Denison’s Tutti Festival
Tutti Festival March 2-7, 2015 Denison University
Miwa Matreyek
Miwa came into our class and we got to discuss with her how she creates her pieces. Her work is described as “a live performance with projected animation. The Artist’s shadow is constantly present”… “from beginning to end – sometimes in semi close-up and sometimes as a full figure – as the world around her shifts and transforms.” Her work is also described as “a multimedia live performance work combining projected animation and the artist’s own shadow silhouette as she interacts with the fantastical world of the video, merging film and theatre to create something that is its own kind of spectacle.” It was very interesting to hear and see (through picture and videos that she showed us) how she goes about thinking up constructing such elaborate pieces. We then got to see her perform two of her pieces. It was really interesting to see how she integrates animation, music, and her own body into one art form. Visually, it seemed that the animation was often motivated by the music and her movement was motivated by the animation. She said she used the music to motivate her movement since she is unable to watch the animation as she interacts with it.
Josh Weckesser
Josh designed the lighting for a few of the dance pieces in the Tutti Festival and came in to talk to our class about how he designs lighting in relation to dance. He talked about a range of topics from where he gets inspiration for the design, how he balances lighting with music and movement, etc. Here are a few of the ideas that he talked about:
There is no one approach to lighting, just like there is no one approach in any art form
The lighting design often comes out of listening in all senses and ways
The way that he feels best when he is lighting are the times that he feels the least comfortable talking about why he made those decisions
If you could talk about it, why would you be dancing about it?
It’s a feeling
The big deal with lighting is that the final product is in a space; with dance, you can rehearse in a studio and different spaces and you can get close to the performance experience but with lighting, its difficult and nearly impossible to bring lighting into a rehearsal space. You have to be able to come in to the performance space and discover the lighting once you get into the space using the feeling of the piece, the look of the space, cues, etc.
There are two types of cues: music cues and movement cues (Music: on this key change, do this, it doesn’t matter what the dancers are doing; Movement: when they do the crab walk, cue the lighting)
Personally, he goes off of the music more in regard to tone but the movement more in regard to specifics. The music is usually a very serious grounding point that has been baked into the movement and is strongly involved with the mood of the music.
If the movement set to the piece of music and the music piece itself differ from each other, his ideas for the lighting design are simply informed in a different way.
There are two basic issues with costuming: color (not necessarily and issue but something to be considered and dealt with) because the lighting can change the color of the costumes, and also shape (if a guy is in a hat and he is top lit, his face disappears) can change the way the body looks using lighting.
If props, set pieces, costumes, etc. are reflective or mirrored, you have to pay good attention to the lighting so you don’t blind the audience.
Every problem creates the opportunity for a creative solution.
How do you balance and resect what the artist wants? Often times, the practical reality is that the lighter has an artisan role rather than an artistic role: he is a skilled laborer. If there is an artistic conflict, he more times than not loose the argument. If the choreographer or director doesn’t like something, it goes.
He has learned to not be emotionally attached to the designs but allow them to be his art because he doesn’t want to take it too personally when his ideas get dissed. He makes sketches and slowly gets more attached to an involved with it as he gets feedback and builds the design.
With people that he’s worked with a lot, he is more set free to do what he wants. Over time, through working together, you learn to actually work with each other.
In a situation when a piece is returning and he is given a video to recreate the lighting in a new setting, his goal is not to rediscover but to recreate it. It’s like and Ikea chair when you don’t have all the parts but in the end of the day, you still need to be able to sit in the chair.
Have you ever done a piece set to silence? Not one that has been all the time silent but he has done pieces that have ling stretches of silence. It is his impulse to write fewer cues into those spaces. With music, you can slip lighting cues in. Lighting is meant to fade into the piece; you don’t want someone constantly looking at the lighting. With music, when things musically get brighter and the lighters also get brighter, it is more of a feeling and experience and the lighting is slipped in. When you are no longer listening to anything, your other senses become keyed into other aspects of the piece.
Have you ever made a lighting plan and had dance set to it? That’s kind of impossible. He’s tried it before (been asked by a choreographer to do so, wrote some lighting cues, and gone into rehearsal and watched the choreographer work) but since you can’t turn on all these site-specific lighting cues in the rehearsal space, it’s difficult to make it work and not force the hand of all the artists. He can sit there and say “you can’t dance there, you’re in the dark”, but not everyone can imagine the lighting in that same way that he can since he created it and it is therefore very difficult to make things work in rehearsal and translate in into the performance space.
ETHEL
ETHEL is a New York based string quartet that was co-founded in 1998. They came into our class and we were able to do dance improvisation while they improvised music along with us. We did this in many different ways. We did solo dances with solo accompaniment two separate times, first with the musician leading and second with the dancer leading. We then did duets with two dancers and two musicians all responding off of the three other people. It was an absolutely amazing experience. I did the solos with Dorothy Lawson and the duet with Stanisha Lang as a dance partner and Ralph Ferris and Kip Jones on Viola and Violin respectively. After we did the improvisation, we got a chance to sit down and talk tot hem about their music.
Dorothy Lawson – Cello
She’s found that watching great choreography exposes the inner rhythms of the music. The physicality of rhythm is essential to music and she wishes musicians were taught more about that.
Ralph Ferris – Viola
Eurhythmics is invaluable training for musicians. The weight that you give to one beat versus the lift that you give to another is often ignored in performance.
Kip Jones – Violin
What does it feel like to be wrong? It feels just being right until the moment you realize that you’re wrong that feels so horrible.
Dance is the last remaining oral art form.
There are other things that try to capture movement in a non-movement form. There is nothing else that can’t be explained away the ways that dance can. You can’t ever actually reproduce dance in the moment. Dance has avoided being squashed and divided in a way that no other form of human creativity can be.
Dance costs a lot, there is a short period of time in your like that you can actually burn as bright as you can but it is so creatively rewarding.
Corin Lee – Violin
Mary Ellen Childs
Mary Ellen Childs composed the piece of music that ETHEL played for one of the dance performances during Tutti. She came in and talked to our class about her compositional process, how she works with movement in her own creations, and how she works with movement from other people. Here are some of the interesting things she talked about:
There is always a lead artist, she has never worked in a way that was equal, but what is equality in art?
The audience is the ones that make the piece make sense.
Everything has to be communicated in some way. There has to be discussion.
She follows the concept but she has to be able to bring her own strong voice to it. She won’t write wallpaper music if she feels like the piece needs something else. She doesn’t do work for hire, she makes her own work. Some people like doing that but she doesn’t, she likes having her own freedoms.
What is not your territory to step on? You can step into it but you have to know when to step back and realize that that aspect isn’t up to you.
There is no one-way to work. There are so many different ways to put things together that you have to be able to have a relationship with the other artists. If it doesn’t work, you find another artist.
Ways that she’s worked with choreographer
She was asked to compose a piece by a choreographer and told what performance style they wanted to use, had a discussion, talked through key elements, met once during production to give a few notes, and then had the music group record a working track and then the choreographer choreographed the dance.
She had a piece of music, an idea about the sound performance, the lighting, the dancer and the choreography and she went and found a dancer and asked them to put it together.
In another instance, she was asked to compose music for a dance that was already in existence. She coordinated her music to dance but didn’t write phrase to phrase. She had a video and made the music to that. The music was live and she gave musicians movement cues of when to move on to the next part of the movement.
She has collaborated in all different ways with a choreographer that uses text quite frequently and music very little. She took the choreographer’s text and worked on it with her to create the sounds. In another for with this choreographer, the choreographer was doing with a dance with a singer that used prepositions to portray their relationship and she wrote the music for the singer that complimented the words and the portrayed relationship.
Sandra Mathern-Smith
Sandy choreographed two pieces of work that were performed during the Tutti Festival. The first work was performed in the Knapp Performance. The audience was around three sides and the fourth side had large, loud fans blowing. The dancers came in and out of the space in different numbers, running for a majority of the dance. The dancers did abstract movements that represented elements of being at the beach, for example a bird and the feeling of the ocean. The second part of the performance was a cite-based work in the Bryant Arts Center with ETHEL performing a composition by Mary Ellen Childs live. The dancers started at the end of a hallway, dancing and running down and around each other. There were four dancers on each level and multiple levels of dancers. In the second part of this piece, dancers were on the glass-enclosed balcony in Bryant, dancing on and along the glass, hanging over the edge and pulling each other back. This part was meant to represent a cliff. The final part of the second performance consisted of dancers in sand on the bottom level of the arts center as people watched from the railings on the levels above. They used their bodies to make shapes in the sand, cleared the sand by dragging a bar across the surface, and then continued to dance and make new shapes. It was very interesting to see the space used in such a wide variety of interesting ways.
I gained a lot of information through talking to guests throughout the week in some of the many different fields of art that goes into making a dance production. Each guest had a perspective unique to his or her field as well as unique to them, which provided us with a broad range of “food for thought” in relation to dance productions as a multidisciplinary art form.
