DANCE MARATHON returns to Toronto World Stage Festival
Author: Richard Windeyer
digital music / design / performance
Beginning the design process for a new Bluemouth experience.
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?
Dance Marathon London
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)
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.
Dance Marathon Edinburgh
I’m about to head into my second week of Dance Marathon performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, presented in association with Traverse Theatre and Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. We (bluemouth) are getting some great responses and reviews while working with some really amazing and talented people. To follow all developments – including reviews, audience responses and photos, head on over to bluemouth’s Twitter and Facebook pages.
More photos to come…
Sleep. Dream. Study. Listen.
Above is a (slightly remixed) excerpt from the Rhubarb 2011 Festival performance of ‘Salle du Rêve / Centre for Sleep and Dream Studies’ with Angela Rawlings and Ciara Adams (voices) and myself (laptop). The first 3 minutes or so consists of an improv the three of us did at the end of the evening. The ‘sleep dream questionnaire’ heard throughout this excerpt was administered to individual audience members, one at a time, in an intimate setting next door to the bar/dance floor. Co-presented by Bluemouth Inc Presents last February (2011) at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto.Philip Auslander on digital liveness in historical, philosophical perspective.
Footsteps
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 Manhattan
Doing shows in New York is tough for independent theatre companies like Bluemouth Inc. Competition for audience is relentless, equipment rentals are prohibitively expensive (it’s often cheaper to just buy the gear outright), and with such minimal institutional arts funding, it’s really all about cultivating the rarest of warm, fuzzy long-term relationships with deeply-pocketed people who share your inspiration and passion for giving audiences the wildest, craziest immersive experiences anyone can imagine.
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)
The National Centre for Sleep & Exit Dream Strategy Studies
Avoid the compartmentalization of creative impulses by throwing an office party. Encourage all creative ideas from all the different projects to mingle, flirt and mess around with each other on top of the photocopier. A rainforest brainstorm session begins.
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.
Richard C. Windeyer 