Picture this:
Walking into this enormous old castle of a building you hear an odd piping
sound. Following your ears brings you to a large dilapidated room --
crumbling describes it better: different layers of paint are exposed, pale
green, yellow and grey, lots of grey. There's traces of Russian graffiti
here and there. In the middle is a raised marley-covered floor on which
Angel, a beautiful Spanish ballet dancer (see attached picture) alternates
flitting petit pas and high leg gestures with deep wiggly lunges and
sequential undulations reminiscent of Forsyth. He has four colored wires
attached to his head, and is trailed by a long cable.
The electronic flute-like sound he is dancing to has an unusual
relationship to his movements, not one you have ever seen before. The
sound is an audible "translation" of his brain waves. It is, by the way,
not coming from the part of the brain that generates the movements, but
rather lower down -- the area where emotions are said to reside. He has
been at it awhile. He is sweaty.
So just what _is_ the relationship of the sounds to his movements? Good
question. Actually, this question is one part of what this workshop is
about. We are all trying to get a fix on that. You can't say there is NO
connection. When he abruptly stops, or settles down into a certain rhythm,
the tones generally do so as well. Not always, but too often to be
coincidence. Still -- and this is important -- I think Angel is more aware
of it than the observer. (Not surprising perhaps. They are after all
_his_ emotions. Still, you must agree, the point is not irelevent when we
are talking about performance.)
But OK. He and our resident psychologist, Chistina Braun, are deep in -
whatever they are deep in, so you go upstairs to our upper rooms. There
you find Joerg Sonntag in front of his "Final Cut" and "Premiere" stations
rendering Dada-esque video sequences. Hartmut is maxed out on "max" and
between the two sit Sandra and Frieder. Sandra is wearing the same head
wires Angel had on. She has on a black sweat band to hold the wires in
place, plus head phones on on top of that. Frieder is pushing little
symbols around on his "Lab View", connecting them with virtual wires.
Rene, who is sitting a few feet behind Frieder, is transfixed by Frieder's
screen. Soon you are as well. It looks like a massive schematic diagram,
only you don't recognize a single symbol on the page (imagine Zulu sitting
at the controls of a Klingon space ship). Inserts, expanded details of the
much larger program, keep popping in out of relief. This is occuring at a
dizzying pace. Meanwhile, he is popping Peanut Flips into his mouth. You
and Rene look at each other, shaking your heads in disbelief.
You try without any real hope to figure out what is going on. In a general
sense you know: Frieder is writing a program to allow Sandra to steer
videos and control music with her brain waves.
There is a whiney Arabic-like melody coming out of the big speakers at the
back of the room. It is deep in the night. No one says hello. They are
far too concentrated. "Um... When are we going to hang the projection
screens?", you ask. Tonight, someone answers. You write-off getting much
sleep again tonight.
oooooooooooooooooooooooooo
The trick now is not so much the physical connections, it is the filters.
This is what I meant about Angel's work downstairs. We want to gain a
degree of control. Everyone agrees, total control is boring. But everyone
agrees too _something_ has to be extracted. Something an audience can lock
on to.
Johannes Birringer just stopped in for something. He is editing video
material for an installation piece between massive hours spent on the book
he is writing concerning dance and technology.
I just went down (Angel is done) to help Rene get started (though I soon
realized he knows digital sound editors better than I do). He has
assembled 350 questions, many quite personal, asked by synthetic voices.
They are to be triggered as one moves around his installation. A 'yes'
means a turn to the right, 'no' is left. Next question.
Attachment foto credit: Joerg Sonntag
Attachment converted: Personal Files:Elektr~1.jpg 1 (JPEG/JVWR) (0000755A)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Robert Wechsler
Artistic Director
PALINDROME Inter-media Performance Group
Johannisstr. 42
90419 Nürnberg
Fon: 49 911 39 74 72
Fax: 49 911 377 8311
Scheduled touring, fotos, video clips and complete information:
WWW.PALINDROME.DE
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 03/28/01 CST