What Was Frankie in the Mood For?

             Before the show even started, I was immediately entranced by the fish swimming around in the middle of the stage when I went to see In the Mood for Frankie. However clear the meaning of live fish during performance could be, I managed to derive exponentially less meaning from the dancers themselves. As the show began, I immediately noted how the lone dancer was able to continuously stay on his toes throughout the entirety of his routine. This theme consisted as the others gradually came on stage, switching off one by one in the beginning. As the show progressed, I began to search for a common theme or sort of storyline that could be derived from the actions of the dancers when they were on stage either together or alone, but only managed to scrape meaning out of a few scenes. I saw the tale of a marriage from its heartfelt beginning to its extremely messy, drunken rage and sadness-filled end, along with the continued strife of the dancers as a result. Throughout all of this, the performers remained on the tips of their toes, leaving the most significant moment of the entire performance (to me) to be the one point where one of the dancers visibly came down to the flats of his feet for several seconds. It had more of an impact on me than any other part of the performance, regardless of whether it was intended or not.

               There were also scenes with continued outfit changes that assisted with setting the scenes that I found interesting, although at times I did find myself silently hoping that the dancers would keep at least some of their clothes on. The outfits ranged from gowns to layers of shirts on top of each other, allowing the performers to better fit their various roles within each scene. Along with these outfit changes, I felt it was an extremely strong creative decision to utilize the small nature of the stage to make exits at various places all around it, instead of using only one or two points. It allowed for a versatility that I felt contributed to the flow between scenes, making it so that two performers could leave the stage in opposite directions while the third was able to enter it all at the same time. This steady flow prevented any one transition from feeling too abrupt or choppy like a poorly done music mix.

               While I was unable to identify the meaning of every scene and motion, I found that it was an extremely delightful performance enhanced by the prowess of all three dancers whose mastery of ballet was beyond evident. This was so much so, that just like abstract art, the undecipherable scenes were able to evoke variants of raw emotion from me as the viewer. This was beyond appreciated, as it is rare these days to find a show that manages to provoke a sort of emotion with almost no context whatsoever.

Descent

Descent, performed by Kinetic Light was a performance of the “story of Greek mythical figures Venus and Andromeda as an interracial love story with choreography that conjures the aesthetics of August Rodin’s sculpture Toilet of Venus and Andromeda.”   As captivating and heartfelt as this story was, that was not the aspect that I found most intriguing; the architecture and usage of the stage grappled with my attention.

The stage creation, led by Laurel Lawson (product architect) allowed the disabled to connect with the performance.  The gradual inclines of the stage signified the challenges that the disabled faced as it gave not only kinetic potential but a “challenge of the conventional relationship of slope and disabled movement.”  The stage itself was a work of art, crafted with articulate curves and bends that gave the stage dynamic.  This created a uniqueness to the performance as typically dancers will perform on a flat surface.  Although the slopes were necessary to the movement of the wheelchairs, the performers also used the bends to their advantage as the beginning of the piece began with one of the dancers grasping onto the corner of the stage and slowly descending down it. 

As the performers progressed to the use of the wheelchairs, all that I could think about was the intense repetition that it must have taken the performers to achieve the perfect angles.  There were moments where the audience held their breath as the dancers flew down the ramps and swirled around as they did.  The intense choreography called the dancers to evoke such strength as well as control of their movement, gracefully stopping and moving the complex aspect of their wheelchairs.   The other moments of strength came from the pure core balance that both performers needed in order to lift each other and to hold the chair at certain angles on the stage due to the slopes.

Blind and nonvisual audiences were also able to experience the architecture through sound.  One of the most notable aspects during the performance was the amplified sounds of the dancer’s feet and/or wheelchairs on the stage.   The choreography perfectly matched these amplifications to the music, timing their movement and sound to create overlap and thus a beautiful piece of sound art. Additionally, the performance was centered to accommodate the perspective of those in wheelchairs.  Kinetic Light’s attention to detail in this regard only added the beauty of the performance. 

I personally enjoyed the performance as I felt as though it built empathy with its choreography throughout the performance.  Both dancers amplified such a deeper emotion to the story than just a performance; the audience could visually feel the passion the dancers had to include every person, disabled or not.  The time and the effort put into the performance was apparent, as they laid their heart and soul into their movement.  Also, the performance for me highlighted the fact that a disabled person is not incapable or limited.  Beauty was captivated and strength was amplified through the dancer's use of wheelchairs.  

A Review of Descent, Kinetic Light

Descent, an immersive dance performance by the company, Kinetic Lights, is an eye-opening love story about overcoming disability. What makes the performance unique is its multisensory approach, its story, and its inclusivity of the disabled community.

Kinetic Lights is a company whose purpose is simply that. One of the members, Michael Maag, who is wheelchair-bound himself, is a light artist. In Descent, the stage was lit with spotlights that followed and accentuated the dancers. More spectacularly, Maag incorporated several projectors, projecting images on the background of the stage as well as the stage itself. In particular, the projectors showed images of constellations, minimalist scenery, and illustrations of the characters Venus and Andromeda from the sculpture The Toilette of Venus and Andromeda, by Auguste Rodin, upon which the story was based and reimagined. The other remarkable aspect of the performance was the physical set. The stage was custom-built, a multi-level, curved, ramp that the dancers used to tell their story of struggle and freedom. The ramp was designed especially for the dancers’ wheelchairs, which were a custom feat in their own right.

The story of the dance began with the two characters separate, each struggling to move about the terrain of the stage with little use of their legs. The dancers crawled, rolled, and slid across the grade of the stage. Soon, though, the characters find each other, and at the same time find the wheelchairs. The dancers explore the newfound freedom of the chairs and also begin to dance/wheel in sync, showing the development of their love. After intermission, the story shows the more intricate struggle between the characters and their wheelchairs, and each other. In the end, the characters re-learn to trust one another and embrace each other, as well as support each other and themselves in the balance of using their wheelchairs.

As a viewer who is not a wheelchair user, and who is overall rather uneducated in the plights of the disabled community, this was an incredibly eye-opening performance. The story told by the dancers was unlike what I had expected. Instead of a tale of struggle without a wheelchair, and then liberation with the wheelchair, the real tale that people live out every day is much more complex. While there is a certain reliance and affection for the wheelchair, and many other amenities used by disabled persons, there is still struggle. There is a struggle to trust the instrument and the struggle to learn to be at peace without it. In the end, a disabled person is more than the tools they use to help interact with the world. This is the important message I learned at this performance. The inclusivity of the performance did not end on stage, though. Part of the performance was the beta-testing of a program designed by Kinetic Lights member, Laurel Lawson (who was also one of the dancers) to enhance the experience of the performance for blind persons. One of the coolest things I saw was the excitement of at least two of the audience members who were wheelchair-bound. It helped me see the lives that this type of inclusivity touched, and why it is so important to share the stories of those with disabilities.

A Personal Take on Moved by the Motion

This is a review of Moved by the Motion by Wu Tsang and Boychild. A little backstory on this piece and the authors behind it, Moved by the Motion is a play that tells a story through the use of various multimedia. The play incorporates text, movement, film, theater, and music in order to tell this story while keeping a sense of improv to narrate the story.

                The piece starts out in silence in a dark room until this silence is broken by a video. The video was perhaps there to introduce the viewer or at least give a sense of what the story might be about. Keep in mind that throughout this piece the story is never given to you. In fact, the story is very ambiguous and by the end of the play, the viewer is left trying to piece together a meaning to it all. After this video music plays and the two main characters are introduced running from side to side in a very peculiar manner often falling to the ground and moving along the ground. Meanwhile, a prerecorded video of the same actors moving in strange manners seen from different perspectives is seen from the projectors. This gave a really interesting effect giving the actors a sense of superposition and demonstrated a form of live illusion. Soon after the third actor came to light and started to speak in riddles. She spoke as if she was trying to tell a story but said it in such a way that it was near impossible to comprehend without a full analysis of the spoken words. Soon after she collapses and the actors start to run up a ramp right in the center of the stage and jump off falling backward behind the ramp. This continues for a while until the actors move off the stage laying right in front of the audience. They start to roll around and share this form of intimacy with one another and this is where I’ll stop since soon after the play ends.

                So as stated above the story incorporates various methods of multimedia taking a very Avant-Garde approach to storytelling. But with so much going on and the authors clearly trying to keep the story as ambiguous as possible what does the viewer make of it all. Given the form this story takes it would not be a surprise if my take on the piece is entirely different from someone else’s but perhaps this is what the Author wanted. What I saw was the cycle of life. The video was a brief historical wrap up of life up until now and the deranged dancing was a representation of the struggle of navigating life. The actors climbing up the ramp and falling could be a representation of death and how it can’t be avoided. The narrator’s ambiguous story might represent the story of life and how it’s not always so simple. And towards the end perhaps the meaning of life lies within the relationships we build with one another. Overall this play was different and the story was not linear but by the end of the play I would be lying if I said I left without thinking.

Sonification Review

I went into Chris Chafte’s lecture on Sonification expecting a primarily experimental music focus without much use for the concept in practice.  What I experienced though was quite the opposite.  Chris started his talk with the start of his own career at the CCRMA, or “Karma” as it’s commonly referred to, at Stanford.  This was a great pick for the start of his lecture because it allowed us to understand the concepts of Sonification with less complicated examples at first.  He explained that Sonification is the process of taking some data, it could be something as simple as a person’s steps to get to work, and assigning different variables different sounds.  Then the magic comes when these sounds are combined to create the final dataset. 

The first example he showed us was created by one of his colleagues at CCRMA where they took a game of “Towers of Hanoi” and used a percussive beat to signify each move.  As the game progressed the beats increased in tempo and then eventually died off as the game came to an end.  Even though the lecture started with a small foray into the world of Sonification, it wasn’t till now that I was able to understand and appreciate the idea.  I enjoyed knowing what I was listening to, and having some background information before I heard the data.

My main question of Sonification’s use in data analyzing came when Chris talked about how it is used in medical science.  Currently there are people working with Sonification in hospitals to diagnose and treat people with seizures in much faster time period than a standard EKG and operate.  Chris explained that a standard EKG can take up to 30 minutes to process and return results to help doctors properly treat the patient, at which time it could be too late.  Now though there is a system where the doctor can use a sensor array around the patient’s head to, in real time, hear the person’s heart rate and neurons firing.  Another example of an application where Sonification has had a major impact on the scientists’ ability to read data is actually in the Arctic circles.  Researchers are extracting long cores of ice from the polar ice caps to analyze the air bubbles trapped within them.  This data is then changed into a form that the scientists can hear to analyze the atmospheric aspects of the air bubble.  This second example was more confusing for me, I didn’t quite see the use of Sonification here. 

The coolest application, in my opinion, was how some researchers were able to digitally create the sound from the Hagia Sofia.  They went to the famous concert hall and popped a balloon to record how the sound traveled through the space.  Then they took that data and were, in real time, able to digitally recreate the correct the echo in a studio.  This is amazing to me, because I’ve always preferred seeing live concerts because the sound is much fuller, and this could be the answer to this. 

I left the lecture quite interested in Sonification as a whole, but mainly this last point.  I’m curious if, in the future, we will see some recording studios using this technology to make records that sound live but aren’t to get that distinct difference in sound.

- Zachary Schaller

November 1, 2018

Sonification

Sonification - EMPAC 11-01-2018

Chris Chafe's lecture on Sonification took on a new aspect of art, combining technology, science, and music together to express data.  Chafe coined the term sonification while working at the Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). 

Chafe’s began his lecture discussing an entertainment piece centered around the data of carbon dioxide levels of ripening tomatoes.  Chafe used computer-generated algorithms to create a mapping strategy of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the tomatoes and the amount of light (that ran through the gallery) on the tomatoes over time.  Fifteen channels were to interpret data, creating a sci-fi like soundtrack that encompassed listeners from all angles, causing the listener to feel immersed within the music.  This computer-generated music is unlike anything I have ever heard, consisting of pulsing beats with reverbing sounds.  At the end of the large build-up of increasing tones and pulsing of beats, the music dies off, representing the fully ripened tomato.  Ironically, the tomatoes are used to make tomato sauce for a full multimedia approach.

            There was an extremely eye-opening moment when Chafe discussed the ice drilling in Antarctica that detects climate change.  Using bubbles inside ice cores, one could look at different indicators of climate change.  The Eemian period was a period of time before the last ice age that was about 5 to 10 degrees warmer than current day.  This high temperature, an effect of global warming, caused the Earth to plunge into a deep Ice Age, giving scientists an analog of what the future looks like and the oncoming ice age.  Chafe took the bubble data, showing the rising and falling of the Earth’s CO2 and created a multitoned piece.  The right ear gave sound to changes in carbon dioxide concentrations and the left ear gave sound to temperature.  The higher the pitch, the higher the concentration/temperature.  One was able to appreciate the changing time periods, as the onset of the 1900’s cause for a rapid increase of pitch and tempo in both ears, a terrifying realization of our polluted world.

            My personal favorite demonstration of data presented used data from the DNA sequencing of a plasmid, pairing different tones with different nucleotide identities.  The piece had a voice-over on top of the soundtrack, identifying what part of the plasmid correlated to which sounds.  For a background, a plasmid is a piece of circular DNA in which it contains a promoter, a set of genes, and a terminator.   As one goes around the DNA, the data identifies which nucleotide (ATCG) is present.  During the piece, one could hear the sound travel around the room in a circle, just as the DNA sequence of a plasmid did.  The sound created was very plunky and decisive as one could hear each individual nucleotide.  After a couple of minutes, the data moved from nucleotides to codons, as one could here three specific codons that could code for a protein sequence.  I just found this extremely interesting as it combined music and biology, two fields one does not usually correlate. 

            Overall, I enjoyed the lecture series/presentation of sonification and would like to explore more into the idea of using sound to express an idea.