Dance Performance

Don and I went to a dance performance tonight by the "Merce Cunningham" performers. It was quite an interesting event, but the third piece was the most compelling. The image above gives a sense of the kinetic quality of the third piece which was visually and musically the most stimulating (especialkly for me - because I had a sense of what they were doing and why. )What was most interesting was the score for that final piece (called Eyespace) It was composed by Annea Lockwood and consisted of the interpretation of a rock by Takehisa Kosugi. The musicians literally had a photograph of a rock that they read as a score. (The percussionist modified instruments, frequency and intensity based on the width and curvature of the lines within the layers of the rock.) They have three different rocks that they interpret and it is random on any fgiven night which rock they will play. A description from the Cunningham website describes the piece as follows:


3. Annea Lockwood, Jitterbug.

Musicians required:
1 person on laptop, 2 on variable instruments.

Description:
Improvised instrumentals and electronics over immersive recordings of bowed metal instruments and underwater insects.

From the composer:
In Jitterbug, the musicians are interpreting photographs of rocks taken for this project by Gwen Deely, as graphic scores; these are intricate in their patterns and color shifts and I found them in a creek bed, up in the Montana Rockies. Lines, texture, shapes, patches of dark or light color are translated into sound, by Takehisa Kosugi (using small objects such as shells, empty shampoo bottles from hotel rooms, the actual rocks themselves, an ocarina, oscillators) and by John King (playing viola and electric guitar). A pre-recorded surround-sound score draws on insect sounds: aquatic insects which I recorded in the small lakes and backwaters of the Flathead Valley, Montana; and others generously made available to me by Lang Elliott, of the NatureSound Studio. A curious aspect of the underwater recordings, was that these strong sound signals were being created by beetles and other microscopic insects which were always invisible to me, although the water was clear and often shallow. Deep tones from bowed gongs and a piano infiltrate this insect world, providing a strong contrast; William Winant, Gustavo Aguilar and Joseph Kubera, Maggi Payne and Marilyn Ries generously recorded these sounds for the project.

http://www.merce.org/p/eyespace/index.html