EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 41, Issue 15 This issue's topics: "Baptism of Fire..." (3rd CASSIEL Performance Report.) (part 4 of 4) (3 messages) 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 4 of 4] Let me think... I reckon I can now jump to T minus two days or so. Ah, no, let me rewind to (T-4) days since there was a wee crisis then which required a directorial policy decision (the only one I had to make in fact). For one of the pieces one of the dancers wanted to go on topless, wearing body-paint. As artistic director it was basically my call on whether to let her. A very tricky decision, in fact. There were a number of issues here. Firstly, I didn't know whether the venue management would be happy with it, legally or otherwise: we could well have young children in the audience and so on. Secondly, allowing this would colour the rest of the performance in various ways, and I wasn't convinced that it would be fair to the other performers/acts. Thirdly, I would have to take any possible consequences as director; and fourthly, I didn't want anything happening on stage that might act as a distraction or be a problem for any of the other performers (specifically me, since I was basically flying the entire show and performing all the music, some of which was quite complex to play live). Note that I wasn't being prudish here, and have no (professional, as opposed to personal) problem with this kind of thing (but see next paragraph). Had the performer in question been doing a solo show with me performing music, I'd probably have just gone for it. But with the various things at stake here, and obligations to other performers and staff, I felt I had to pull the plug. I still don't feel quite happy with that decision; but I don't think either decision would have been without repercussions. I spent a long time talking to the dancer in question, basically trying to get an idea of how much control there would be over her performance. In the end I asked her to cover up, for the reasons outlined above. I don't think she's quite forgiven me for that; she probably feels that I'm trying to stifle her artistic expression, which isn't the case. If she wants to sail close to the edge in other performances, that's fine (and I'll be happy to compose and perform music, and/or direct a show (if I like it artistically), for her if she wants). One concern I did express to her, though: if you're going to be deliberately provocative in any way (physically or otherwise), then you'd better damn well have the artistic vision and technique to back it up, otherwise the audience and critics are going to tire of you. And if you're going to play games which can be interpreted as sexual, the criticism might become personal. This is all just my gut feeling, though. I wish her the best of luck. (T-2) days. We were playing on the Thursday evening, and had exclusive access to the room from Wednesday morning onwards. This was extremely fortuitous, since one day would not have given us (plus Offshoot) enough time to get everything set up and get enough rehearsals done. In fact, two days didn't really provide enough technical rehearsal time either. There was quite a lot of friction here in fact. The keyboard rig went together fine and basically just worked, though we had to lift a few earths and swap some cables to eliminate mains hum and thyristor buzz. (I think what I'll do next time is drop inline switches into all my mains/IEC cables so I can switch out the earth selectively; given that earth hum is a facet of the installation at a site it should be easy to break the loop and, more importantly for safety reasons, reestablish all the earth routes when the rig is broken down.) The music was learned, rehearsed and ready to go, and didn't need that much technical rehearsal - I just had to get used to the space constraints and the lighting. The dance needed a lot more work (and remember there were four separate pieces, which meant booking slots for each), and at this stage I think Richard finally realised that he would be flying a lighting desk built by Fisher-Price. The lighting was a real hassle, due partly to rather inadequate facilities (too few channels and lamps spread across a large number of different acts) and partly due to lack of technical rehearsal runs for the Offshoot pieces. Setting the cues up took a lot of time, and often left the dancers standing around onstage twiddling their thumbs and pulling their green shorts over their heads. The pieces in my set were fine, since Richard had talked to each of my performers in advance, cues had been decided, and the operating procedure was largely known before the technical rehearsals started. Steve's Offshoot piece was also fine, for the same reasons, and also because Steve was onhand at all times to call lighting cues. These are the things which weren't clear in advance for a majority of the other Offshoot pieces, which meant that one or two cues got muffed. The Wednesday morning was the first time we really established contact with the venue management, in particular Ali of Stageworks, although we'd met him briefly a few days before and had been exchanging calls; in particular, Richard had been faxing lighting plans and the like. At the end of this venture we were extremely impressed with Ali and his crew. He's good. He was basically the technical/stage manager for every show running at the Assembly Rooms that week (of which there were a great many), plus some at other sites. Despite this he was uniformly friendly and accommodating, would deal with absolutely any problems or technical issues if asked (from erecting the stage lighting rig right down to finding spare 15W light bulbs for my keyboard rig), and was extremely efficient. (He's available for hire btw, and he's worth the money.) I guess we move onto the actual performance. Technical rehearsals should have been over and done with at least two hours before the performance. In fact, as I remember, Offshoot were still running half an hour before start of show. At this stage, Richard was clocking up his second twelve-hour-solid stint at the lighting desk. I think tempers were getting a little frayed by this time. Lewis had been getting performers organised for final bows and the like, and some of them were rather annoyed at being told what to do. (Actually, I thought that was his job.) Ah: as I forgot to mention, Offshoot had their own stage manager for their half of the show, which would have been no problem had he been in possession of a brain cell or two, but really, someone who (i) won't help move props in our half of the actual performance because "it's not my job" and (ii) doesn't realise that smoke machines don't work unless you plug them in, obviously comes from the shallow end of the gene pool. So, all ready to go, just about to let the audience in: and we lose one of the lights on the rearmost lighting boom. Ali: "Is that an important one?" Richard: "Yes, vital." And within seconds Ali's team is sprinting for the rear storeroom to get the scaffolding rods, and a tower is erected on stage within a couple of minutes. Then Ali sprints up the tower, removes his T-shirt and uses it to wrap up and lower the lamp to the team on the ground who change the bulb and pass it back. Then there's a quick refocus and the tower's down. Like I said: this guy is good. What else? Oh yes, the administration decide that they want to run the temporary back-of-room bar for a while before starting the show, in order to bring in some money. Well, thanks for telling us. (Since I was a performer as well as director, I couldn't deal with any of this since I was waiting for my cue to go onstage.) So, that's one more thing to freak out the performers. In fact, I heard later that there was talk of running the bar continuously throughout the dance performance. Had they attempted that, I'd probably have just stopped the show. This is serious art performance, not stand-up cabaret, and I'm not having my performers subjected to the hassle, noise and distraction of people climbing into and out of their seats, wandering up and down with pints, bottles and cans being opened, tills going and the like. Regarding the performance... Was I nervous? No, in fact, not at all, as far as I can remember. I knew the music well and had rehearsed thoroughly, which is vital (read my first gig report about all this). The only potential problem was catastrophic failure of the rig. Well, if it happens, it happens. If it behaves, then fine. Let's go. And so we're into those little bits of theatrical magic which is one of the things which makes it all worthwhile. Murmuring from the audience. ("How many are there out there? Sounds like a lot... Yup, looks like a full house.") Peeking through the side-drapes or chatting over the foldback to try and spot the important critics. ("My god, the Dangerous Hat is right in the front row!" - this from Dawn, Brigid and Steve in unison...) And, the performers (*my* performers... gosh...) milling around in the wings. Jonathan with all the face makeup. Dawn and Brigid in pure white leotards, jumping up and down to try and keep their feet warm. This is the stuff memoirs are made of, folks. Everything went fine, at least as far as I could tell at the time. There was the usual 1/3rd time compression I always experience when playing live. And that was it. The only real problem for me was when starting the sequencer for Dawn and Brigid's piece. I hadn't done a recent check of metronome level through the earphones, and since I was holding some notes on the D-70 at the time I couldn't quite hear the lead-in before the vocoder modulation started. No real problem: keep the notes held, halt and rewind the sequencer, ramp up the earphone level and run again. The result was 5-6 seconds extra of held notes from the Overture. Lewis practically had a heart attack I think, but to their credit Dawn and Brigid stayed absolutely motionless on stage; in fact, they claim not to have noticed the delay. But then, they misjudged the final cue in the music and stopped performing a few seconds early. I distinctly remember playing the final few bars, and seeing Dawn standing stock still, sweat pouring off her face, and thinking, "You've stopped early haven't you? No problem: it's to good effect and no-one will know it's unintentional." There were some technical problems with the props, but nothing I knew about at the time. I remember not knowing what we'd decided to do about cues for starting Jonathan's piece ("Was I to start before Lewis kicks in the smoke machine? Well, let me get going with the PPG stuff and I'll start the main motif when he's onstage."). A certain person forgot to patch in Martin's guitar for the first few seconds. And, there was one place where I did feel awkward; about half-way through the improvisation with Martin and Centli, I remember her doing some movement or other and looking at me in order to get some cue from the music, and I thought, "No use looking at me, I'm driving a MIDI rig, and there's nothing more improvisation-wise I can do." Hmm. This is a definite problem, and one which I'll be looking into solving over the medium term. Oh yes, the one thing which got muffed was the final bow with all the performers (we didn't take bows between pieces). For a start, I didn't realise that I was supposed to lead the bow as artistic director. (There we are standing in a line taking the applause, and Jonathan says quietly to me, "you'd better bow...") Now then, nobody told me that "one call" means a bow with the lights up, then blackout, then lights up for one more (that's the call). I assumed one call meant one bow, then off. Jonathan, Dawn and Brigid (who perform professionally) instinctively stood stock-still during the first blackout ready for the call, whereas the rest of us sloped off. Damn damn damn. I don't think it mattered for the audience's perception, but the video would have had a close-up pan across the line of performers, except that we only took call zero. I'm still really annoyed by this: I don't have any pictorial record of all the performers in close-up. I'm trying to think what came across from seeing everything on video a couple of days later. Bear in mind that I'd never seen what Dawn, Brigid and Centli had actually done. We'd only had a couple of technical rehearsals, and there's only so much attention one can pay to what's happening on stage when performing the music. Dawn and Brigid's piece I found the most appealing from a purely abstract, technical point of view. They are superb dancers, with extremely fine, fluid control and an interesting vocabulary of movement. I found it a little disappointing that they finally decided to only explore a single idea, when Dawn and I had talked about the set several times and I'd structured the music into two parts deliberately. Oh well; I suspect they had to curtail development of the piece due to other work constraints. I'll certainly give it another few viewings; what they did was quite subtle and complex and I suspect it needs careful viewing. Centli's piece felt a little flat on the actual night, mostly due to my dissatisfaction with the music improvisation. Looking back over it on the video, it actually seemed fine (both music and dance), except that the size and layout of the stage worked somewhat against her: she benefits from smaller, less formal, more intimate performance spaces I think. What I found interesting here was the overall feel of the piece: very eastern, very ethnic, very Saharan. This is what Centli is into to a large extent, but what I found surprising is that I managed to come up with music that had that feel and seemed to fit very well, even though I developed it really quickly. Or maybe it's just that Centli is good at interpretation and managed to pull it together. Sheila and Roanne's piece I can't really comment on objectively, which is a shame. I'd been involved in it practically from the beginning, and I'd been sitting in on rehearsals for a long while, so I'd really lost the ability to be objective about it. I remember thinking that the lighting worked really well to change the apparent size and shape of the performance space, but this was from viewing the video which was taken from above stage level; I don't know how well it came across to the audience who were seated so that they couldn't see the stage floor. I guess I'll have to watch the video again after a suitable delay and try to get an objective feel for it. Jonathan's piece was breathtaking. As I intimated earlier, I found Jonathan's project difficult to manage, and he and I had got into various heated discussions about what he wanted to do and what would be possible. Over the two days of technical rehearsals his piece really came together. He'd had a lot of discussion with Richard over the preceding couple of weeks about getting the columns of light to work, I got him a smoke machine, and Lewis did a commendable job of organising the positioning of the lamps on stage, the cabling, the delivery of smoke, and so on. And Jonathan took it all very well. Once it was clear to him that (i) his initial ideas and visions would be impossible to realise and (ii) we were willing to put every effort in with the facilities we could provide, he accepted this and things went very well. He was easy to work with, and his piece came off well as a result. Again, I'd not seen a true dress rehearsal so I didn't know what to expect, though he was hard at work with the face paint for a good time beforehand. He emerged as this Mephisto-like figure in pure white (interesting contrast, huh?), dancing wildly across the stage in a series of jumps and movements that ballet dancers use to show off; and then he'd walk on slowly carrying this heavy cauldron which he'd position on the floor and cover by crossing his hands over it. Light would start to come up from the cauldron and he'd follow the beam with his hands and body, so that he'd be illuminated as if in the path of a searchlight. The end result, with the beams cutting upward through the smoke, and the light coming off his body, was extremely effective, especially on video where it saturated in various ways. More than any of the other pieces, this was Theatre: a man dancing and carrying lamps onto the stage became this demonic figure glowing in white, carrying heavy cauldrons of light and projecting them into the heavens according to some ancient and personal ritual. So, yeah, I was quite pleased with that. It's not at all what I had in mind when putting this show together, and I'm not into mime/theatre of this kind, but hell, that's what performance it all about: coming up with something new and unexpected. That's really all I have to say about the show. We started at 7:45pm approx., and 40 minutes later we had finished. So perhaps I'll tell you what I got out of it. As I said at the beginning, I made a dream come true. As usual, I didn't get a particular kick out of performing - I basically just go on and do it. Maybe that's because of the rigidity of using a MIDI rig and background sequencing. But Dawn and Brigid's piece was a bit of an exception since musically it was a coherent and reasonably powerful piece, and since vocoder-like systems are really fun to play. So, there I am about half way through that set, having fun playing Wavestation and D-70 through a seriously big PA, and I watched Dawn and Brigid performing. And I thought, hell, a year ago I was dreaming about working with them, composing music for them, perhaps sharing a stage with them. And here they are, right before my eyes, performing to my music in a show I've put together. I wondered for a second or two whether I was still dreaming. It was a moment of pure magic which made all the hard work and grunt worthwhile, and I'll never forget it. Just as well really, since after the show everything basically went downhill. Preparing a performance is an interesting thing from a psychological point of view. You are brought into contact with a number of people and are dealing with them in a comparatively intimate context: exploring emotional ideas to put forward in performance, dealing with a large number of little problems and technicalities, having long conversations and so on. This is with people who might have been complete strangers a few weeks earlier, and with whom one might not have much in common apart from the performance. And this is all magnified by the theatrical context: going onstage, acting out ideas and stories, possibly subsuming one's character behind imaginary parts and masks and so on. People meet and relate to each other in an unnatural context, so it's dangerous to make assumptions about what would seem on the surface to be social interactions. The distinction between social interaction and professional interaction can get very blurred, so that criticism can be given, or taken, personally. The pressure of preparing a performance puts everyone on edge which causes frayed tempers, and also causes any serious grievances and insecurities to be buried in the interests of making the performance work; these are all things which must come out at some stage, and it's often explosively. And in addition, dance is a rather interesting context. It's a pure art form, with all sorts of potentially interesting combinations of movement, form, sound and light. And yet, as my T'ai Chi instructor prosaically puts it, it's basically about meat. The performers aren't using paintbrushes, musical instruments, celluloid or typewriters. They're using their bodies. Sensual and sexual undertones are unavoidable. To be brutally honest, this is what appeals to me about the medium: there are so many interesting pure artistic ideas and directions to explore, pictures to paint in the imagination, and yet the sensuality, the subconscious gestures and communication, are still present and can express feeling, aspiration, pain, guilt and all this "human condition" stuff in the same context as the dry, intellectual high art stuff that we perhaps kid ourselves we're there to enjoy. Good dance has Serious Grunt. But I feel the sensual undertones amplify the pressures and insecurities inherent in putting a performance together. Well, at least in myself. So, sue me. I've had enough of trying to analyse my motivations. I just do it. Where was I? Oh yes. We had a few explosions over the next week or so. I guess we all finally had the chance to stand back and think, "Where am I? What have I just been doing?" Just after the show there was a lot of ill-feeling about various things, many involving lighting problems for some of the Offshoot pieces. Some accusations of sexist behaviour circulated. Dawn and Brigid disappeared at the first interval and I've not spoken to them since, although I spent two hours in their company a couple of days later: it was pretty clear that I wasn't one of their social circle and they didn't want me around. I've not seen them since, even though I wanted to thank them properly for working on the project. (Addition: I spoke to Brigid on the phone yesterday and we got on really well in a professional context I guess. As for Dawn: god knows.) A couple of days later and one of the performers all but accused me of sexual harassment. A phone conversation defused most of the tension but I've not seen the person involved since. I think she still reckons I have too many emotional insecurities to be working in dance. Maybe. A meeting with some members of Offshoot was vaguely successful in settling things but left me feeling totally alienated for various reasons. I've had some kind words of encouragement from Lewis, Richard and (surprisingly to me) Mary Brennan; that's it. So, make a note, people: if you're doing this expecting to get words of encouragement or gratitude, you're in for a rude awakening. Luckily, I'm not in it for that. I'm in it because it's my life, and I'll continue to work in electronic music, contemporary dance and the performance arts until it kills me or I'm physically restrained. At this rate, though, I might have run out of potential performers long before that. It's going to be interesting to see who's still around and talking to me when the dust has finally settled. And, I have to admit, the odd "thank-you" might have been nice. I've got one or two things out of this project. I managed to make a dream come true. Not many people do that. I think we made some Serious Art as well, and it's really encouraging to start with a set of vague ideas and see them through to fruition on a stage and in front of an audience. And for a couple of months, I wasn't my usual insecure self, but had some feeling of self-worth through being a director of a contemporary dance company. I quite enjoyed that as well. What next? Well, as a rather nice ballet dancer once recently me, once a show's over, get straight to work on the next one. We have some passable reviews: The Scotsman was rather mixed (dreamy new age music indeed), but Mary Brennan in The Herald was very positive, which should help in attracting grant money and the like - she has a lot of influence. I still intend to take the Scottish dance scene by storm, at least as a musician. The next project is a short soundtrack for a Glasgow-based dancer; it gives me a good excuse to get into portable DAT sound sampling, sample-based sequencing and the like (I *nee-e-e-ed* an Aiwa HDS-1 and a Peavey SP/SX), and it gets me away from the Edinburgh scene for a while, which might be a good idea. After that I have a couple of ideas for future CASSIEL performances, but they're going to be technically quite complex and will require a lot of time and money to make them work, not least because I want to actually hire dancers (and possibly a choreographer) in order to afford the pieces the detailed effort they'll require to make them work properly. But what I need right now is a stiff drink and a psychotherapist. Nick. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1992 15:58:10 EDT From: Marshall Gilula Subject: Re: "Baptism of Fire..." (3rd CASSIEL Performance Report.) Nick...that was a great report, and a very good piece of writing I'm going back to my own studio and the Steinberger, but send me private email when you finish up with the stiff drink.... -73- Marshall mgilula@newssun.med.miami.eduk (sorry for the typo) mgilula@newssun.med.miami.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1992 10:39:31 +0000 From: Nick Rothwell Subject: Re: "Baptism of Fire..." (3rd CASSIEL Performance Report.) >Nick...that was a great report, and >a very good piece of writing Thanks. (You mean you've finished it already? That was quick...) Nick. ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************