Book cover mockup I designed using a few found objects and a scanner. It's a starting point, largely out of the need to distill and concretize a bunch of title ideas and concepts being bandied about by the rest of the company for a last-ditch grant application. This is only a first sketch inevitably leading to more sketches and momentary appropriations. Keywords: 'disposable', 'prototype'

There is no funding for the next Bluemouth project. Yet how else does one begin to make something for its audience to experience? To find funding and support you need a brilliant vision, a seductive pitch, a way into people’s imaginations, something they can hold onto, become inspired with. An act of faith or an act of foolishness? There’s no money and hey I really need a paying job, but…so…hey…

How do you do it?
How do YOU do it?

Thank you London!

Dance Marathon at the Barbican Centre was a fantastic experience.

BBC London Evening News coverage of bluemouth’s Dance Marathon London
(I speak ever so briefly on the increasing popularity of immersive and participatory theatre work)

Ker Wells in the evocative stage work 'Swimmer (68)'

Swimmer (68) is a one-man theatre performance which recently premiered here in Toronto earlier this month at the Studio Theatre. Created by writer/performer Ker Wells and director Bruce Barton — with video design by Cameron Davis and dramaturgy by Pil Hansen – this project was an opportunity to try and push at the use of digital media in performance and begin to formulate a deeper kind of conversation between an actor and the digital media – one in which a vocabulary of inter-medial gesture could be developed and tested. Imitative/mimetic exchange, video as light source and or as a character, experimental application of in-ear monitors and back-of-house video monitoring for actors.

The ‘holy trinity’ of theatre may always be the writer-actor-director collaboration. yet as time passes and ‘digital natives’ inherit theatrical traditions it may begin to seem ever more natural for digital media to exist in the theatre.

More photos to come…

Digital Liveness: Philip Auslander (us) about digital liveness in historical, philosophical perspective from transmediale on Vimeo.

A short history of the footstep in video game sound design, courtesy of Damian Kastbauer at LOST CHOCOLATE LAB. Nicely done!

Funny how it’s seemingly easier to project oneself into a 2-dimensional image experience when we have footsteps to connect us sensorially. Also interesting to consider how the initially crude sonics and synchronization of the footsteps (a consequence of technological limitation), parallels the history of footsteps in early silent and (later) ‘talking’ cinema. Here, technological limitation encourages the use of less realistic and more abstracted sounds as footsteps – think woodblocks, coconut shells, or plucked strings ‘mickey mousing’ to the picture from the movie house orchestra ‘pit’ – which test and pull at the connective tissue between sound and image in a way that we haven’t really had since the maturation of sound in cinema.

Dance Marathon aspires to be that kind of experience. Manhattan is a tough market, so many thanks to Martin Denton for his review on nytheatre.com (January 6).

Dance Marathon NYC was presented by Incubator Arts Project’s Other Forces festival and the Performance Project @ University Settlement. Dance Marathon was originally created with support from the Harbourfront Centre’s Fresh Ground new works commissioning program (Toronto, 2009)

Developing the sonics for a new Salle de Rêve / Centre for Sleep and Dream Studies performance at Rhubarb next month (Feb 26 @ 9 pm, Buddies in Bad Times). Lots of pushing and pulling and stepping through impulses, textural changes and scrambled checklists, line by line, clip by clip, sample by sample – until an impulse to release the accelerator in mid intersection occurs. Turn the car around (when did we leave the office party, by the way?). Head for a road you almost went down years ago. A National Exit Strategy re-mix set planned for a gig at the Drake Hotel 3 years ago, but which no one ever heard due to last-minute MIDI trigger failure – an old framework applied to new materials; new materials tossed into a speeding cab with old materials, tearing off across town in search of address scribbled in crayon on bar napkin. Beautiful cross-pollinations, co-adaptations and rainforest metaphors come spewing out of the photocopy machine.

Interviewed by Hannah Dean on CKLN this morning about tonight’s FINGER performance at SoundPlay (8 pm, Theatre Direct’s Christie Studio, Artscape Wychwood Barns, 601 Christie #170, Toronto). Some really good conversational threads emerging about the re-defining of performance in the age of electroacoustic/digital technology; the role of the body in laptop-driven performance; the struggle to accept ‘liveness’  as something which itself accepts (and even embraces) technical failure as a deep-seated echo of ‘the sacrifice’ in ritual and spectacle. It’s the uncomfortable thrill audiences receive in watching someone fuck up onstage. A moment like that is truly alive – because in that moment, artifice and representation fall apart. Reality smashes the window and forces everyone to improvise until balance and control are restored. Ultimately, that same audience also wants to be captivated by virtuosity.

Hannah asked me to name my influences…who else does this kind of work? For some reason, I thought of Bob Ostertag’s writing (Human Bodies, Computer Music and others) and his acknowledgement that tension and struggle are key themes in all of his work. Isn’t a performance largely about witnessing a personal, physical struggle of some kind? To make all the right moves in the heat of a moment; to lose oneself to (or to give oneself over to) the music that’s being made in the moment. I couldn’t help but also think about the stage craft of Bryan Ruryck.

One last question – what, if anything, in this FINGER show is structured? Other than our assigned, physical tasks during the show, it’s only the timeline that Cam’s (McKittrick) computer follows as it collects, parses and conditions streams of data generated by our physical interactions with the sensors and materials of the show. This ‘brain’ runs along with us in the background like a ghost – somewhat reminiscent of the ‘ghost electronics’ compositions of Morton Subotnick. The system runs imperceptibly deep in the background, inaudible itself but forever modulating the audio-visual consequences of my/our physical activity – even to the point where (potentially) the system decides to punch-out for the day and leave me/us hanging in the wind?

The next likely stop with all this – the drum kit and National Exit Strategy.