Collaborators' first meeting: November 7, 2010

On Sunday November 7th the first group of six collaborators met for the first time at the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative on Scarth Street in Regina. The purpose of the meeting was to eat cheese and toss around their first ideas around the initial concept proposed by Chrystene Ells for the lab-style development of a collaboratively created installation-influenced performance, tentatively titled 'kaleidocycle,' to be pitched to the Globe Theatre on November 19th.

In attendance were:

• Johanna Bundon: dancer, performer, choreographer
• Candace Cardoso: designer for theatre and film
• Jason Cullimore: composer with a background in the study of music psychology
• Chrystene Ells: writer/director/producer
• berny hi.: experimental filmmaker, animator and projection artist
• Joanne Weber: culturally Deaf poet and author and teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Meeting notes

1. Chrystene presented a few images and ideas as starting points for the discussion:

• overall feel of show as first envisioned:
• immediacy and a sense of “no one knows what is going to happen”
• old school magic/special effects (ie: fire dress from Shockheaded Peter)
• a sense of beauty but also a lost feeling...
• ASL Poetry combined with dance, projection, live sound effects and music, lighting effects, and possibly shadow puppets or shadow performance of some kind
• media: analogue: no synth, no digital, if possible, ie:
• 16mm film projection/performance
• live foley pits, non-traditional sound makers/instruments
• set and design:
• costumes and set pieces that work as projection screens
• modular set pieces that can be combined in different ways to create different environments
• other/miscellaneous:
• bicycle on track
• harness or suspension, things hanging from the ceiling
• non-textual project
• constant shattering and regrouping
• in-the-round? central performance pit

2. Also Chrystene presented a few preliminary ideas about how the developmental process might work:

• Collaborators and Performers - different but potentially overlapping
• collaborators: generators of visual and auditory material (mud and pearls)
• performers: artists who will meet for development and rehearsal of material, and perform in the final production

• Collaborator Volley - possible example of how it might work
• each collaborator takes 2 weeks to respond within his/her media to a concept (such as a moment when she/he brushed the divine or simply went crazy -- good or bad -- in connection with art or creative endeavors)
• at the end of the two weeks, through some process of selection (maybe just names in a hat), each collaborator is given the work of another collaborator to respond to
• some concepts might make the entire round of collaborators and some will fall aside... but as time goes on we will generate a lot of material wherein we’ll find more and more connections - some will be useful and some won’t fit, but it’s the mud in the pearls we’d be after
• eventually the performers would be brought into the process to respond with the director to the material that has been generated, in order to create a script and a performance that can be further developed and honed
• Time and energy commitments should in this way fit everyone’s needs or desires, from being intrinsically involved from day one to just working on the project when time and life allows
• the dream or concept is to bring in designers, media artists, and composers early and make them collaborators from the beginning, rather than the folks who have to scramble at the end to augment and facilitate the performance which has already been created by others

3. Some of the responses brought to the first meeting were:

Joanne talked about language and neurolinguistics - what part of the brain does language come from?

• when Joanne uses ASL she feels like she has a split personality
• she feels it is connected to an older or more primitive or more immediate and more direct part of the brain
• the image of the tree - synapses and structure
• does phrasing make sense in terms of timing, grabbing the beginning of a word or something?
• Primitivism

NOTES: See thesis and other research by Loretta Paoli, MFA

check out the book “Seeing Voices” by Oliver Sax

Candace had an image of a picture of the brain 

• as if there were a split personality and different parts light up different colours, with different characters associated with the brain sections by colour
• also images of moon and moonlight, of night shade and water
• she likes the idea of the bike and riding a bicycle in the silence

Jason talked about auditory illusions

• apparently, like optical illusions there are also auditory illusions such as Shepherd tones that sound like they are either -- or both at the same time -- ascending or descending in pitch 
• he likes the idea of the performers using the sets and spokes and foley and found sounds around the stage mixed with taped stuff for starting off points - could interact with or develop it in a call-and-response way
• mentioned that there are recordings of what hearing afflictions, such as Tinnitis, sound like 
• mentioned that there are a ton of different Psychological effects that accompany altered states of consciousness etc,. from literature on auditory physiology and sonic effects

Johanna talked about language and the idea of going sublanguage

• she also talked about the use of hands in various types of performance
• brought in Barba's book on Theatre Anthropology - Joanne noted that the pictures of hands and gestures from various Balinese and other dance styles are all hand shapes that are also used in ASL
• talked about working with performers in a Lab style setting and working without words or text
• said that she is very interested in performing in the piece

berny talked about various aspects of projection performance

• mentioned projection techniques such as the use of mirrors, disco balls, and prisms to cast multiple iterations of a projection image around a room, such as creating dozens of tiny spaceships from a single projection of a spaceship with the use of a disco ball in front of a projector
• expressed interest in various experiments with projection and light and stage illusions
• also mentioned the McGurk Effect (see it here on our Cool Videos page), where what we see influences what we think we hear (as in video of someone saying FaFaFa to audio of BaBaBa - and we think we hear FaFaFa

In preparation for the pitch Chrystene is collecting any ideas, links, images, videos, and/or other thoughts to put together for an 8-10 minute presentation to the Sandbox Series jury at the Globe Theatre at 10am on November 19th. This blog was created as a storage place and communication centre for the collaborators to post ideas and other resources.

Some elements that we discussed including in the pitch session are:

• a piece of music by Jason that is based on a Shepherd's Tone and includes a short composition (30 seconds) constructed of analogue non-musical instrument based sounds (such as, perhaps, sounds made on bicycle spokes)
• a very short (30 second) interpretation of a few lines of one of Joanne's poems about being deaf, presented in the style of ASL Poetry and performed by Joanne at the pitch
• perhaps 30 seconds of examples of projection performance presented by berny

Cheeses in attendance: Swiss, Gouda, Jalapeno Jack, Double Cream Brie, and Chive Boursin (the clear favourite), served with rice crackers and French bread, paired with Old Tyme Ginger Ale, cranberry juice and soda water

until next time!

Proposal to the Globe Theatre: Oct. 22, 2010

k a l e i d o c y c l e

(Greek: KALOS beautiful + EIDOS form + KUKLOS cycle, circle)

a response to the call for submissions for Globe Theatre's 2011-12 Shumiatcher Sandbox Series

On the evening of July 15, 2010, I was at an opening reception at Mysteria Gallery in Regina when the bottom dropped out of everything and I found myself simultaneously inhabiting two realities: I was flying around and around the gallery like Superman, and at the same time standing still, looking at a painting. The multiple and entirely unexpected seizures I had over the next ten hours dramatically changed my life, sense of identity, and perspective on everything. Several things happened immediately:

• the first response of my brain was to close down my speech centre; I immediately lost the ability to speak for hours at a time; at some point however I realized that I could still use rudimentary American Sign Language (ASL), through which I could communicate through an interpreter until I more or less regained fluency in spoken English 
• finding it difficult to sleep for over two months, I often slipped instead into the Regina summer nights on timeless bicycle rides until dawn brought the dog walkers and joggers and an end to the magic and secrets of the black streets
• I found myself encountering a changed world, overwhelmingly beautiful and surreal, visceral and intense on every level, and I saw clearly the intrinsic interconnectedness of everything
• I lost a familiar connection with time, and was not only unable to hold onto moments as they passed beyond memory within a minute or two, but found myself unable to anticipate or plan or build; even a simple task such as making coffee was incalculably difficult and required all of my attention to complete.

Eventually I was diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (an affliction of many artists and writers, including Dostoyevsky and Lewis Carroll, TLE for short), a condition that rarely brings on externally discernable seizures but which often induces deeply personal experiences of the divine, and obsessive bursts of creativity and energy. The question naturally arises whether the seizures create hallucinations of divine or ecstatic experience (in short, a form of madness), or whether encountering the sacred in the physical world manifests as a medical anomaly categorized as seizures, but which in fact may be a normal human response to a profound spiritual experience. Time is passing and I am ‘healing.’ With a sense of sad loss, I am slowly returning to a state of capability that includes teaching at the university, writing grant applications, driving a car, making plans, and working on creative projects. However, it is becoming apparent that the seizures have left or created a crack through which I can still extend myself to touch that exquisite and mysterious world that seems to co-exist with my daily reality. In fact as I learn to incorporate the existence of this portal into my life in general, the schism created socially between others and me is much greater than any break inside my own psyche; I have been labeled ‘manic,’ ‘dead,’ ‘permanently altered,’ ‘subtly different,’ and ‘an entirely different person.’ Because my experience of the world was so radically changed, for some time I had a sneaking suspicion that I had actually died in the gallery and was wandering in some portal between worlds.

KaleidoCyle is partially a response to and engagement with this experience, as well as on current clinical and philosophical engagements with TLE, but I am also interested in the moments of 'divine inspiration' experienced by other artists, particularly the collaborators on this project, with their many different backgrounds. The production would rely heavily on the development process, signaling a return to my early performance/ensemble experiments based on the work of the Odin Theatre under Eugenio Barba, exploratory work I conducted for over a decade starting in 1984. Drawing on this and other related work such as that of Anne Bogart and the SITI group, as well as the stage craft of early Julie Taymor projects, I hope to conduct a Lab with an interdisciplinary group of Saskatchewan-based artists, working collaboratively over several months to create a performance piece based on the above subjects.

Although a good deal of the meat of the project will be based on material generated through the lab process, the production will largely rely on non-verbal, non-textual communication, with an emphasis on images, bodies, sounds and music. Definite and intrinsic elements of the finished work include a bicycle being ridden onstage, live music and foley/sound effects, live performance-projection of film footage, a small ensemble of physical performers, intricate and lovely costume designs, and some form of ASL Poetry (a performative style of signing developed within the Deaf community that spans dance, poetry, storytelling, and ASL - here's an example). Other elements might include harness /suspension performance, puppetry and/or mask work, and live painting or the live creation of visual art. There will be some element of the surreal juxtaposed with a representation of waking life, ideally recreating for the viewer some representation of the experience of a TLE event and fallout, or a brush with the muses.

I envision the playing space as being very simple, with perhaps nothing more than a few modular, moveable set pieces, such as lightweight screens to act as rear- and front-projection and/or shadow-puppet surfaces, so other than the costumes and a few interesting props, such as the bike, puppets, and potential suspension systems, the actual cost to mount the show would be relatively minimal. However, it would be important to me to pay the collaborators for both the development phase and the production.