Every performance is an installation, every painting a performance. All poems are music, and every sculpture is a dance. Crayons and brushes are pencil and paper, or computer keyboard, or violin and bow, or space to fill-up on stage in a theater. A pianist is a singer, is a dancer, a maker of line drawings, a teller of tales, a weaver. The designs and stories are new and old. The spinning has never been done before, never … [Read more...]
Triangle
I perform a piece with Butoh artist Maureen Fleming in which I play Philip Glass's Etude No. 5. The performance includes a video of Maureen moving, projected larger-than-life-size on a scrim. Behind the scrim, Maureen performs live. In front of the scrim, onstage, I sit at a piano and play the etude. Maureen made the video first. She started improvising movements and shooting video, with careful, subtle lighting. The movements are slow … [Read more...]
Lights up
So there we are in the theater. The lights coming up just a few seconds too soon and making clearly visible two black-clad dressers meant to be offstage before the light arrives. A little glitch in seamless perfection. And then what? Pretend it didn't happen? Hope no one saw them? Or, on the fly, damage the seamlessness even more and send the dressers out again later on in the show? Most big theater productions have trouble with that kind of … [Read more...]