EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 41, Issue 13 This issue's topics: "Baptism of Fire..." (3rd CASSIEL Performance Report.) (part 2 of 4) Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1992 17:57:49 +0100 From: nick@DCS.ED.AC.UK Subject: "Baptism of Fire..." (3rd CASSIEL Performance Report.) [Part 2 of 4] That was two acts or around 20 minutes, barely enough to consider a critical mass for a show. Ah, no: let me think. March. So, by that time I'd met Jonathan. Jonathan had just arrived in Edinburgh after doing dance/theatre work in Amsterdam. His background is ballet, but he hadn't taken his ballet technique into straight contemporary dance or anything like that (this seems to have been the usual process with the people I know, and involves the deeply symbolic ritual of trading the dainty white ballet shoes for a pair of Dr. Martens). Instead, he was into more theatrical stuff: mime, physical theatre, call it what you will. Costumes, masks and so on. What the hell, thought I: the more the merrier. I gave him a tape of the Traverse set and the material I'd been working on for Helen, and asked him if he'd be interested in conceiving and performing a piece. He gave it a listen, and came back to me quite enthusiastic about the Loremarie section. We then had a few long talks about the images I'd been trying to portray... But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let me describe the development of the individual acts later on. So, the application was accepted and we were offered the Assembly Rooms. Wow. This is basically the major Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue, and I was really happy that we got it. We were given one evening only (I'd have liked two or three, but never mind...) and we were marked down as a double-bill with another dance company called Offshoot... So, we had a venue and some cash. And I almost had a long enough programme... And then Helen pulled out. She'd actually been planning to do a improvisation with a second dancer, who couldn't manage the date we'd offered due to exams. Helen was rather unhappy about improvising a solo, and didn't have time to choreograph something; and then found out that her exams were on the performance date as well, so the piece was basically out. This was a shame because I'd been wanting to work with Helen for about a year, and it also dropped the entire CASSIEL set below the necessary critical mass to form a complete programme. I started a long, protracted, series of phone calls. I asked Susan Hay whether she'd be willing to improvise something. I knew Susan from some dance forum meetings and from the Stirling thing, and I'd seen her perform in an improvisation-based piece for Electric Motion Dance Company in Glasgow last summer. (It was pretty impressive - Susan has a very distinctive movement vocabulary - and Martin does interesting music. But I'll get onto that.) Susan said she'd think about it, so I gave her a tape. Hang on, this is wrong. I must have asked Susan before the application for the Spring Fling went in, since she now dances which Khoros Dance Co. who were performing for the Spring Fling as well, and I had to avoid a clash. OK, so I'd spoken to Susan ages ago. Yes, that makes sense, since Susan had to pull out as well, about a week after Helen did... OK, down to two acts again. I put out a lot of feelers to basically the entire Edinburgh dance community (both amateur and professional), and also contacted someone at Laban in London and someone else at Dance City in Newcastle, and would have fired a barrage of tapes off towards Nikki Millican in Glasgow as well had the Third Eye Centre not been going through a state of financial, er, bewilderment. Looking back, I wish I'd taken out shares in TDK. Scene change: Glasgow, The Tramway, which is a superb performance space. It used to be, well, a tramway, and some of the original tramlines are still in place. After that it was turned into a transport museum, and then a performance space. And it's enormous - the smaller performance area/entrance lobby must be, what, 20 metres by 70 by 20 high, and as for the main performance space, well, I've never seen as far as the back of it and I don't remember ever seeing the roof. Think of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark and you'll get some idea. It's dead dead trendy (painted black and white, Conny Schnitzler style), and its size makes it ideal for large-scale performance projects like B'rith Gof coming down from the roof on ropes and so on. (Actually, for their last show, B'rith Gof decided that the Tramway was too small and staged the performance at the Harland and Wolff shipyard. I think these people might have delusions of grandeur. And I want to do their music some day...) I was at the Tramway for the Laurie Booth show (c/w octophonic PA and entire sound structures being thrown across all the speakers... oooh, mummy, please can I do something octophonic?), and was milling around with various dancers in the audience (which included some of Peter Royston's students... in fact, they turned up in a minibus from down in the Borders where Peter teaches; this minibus came to a halt at the Tramway main entrance, the side door swung open, and out piled approximately nine lithe young bodies and eighteen Dr. Martens, immediately peaking my trendometer into the red and making Roanne suddenly feel somewhat underdressed...) Where the hell is this thread leading...? Oh, yes. Dawn Hartley was there (she used to be one of Peter's dancers a year or so ago before joining X-Factor full-time), so I spent five or ten minutes working up a good deal of courage and then wandered over and introduced myself and asked her whether she was doing anything on June 4th, and if not, then whether she'd perform in my show. This was one of the key moments of the whole project (of which there are a couple more: I mustn't forget to mention the Dangerous Hat and the lasagna...) and it took a lot of courage to even talk to her, since she's a top-notch professional dancer, too busy to bother with the likes of me I'm sure, and the situation was... well, that's another thread which I'll maybe come to. Anyway, I asked her and her reaction was rather a surprise to me: she immediately hunted around for her diary, checked the date for any clashes, and said yes. At this point my feet gently left the floor and didn't touch it again for several hours. So, that was three acts and enough to resume the countdown, but I really wanted one more act to make a full, coherent, programme. Then one morning I got a call from Martin who runs Electric Motion Dance Company (nice name...). The Company had, as far as I can tell, sort-of stalled since the high-profile performances last summer in Glasgow, but Martin was happy to contribute to my show, by offering his services as a guitarist and one of EM's dancers (Centli) as a performer. EM is strong on preparing improvised shows at short notice (as a sort-of "strike force" as Martin likes to put it), so I thought, why not? Three-way improvisation with guitarist, keyboard player, dancer. I'll try anything once. I finally had a show. There was Sheila and Roanne's piece (with three other dancers), Jonathan, Martin plus Centli, and Dawn (and in fact, Brigid McCarthy came onboard later on as that developed). I still don't know how I managed it, actually: four acts, four dancers from Offshoot, one from Khoros, one from Electric Motion, one from Vestris and somehow I'd succeeded in getting two-thirds of X-Factor. In terms of styles, as we'll see later, it was a pretty eclectic mix, so getting the running order and staging right was a bit of a challenge. And I think I'd basically succeeded in blowing this amateur/community/professional distinction out of the water(*). I guess the fact that I was the musician, not a dancer, helped a lot: dancers need music as I said earlier, and I was outside the slightly incestuous classes/workshops cycle which is where friendships get forged and rivalries flare up. (*) Well, maybe. There are a lot of threads here which I still need to sort out in my mind, and until then I don't want to say too much about it. Uuuhh, what next? Let me check my notes. Oh yes, I had to start assembling a technical team. I asked Richard onboard as lighting designer. He'd had a lot of experience lighting theatre and opera (as well as general theatre management), so I thought I'd throw a dozen contemporary dancers in his direction and see what happened. And I also asked Lewis to stage manage, mainly because I wanted someone who was very good at organising people and getting them to do things, who would not back away from any crises or confrontations (we had a few of those, I can tell you), and who could be objective and prioritise tasks and so on from an outside view. Regarding getting people to do things, "people" included me: since I was still in the process of composing and preparing bits of the music, I thought I might need some project management if things slipped; in fact, there was no problem here. The other reason I invited Lewis (two selfish reasons here, I notice) was that I'm currently trying to find a job; there were various options of work here and there, and I'd just been through a rather fraught six months or so of trying to decide where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. Lewis wanted to take me onboard for a software startup; and I thought the fairest thing I could do in the circumstances, rather than argue over income, cars, portable phones, perks and the things that people seem to think are important, was to bring him up here and show him my world: the things and people and aspirations that are important to me. That means these performers and this show. At least now, we both know where we stand motivation-wise and I hope we can come to some agreement on how we can chase our respective rainbows. It seemed like an obvious good idea to have Richard do lighting design for both CASSIEL and Offshoot. Given the minimal technical facilities on offer, I thought it would be rather silly to have two lighting designers trying to do their own shows with the single rig, and would require a lot of effort for them to stay in touch and get things planned properly. So, use one designer. Seemed like a good idea at the time. The jury's out at the moment on whether it was in hindsight... Let me describe the pieces now, and the development of the music. This is roughly in chronological order of conception. Actually, this is rather difficult; I find dance extremely difficult to describe, and I feel it would be unfair to attempt to go into detail if I can't do it justice. So some of this might be a little simplistic, and I'll to stick to form rather than artistic content and message. And I won't describe the actual performances on the night until later. "In the Beginning..." This is Sheila and Roanne, who were by now a dance company called suddenlylastsummer (it must be completely in lower case). It's apparently easier to talk to the Scottish Arts Council if you have a "name" rather than just be performers. We'll see: I'm going to go in with the name CASSIEL, headed paper, a logo, the suit and the PowerBook and see how I get on I think. But I digress... This was the longest piece (around 12-13 minutes), and in terms of the music at least the most sequential and structured. A pure dance duet between the two women at the beginning, leading gradually into what I'd almost consider physical theatre; the women are approached by three anonymous figures, who burden them down with suits, underwear, shopping, children, a briefcase, kitchen utensils, jewellry, the trappings associated with the roles forced upon, or taken on by, women in our society. A brief period of constriction and lack of movement. Then, a rejection of the physical trappings, and a longish section of unison between the five dancers breaking into and out of duet sections. (Hmm, despite what I said about Sheila and I having differing tastes in dance, in terms of pure form this section is quite close to some of the things I have in the back of my mind.) The final resolution is back to duet, with some rather effective contact sequences. I don't want to dwell too much on the music, to be honest; it was pretty standard Rothwell fare, with some interesting twists. The opening was Wavestation pads, with tons of modulation and all voices running through an overdriven phaser and DDL. This developed into a bass/voice riff inspired by what I remember of the soundtrack to an open-air dance piece by Theater Tango in Copenhagen last summer. (I should have scribbled down the music at the time; I wish I could remember exactly what it was like...) Some ballsy percussion from the D-70 since it's got filters which can provide it. (I think we were running a lot of the percussion stuff at around 20-30Hz through the PA; my can of Lucozade was walking around on stage during technical rehearsals...). Middle section of the piece was silence, punctuated by my "people whispering" patch on the WS (tons of wave sequence modulation). Part two was my attempt to imitate the sound textures of Gabriel's Birdy soundtrack, by running a vector-mixed leadline climbing fifths and octaves through the distortion/overdrive FX config which I was driving by MIDI from the Lexicon MRC. What then... I tried to get the next section to feel like bits of the Julee Cruise/Twin Peaks soundtrack - dunno if I succeeded. Finally, let rip with the wave sequencer, throw in yet another Miles Davis horn solo (blame Team Metlay for encouraging me back in Dec. '90 - it's their fault) and then wind down with the Edgar Froese Jupiter-8 vocal patch through the LXP-5 and a piano solo to reprise. "The City of Lot." I have to admit that Biblical references are somewhat over my head. Actually, management-wise, this was the most difficult of the pieces to keep in control, or so it seemed at the time. Jonathan (under the stage name Vestris) basically started with the music and tried to come up with some kind of theatrical image and piece to fit with it. He was quite impressed with the ostinato section of Loremarie (from the USEnet '90 tape, though that's a very early version of it) and so we hunted around for ideas for something visual which would be carried by that music. I explained my images that I had when I composed it (war-torn Berlin) and we went through a few iterations of theatrical elements that might be used. Most of them would have basically been illegal. ("How about breaking sheets of glass on stage?" "Illegal, Jonathan." "How about if we have lots of candles and I dance around holding two of them and swinging them in patterns?" "Illegal, Jonathan." and so on.) At some stage the idea emerged of building columns of light on stage, with a performer in pure white carrying lamps into position on the floor and miming the formation of the columns by blocking the beams and making them seem to grow upwards. We then went through several iterations of this. Early rehearsals had a large number of paper plates serving as lamps, with pieces of string being the mains cables which Jonathan intended to dance round and over and through as the lamps were put in place. ("Illegal, Jonathan.") Anyway, we went through this development process for a few weeks, with various arguments and discussions as it became apparent that his artistic concept and visual images of the piece wouldn't be that easy to realise without a lot more resources. The fact that we had to use the stage rather than the floor was a hassle. Whoops, haven't mentioned that yet. I'd better fill in the details. We were given one of the large banqueting halls in the Assembly Rooms. The idea was that if we were lucky (financially) we'd have some raked seating installed, in which case the audience would be able to look down on the performance area which would just be part of the floor, with lighting rig set up appropriately on stands and the like. Otherwise, we'd have to use the stage which was a fairly generic church hall job, with the audience unable to see the floor that the dancers would be standing on. I hate that kind of performance space for dance; it makes the thing look too cinematic and two-dimensional, and puts up this barrier between the audience and the performers, and a lot of the movement (and lighting effects) gets lost when you can't see the floor of the performance area. Anyway, Jonathan was really taken with the room itself, and wanted to build his columns of light on the floor at the centre, shining up and hitting the big chandelier. It was a great disappointment when I learned that the money to pay for the fancy seating hadn't come through, so we had to use the stage. (Actually, we could still have used the floor area, but lighting it would have been a problem, and the audience sightlines would have been pretty screwed, and the floor surface would have been pretty unpleasant to dance on.) Jonathan was disappointed as well, and was a little reluctant to carry on with the project. Then we had all the arguments about the fact that beams of light aren't actually visible and need to shine through something to be seen, so we'd need a smoke machine or something. Uuuuurrrr. Compared to all this, rescoring the music, adding new sequence-riff sections and learning and rehearsing it were child's play. The only real issue here was getting the running time and the general flow of energy in the music to match the speed at which Jonathan would be bringing on the lamps and putting them in position. A lot more work went into lighting design (understandably) and stage management (getting the lamps set up offstage, running the cables safely, marking out the stage, and so on). "Insidious Sedation." A bit of an unknown, this one. (Ditto for the title: I don't know quite what's on Dawn's mind right now...) In this case the music was pretty well on its way to completion before I'd even spoken to Dawn (and later, Brigid) about what they were going to do dancewise. So let me talk about the music first. Oh yes, this is the piece I'm going to spin off for the USEnet '92 tape, so you'll get to hear it yourselves. The basic structures and sounds of the piece went together almost as soon as I installed the version 3 firmware into the Wavestation and discovered the vocoder algorithms. I love vocoders, and always have done. They sound gorgeous, and have the significant property that they allow timbre and rhythm to be independent; a single, evolving, timbre or texture or harmony can be modulated by different rhythmic sources, or a single rhythm can modulate a series of different timbres. So as you can probably gather, this piece was predominantly vocoder based and hence almost all Wavestation. I had a number of smooth timbres which carried the harmonic content, and a series of carefully programmed wave sequences to carry the rhythmic content and melodic phrasing. Actually, the vocoder programming and sequencing was quite complex in a number of ways, but I'm not going to go into detail since I consider a lot of that to be a trade secret: you'll get to hear the finished piece though. The big benefit of this piece musically was that it lent itself ideally to live performance: the sequencing software could hold the rhythmic content and I could play chords and suspensions and basslines through the vocoders. (This is the sort of thing I want to set up with MAX eventually; a system to facilitate the decoupling of rhythm and texture in an intelligent and flexible way at the MIDI signal level rather than in audio which is what vocoders do.) This is what I did: the sequencer carried the vocoder modulation, some volume fades and light D-110 percussion as icing; everything else (WS vocoder carriers, D-70 bass and piano, MKS-70 and MicroWave motifs) I could play live. This made a big difference to how happy I felt while actually performing it, and it felt a lot less awkward than playing highly structured, highly orchestrated pieces. For future live projects I think I'll do a lot of work with MAX and drive the composition process by what I can do live, rather than compose in Performer and then try to make it playable live. But I digress here, and I'll be getting onto MAX later. And I also completely forgot to mention the dance... This was basically Dawn's project - I think Brigid came into it quite late on. It was basically an improvisation based around moves that were practised and developed in a few rehearsal sessions beforehand. And that's about all I can say about it, to be honest. Although I delivered a series of tapes to Dawn and Brigid over the couple of months or so running up to the performances, I never saw them rehearse anything to the music, and only had very brief conversations with Dawn about the kind of thing they were doing. I think we went over a few concepts and abstractions at one stage, but I don't remember very much about it. It was only in the technical rehearsals on the day of performance that I saw what they had planned. There wasn't much in the way of dance in the conventional sense of leaping around; it was quite an abstract piece, starting from the two dancers crouched motionless on the floor, and then developing as they reached out with hands, arms, head, body in a series of fluid and yet tightly controlled, almost robotic, gestures and explorations. I know, I'm not explaining it well. But I've seen this piece properly exactly once on video, and couldn't pay close continuous attention to it during the performances because I had music to play. "Richness Unknown." Well, from my point of view, Performance Unknown might be closer to the mark. This was pure improvisation from Martin on guitar, ditto from Centli, and from me it was pure improvisation inasmuchas today's pop-culture-influenced computerised instruments let you improvise, which is to say, not very much. (I don't mean in terms of keyboard improvisation: that just takes a decent keyboard. But, *synthesiser* improvisation is a totally different matter, and I don't have anything, hardware or (yet) software, which allows it. But let me get to this later.) Centli is very much into what you might call an ethnic performance style: shades of middle-eastern dance in places (I guess), and the way she likes to use light and costume very much reflect this: a single piece of fabric can serve as a sari or a veil or a headband or flowing water or whatever. As an aside, she also looks the part, with a lineage containing African-American, Spanish-Mexican and Turkish blood. So, anyway, Martin improvising with guitar, me improvising with keyboards, Centli improvising with a large sheet of deep burgundy-coloured cloth. We had a couple of sessions beforehand, one with Martin and myself to see if we could play in the same key, one with Centli picking out timbres and so on on the Wavestation. The ones we came up with sort-of had an eastern desert feel, if you know what I mean; lots of breathy, dry sounds, lots of light percussive string-of-beads kinds of things. So, take those, add some deep rumbling breathy Peter Gabriel-style pedal bass on the D-70 (well, if you're going to have a quality PA why not make use of it?) and then, well, how about some rhythm? The most obvious thing to do here seemed to be to rig up four wave sequences, vector mix them, and run them into the FX processors programmed for a beat-and-a-half delay (an old trick for adding life and movement to sequencer riffs, and very effective when sequences and rhythms are being stopped/started and/or played live) plus some phasing to animate the upper harmonics of the rhythm and add to the dry, dusty, windswept feel of some of the lead sounds. The thing was run without sequenced backing (of course), although Performer was running in order to provide the 90bpm tempo for the wave sequencer; when free-running, the WS clocks at 100bpm, and Centli wanted 90. The whole effect, and the music that resulted, was OK as it happened, but I was rather frustrated by the process of setting up improvisation structures. I had to build a palette of sounds, of which there were, lemme see, eleven: four rhythmic/sequence patterns, vector-mixed; four assorted lead sounds and treatments, vector-mixed; one light percussion wave sequence for constant upper-harmonic fill; D-70 rumbling bass, MicroWave using wavetable R14 for sharp, tuned, midrange stuff. This might all sound like a lot, but the point is that it was a fixed palette of sounds. (I actually programmed up the MicroWave and LXP-5 to provide a lot of realtime modulation but didn't get a satisfactory result in time; it's not a easy as it might seem.) It's rather like, say, a painter messing around on canvas with some red and some blue paint. He starts with red, adds a little blue, and then thinks, "Yeay, that's good, now some more red, ah, I like where that's going, what I need right now is a splash of green and a wash of yellow, now let's see, I've got red and blue, ..." If you're preparing stuff in a studio that's fine - my machines can all do green and yellow if I give them some attention and let them think about it. But on stage, in a live improvised performance? Nope, I was definitely at a disadvantage here, compared to what Martin could do on guitar. All I could do was put together a palette of as wide a range of textures, colours and rhythms as I could reasonably get access to at one time, and stick with them. While there's something to be said for disciplined use of a small number of resources, this ain't live improvised synthesis, folks. I blame the pop music magnates and MTV for building a pop culture that's left us with crippled instruments. That's about it for the actual dance pieces. In addition I bolted an opening minute or so of music onto the front of the first piece (Dawn and Brigid). I had a sort-of overture-like piece which I thought would make a good opening to something or other (I composed it as an attempt to copy the sort of music which accompanies the first panoramic shot you see in most films; it's all soaring D-70 strings and voices tuned in fifths), so I just transposed it to a new key and used it. We also needed to sort out some ideas for the lighting as well, so there were various meetings between myself, Richard and the performers. Dawn and Centli were fairly easy to please; they wanted various kinds of broken lighting and fill, so it was basically a case of making sure we had suitable gobos. Sheila had more complex ideas about enclosing areas of space and changing the apparent size of the performance area by opening and closing the lit areas (I think; this is all from vague memory). And as for Jonathan, well, he wanted Steven Spielberg but we managed to make him happy in the end, I think. [Continued in EMUSIC-L Digest, Volume 52, Issue 14] ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************