expectations (and what would be the value of doing so)? Precisely because spectators would come to hear Teddy eloquently caressing his instrument and Alex’s careful finesse of electronic sound, what would happen if they traded roles or ‘failed’ to fulfill their respective ‘duties’, or if they collaborated in a medium toward which both or neither is inclined? Chaos or hilarity, and what is the value of each?

Finding themselves with such a broad array of options was both liberating and overwhelming. The first week of the residency, Amy and producer Majel Connery assigned a different task each day; Teddy and Alex spent the afternoon creating a piece to present and discuss the next rehearsal. At the end of the week, they chose the concept from one of the pieces to direct and focus their work. This is easier said than done as inquiry often feeds further inquiry, and such is the curse of artists endowed with such a wealth of resources! After some stops and starts, and within some level of seclusion, Teddy and Alex seem to have found themselves on a more comfortable footing. To what extent is art defined by the properties of its ‘product,’ and to what extent is it defined by the collaboration that creates it?  These are the questions raised by Teddy and Alex’s Opera Shop collaboration.  Suffice it to say that this opera is produced not just from a creative spark, but involves a focused study as to its ramifications and meaning in the wider context of contemporary opera– it is a uniquely self-conscious engagement with the idea of Opera not only as a genre, but also as a philosophy.  We are eagerly anticipating the fruits of their labours, as those who know them have a fondness for and confidence in their working relationship.

This will be the last antibody dance. After this performance of Phase 1, the company will assume the name of Antibody Corporation. The company itself and our bodies are in a process of becoming_cyborg, which will be completed in November when we present Phase 2.

In a way, this is the last human performance by Antibody. The title Holocene Overkill stands for the dominance of the human species over every other species on the planet. However, at this apex of humanity’s triumph, the fragile hold that the individual human has on our collective reality begins to slip. The question now is “what next?” Or even more bluntly, Mother Earth has issued this question as a command: “NEXT!” The human is about to mutate into something other. We are being roughly prodded and pushed forward by nature, and it is our own choice as individuals to either  jump off the cliff with humankind or take our chances with whatever biological escape plan we manage to scrap together.

Dance, as a form dealing directly with the body, is uniquely situated to respond to this crisis.
Dance and Performance Art are means of epigenetic mutation; that is their purpose and justification. The rational world of business and entertainment generally dismiss the need for more experimental art forms, yet this appears merely to hide the fact that they are pressing their own epigenetic mutational program on us in the form of an interlocking network of corporate cultural products. For our performance we’ve personally selected some of the finest resources that the global economy has to offer and incorporated them into a tasteful assemblage. These include the screams of various endangered species, African drum samples supplied by a digital drum machine, fresh coca leaves from Peru, and of course, our bodies, which are robed in specially designed costumes inspired by the essences of the desert landscape. The stage will be a cage, as it always has been, and we begin as zoo animals; not doing much, barely moving. Yet this is merely a preparation for the entertaining ritual that is to follow.

As someone interested in how to integrate my art into my life practice, this week forced me to articulate what I need to create – in terms of environment, structure, and communication.  I structured physical warm-up time before each collaborative session, I controlled the temperature of the work space, I planned my meals around our sessions.  Our art making disrupted my normal patterns of behavior, and forced me to re-examine how I approach the rehearsal process.

For Christopher the programming had to happen very rapidly so that alterations were ready for the next rehearsal. The discussion around the development of the sound palette and the unique perspective that a dancer brings in discussing sound took this project in a new direction.

Ultimately the result of our intensive week of work was a 40 minute performance piece structured on the symphonic form.  We developed new choreographic and improvisation structures, as well as new sound filters and modulations, allowing us to expand the scope of the piece and add variety.  We developed new interactions between the live performance and the technology, taking advantage of spatial relationships to create dramatic effect.  We also developed new methods for decision-making within the structure of the piece to address who is controlling the sound and the sequence of events.  Control alternates between the dancer and the composer and we played with various mechanisms by which to switch between the two, as well as situations with more ambiguous shared control.   Perhaps most excitingly, after generating this new body of material, both the sound and movement worlds feel more open ended and as if more possibilities exist. This intensive work toward a completed piece also led to discussing whether the piece was successful and how that success is measured.

One of our goals this week was to make the work live outside of us (me and Christopher) so that we can offer it as a collaborative project to other performers.  Christopher has considered using another dancer or instrumentalist, while I am interested in developing the video technology to trigger light instead of sound for use in dance performance.

What is next for SoundLines?  After performing at HCL on Friday, August 12, we brought the piece to Minneapolis for a series of gallery performances the evening of Saturday, August 13.  We plan to show the revised work in the San Francisco Bay area this fall.

Hello, we are Katharine Hawthorne and Christopher Jette, the collaborative team behind SoundLines and visiting artists in residence at HCL this week. Both of us originally hail from the Midwest and are currently based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Our residency at HCL is part of our Midwest tour of SoundLines, a way for us to bring the work to new audiences and learn from new environments. It also affords a focused time in which to deepen our understanding of the collaborative process.

SoundLines is an interactive sound and dance project that uses video tracking to convert movement into sound. We are re-examining the pre-existing performance piece in greater specificity, with the intention of developing the work into modules that can comprise a full evening work. Our process involves computer coding, choreography and composition, and is informed by experimentation, discussion, and optimization. The work is deeply collaborative and involves an ongoing conversation across the disciplines of music and dance – we are essentially using the work as a focal point to teach each other about our respective genres. This cross discipline conversation is rooted in our individual classical heritages as well as our current interest in technology in performance.

We are both working at the edges of our disciplines and attempting to push beyond established performance practices. SoundLines uses highly formalized, abstract, and conceptual structures in addition to organic, expressive improvisation. We draw rigor and aesthetic inspiration from our years of classical training, Christopher as a violinist and collegiate composition instructor, Katharine as a former professional ballet dancer and a trained physicist. We are committed to experimentation and find inspiration in unexpected outcomes.

K: I am inspired by the physics of the moving body and its expressive capacities. My work is motivated by constant questioning – what can I do, what can I express? My choreographic process is inspired by my physics education and my experience as a researcher – I treat the studio as laboratory and rehearsal as research. SoundLines has challenged me to heighten my spatial and aural sensitivity as a performer responding to interactive sound. I am exploring what it means to be a body in conversation with technology – this is a through line in my work.

C: How can I respond to this space? I have composed for violin, many traditional acoustic instruments, and for computers and electronics – which has lead me to ask how can I extend my work and compose for movement of the human body? As a composer working in digital medium, relying on the human body as source for sound has introduced a number of limitations to the process – such as exhaustion, imprecision, and unpredictability. These limitations are part of the musical performance tradition but they differ in some surprising ways.

In SoundLines we aim to immerse the viewer in a sonically charged space and offer a physical experience of sound. After only two days here in Chicago, we are already immersed in our process and inspired by the HCL space. We hope you will join us for our showing this Friday, August 12th, at 8:30pm.

The Cleo Project is an experimental short that uses Agnes Varda’s film Cleo From 5 to 7 as a prompt to explore performance and gender. Multiple women will enact the same scene from the film while being given direction and adjustments on set as cameras roll. One camera will shoot the scene as it plays out.  An additional camera will document the director working through the process of performance with the actresses.

Sophia prepares her wig (photo by Kara Clarke)

I just received the production stills from the Cleo shoot from Kara Clarke, and thought it would be a good time for some behind the scenes information.  It was a pretty intense two day shooting schedule, but full of so many talented and charming people that it was also really fun.

In the scene the ladies all had to wear a hair piece which they pull off part way through.  I was so busy sewing robes and buying props and generally trying to keep everything together, that I forgot about the wigs until the day before the shoot.  Late that day. Christy picked up the wigs the morning of the shoot from a limited selection, so they were a little ridiculous.  The one that Sophia and Mary had to use was particularly challenging.  It was huge, curly and much more red than either of their hair colors.  The color looks okay under the lights though and all the ladies figured out a way to style the wigs that worked for them.

Speaking of lights…

This was a pretty common moment between shots.  We went through 30 daylight balanced photo floods during the shoot.  HCL is a beautiful space with really great windows which is part of the reason I wanted to shoot there. We had to light quite a bit so that the windows weren’t completely overexposed and those lights only have a 4 hour life.  There was a lot of swapping out dead bulbs and turning lights on and off at the beginning or end of a shot.

Again, check out how amazing this space is! They also have a beautiful piano.  This is during the dolly shot, which was the last scene we shot with each actress.  We were using a wheelchair as a dolly with the camera and tripod carefully balanced on it.  You can just see it on the far side of the piano.  It took three of us to the maneuver the dolly each time, two to actually pull it while holding the camera and one to guide them.  We wound up shooting this a lot because of various difficulties with the dolly (cables in the way, backing into poles, bad timing with the actresses walks…)

Scott followed Christy around with a camera almost non-stop the whole weekend.  He was supposed to document the process of Christy preparing and directing the actresses for their performance.  We dubbed this “The Christy Cam.”  Because I didn’t know what would be important to me in editing and what wouldn’t, he shot almost continuously. It makes up the bulk of the footage and has taken the longest to sort through.  Before I finished going through it all, there were many nights when I woke up in a panic about whether or not we got a shot of figuring out Chloe’s wig or if the audio turned out during a very quiet conversation.  Having now watched it all, I can safely say it’s pretty great.

The British coalition government announces the biggest planned public spending cuts in recent memory.

21 October 2010

Hannah Price talks to Mark Ravenhill about these cuts and they decide they need to do something about it.

27 January 2011

Plays by leading UK dramatists are uploaded to the Theatre Uncut website to download and perform rights free on 19 March.

2 February 2011

A bored Alexander Lane is being a theatre nerd and stumbles on a great article in The Guardian that mentions Theatre Uncut. He immediately writes them asking if he can stage a production in Chicago.

26 February 2011

Chicago casting is finalized with some incredible actors and a first read thru is held at what is the perfect arts space for this project: High Concept Laboratories.

15 March 2011

A blog post is written in hopes that it might pique people’s interest in attending this FREE event.

19 March 2011

Theatre Uncut will perform in Chicago at 3pm along with over 5o other productions throughout the UK, US and in Germany. Will you be there?