December 18, 2006
Anger
a multimedia immersion performance
Anger - a multimedia immersion performance by Randy Gibson and Ana Baer-Carrillo :: performance, reception, and silent auction :: presented by Avant Media Performance :: Thursday January 25, 2007 - 8PM ::20 Greene, SoHo, NYC (between Canal and Grand) :: tickets $15-$50.
Featuring :: Randy Gibson (piano, crotales), Mike Rugnetta (guitar, banjo), Laine Rettmer (voice), Ana Baer-Carrillo (video), Alicia Wargo (costumes, sculpture), and Oscar Henriquez (design).
"Anger" is an evening-length multidisciplinary work that deals with issues of major ordeal in the contemporary setting. Originally sprung from an intense feeling of pain and anger, "Anger" has developed into an idiosyncratic expression of the human condition. From birth, the human experience is multifaceted and contradictory, delightfully painful; at its most, this experience is bursting with excitement and passion, sorrow and anger.
"Anger" is a collaborative effort to depict the contradictory human condition through music, video and dance. The music runs a fine line between control and chaos. It is performed live on piano, guitar, and voice as a long form hyper-structured improvisation that moves through tonal areas that get to the heart of these feelings running the gamut from simple open chords to extremely dense sonic environments, and everything in between. The performers are forced to confront some of their worst fears, as the music is restructured live by a computer that samples the sounds they create and feeds them back to them in new combinations, all with complete randomness on multiple speakers. The musicians must be extremely aware of their performance, since they never know if what they just played will be played back to them five minutes later, or in little snippets 100 times over, or only once, or not at all. For this reason the performers are extremely skilled and able to adapt to any situation.
Accompanying this soundscape is a visual landscape of film and filmed dance. The visual elements are extensions of the ideas presented in the music. The chaos and randomness are depicted in the film through various experimental editing techniques. The majority of surfaces in the space are covered in large form video lending a surreal saturated environment to the performance installation.
"Anger" is uniquely suited to performance in a gallery environment. There is no best angle for hearing and viewing the work. The piece is unique from every position as certain elements change volume and importance. The video, four unique but similar channels of ever-changing combinations of loops, does not repeat the same combination of images until it has run for two and a half years. With a central core of speakers surrounding the performers, and additional speakers surrounding the audience, a true immersion in the music is achieved, live sound mixes perfectly with looped sound, and all sense of time and direction is lost as the audience member becomes entranced by the music and esoteric images.
"Anger" will premiere January 25, 2007 at 20 Greene in New York. Get your tickets here.
listen to sound excerpt | quicktime required
view video excerpt | quicktime required
Posted by jo at December 18, 2006 10:32 AM
