Outrageous Beauty

Our production, Autumn Spectre, goes up this Friday & Saturday, so we are running around a bit like chickens with our heads cut off. But it’s fun, right?

Autumn Spectre is set in a church - a dreamy, longing, eve in which a Mourning Man finds himself in a deserted sanctuary, surrounded by shades of his life, shadows, and his solitary thoughts. The music has stunned me with its outrageous beauty. I guess this is no surprise, given the masterful settings of seminal poets’ words by some of the 20th Century’s (most still living and creating) greatest composers.

The setting, both physically and dramatically, and the site-specificity of the performance, has thrown us a curve ball or two - nothing our adventurous band of merry-makers isn't used to - but this week has been a big lesson in the flexibility needed to make art happen. It’s an exciting time, watching the work come together, unfold, transform, and bud wings. This is the part of the process most creatively fulfilling, and perhaps most precarious. Autumn Spectre is a living being now, a bit out of our control, still needing tending and guidance, but an independent creature of the creative process with its own identity. We have a short time to get to know it, and then it passes from us forever. I hope you’re there to share with us the very magical, ephemeral quality of live performance.

Aesthetics and Uncertainty

I've worked with people in the past whose work would spontaneously take shape upon moving into a performance venue. No amount of meetings, planning, research, rehearsal, blocking would lead them to the same artistic product that being in the actual space and making it work would produce. I never thought I'd be one of those people - I am usually another type of person who plans out all meals a week in advance and creates ridiculous excel budget spreadsheets for herself. But working with Misha and Divergence Vocal Theater so far has been an exercise in being patient with myself and my apparent need to "make it work" next week in the space.

So many unknown factors come into play for this show. The space is a church, not a theatre. There is some lighting in the church but I don't know what / how much and we can't refocus it. I'm renting some stage lights, and I can get a general "plot" going for this but really, it will be a "these lights go HERE" kind of thing once we're in the space. The piece is song / dance / a little bit of spoken word, but without seeing it in person I can only get a rough sense of what it needs for lighting and video.

And of course there's the uncertainty involved in add me and video together.

This marks my fourth show designing not only lights but also projections. The first time - Rapunzel - I seriously edited in Final Cut Pro the way I play any type of fight game on the Playstation. I mashed the buttons until something cool happened. In a bizarre twist of fate that particular piece received some national attention and was invited to be performed in Prague. I had no idea what I was doing, but what I did worked for whatever reason. Maybe because I had no idea what I was doing?

I make a conscious effort when I'm doing new things to not try to hide the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. Because of this I've half-adopted an aesthetic that's more "DIY," found footage-esque than clean and professional. That doesn't mean I won't one day need a more professional looking video design, but for now the projects I've been working on have allowed for this.

For Autumn Spectre I've been working on a number of short video pieces that will be worked into the performance. One piece in particular stands out to me - a girl in a white dress exploring a graveyard for four minutes or so. Austin actress Emily Tindall and my husband Travis came with me to the cemetery and just improvised from there. Later when I edited the video together to send to Misha, I said to Travis that he had done a great job of filming. He then watched what I had edited and said that I had used mainly footage taken unintentionally between "real" takes - like the camera swooping suddenly down to focus on the ground, or a random pan across a scene which allows us to glimpse Emily in passing before she's out of frame again. There's something almost more authentic to me in shots like those, though, as though that authenticity is lost by getting perfect images out of it. The imperfection implies another story that we're not told. (See previous entry on why I like to not have everything explained to me.)

The next big uncertainty with this video project will come on Monday when I arrive in Houston for the week. That's when we will take the actual performance Misha and company have created and see if the video actually works with any part of it. I have had ideas while editing these pieces, but theatre and design have both taught me that I need to be a little Buddhist about my work. As in unattached. For the piece above, I had listened to the music Misha sent to me several times and was flipping through images that really spoke to me until I found one of a face covered in twine. This picture meshed with a specific musical piece for me, and catalyzed the whole graveyard walk thing that we did (at one point in the video, Emily is seen with her head and face wrapped in jute). I edited the final piece with that song in mind, but the truth is that it might not work next week, and that's ok. Maybe a little scary, but ok. Maybe it will work with another song entirely. Maybe there's too little video, maybe there's too much, maybe it will distract. We won't know the answers to these questions until we actually see it and start playing with it in the church next week. It honestly makes the project more interesting and adventurous this way.

The Hazard Factor

I found myself in rehearsal yesterday saying how important I think it is that artists are able to “plug into each other’s work”. In a time when budgets are tight, rehearsals are limited, and creative demands high, a very practical way to address performance-making is to collaborate with artists whose work, independently, is very strong, interesting, and even seemingly incongruent. The incongruence is the exciting ‘hazard factor’ - the wild card that makes the work compelling and dynamic. Autumn Spectre’s elements include the butoh-inspired dance of Toni Valle; the only-Timothy Evers-can-create-this character of a mourning Englishman; the dreamy sitar playing and atmospheric elemental Wind of Aaron Ray Hermes; Megan Reilly’s multimedia and lighting; and the core of the evening: beautiful contemporary art song mediations on loss, death, regret, longing, and hope. These settings of Dickinson, Jonson, Shakespeare, Whitman, Vachel by master composers anchor the performance. The characters’ archetypal quality provide points of navigation, I can simply get out of the way and allow the audience to connect-the-dots of an open and non-linear narrative, hopefully, in ways I had not even thought of.

Autumn Spectre

October 2 & 3, 8pm

First Cumberland Presbyterian Church (River Oaks)

More info here

Notes, News & Collaborative thoughts...

Autumn Spectre color palette

I'm excited and intrigued by the mini-films Megan is creating for the performance. Her aesthetic is very different from mine, and I'm enjoying the surprise of another artist's perspective on material we're both working with. The current creative practice is affirmed, trusted: collaborative artists working independently -- then bringing the work together -- letting the hazard factor play in the artistic process is effective, interesting, inspiring...

This weekend we continue to join the puzzle pieces of dance, actor, and sitar (Toni Valle, Aaron Ray Hermes, Timothy Evers) - I think of that trio as earth and wind elementals, and the unsuspecting human...

Timothy is also writing a character for Autumn Spectre, rife with beautiful and unsettling words:

Nighttime comes too often here – and will stay far, far too long. Some days never come. Others linger – fighting the darkening sky – holding back the moon –

In other news:

Divergence Vocal Theater is now working with PR-Marketing Diva, Tina Zulu of Zulu Creative. We're sooooooo excited -- many possibilities ahead!

More news ahead....the cat is struggling to get out of the bag! (poor thing!)

Join us!:

Support us through Spacetaker's Cultured Cocktails at Boheme Cafe & Wine. September 24!

Join us for Autumn Spectre, October 2 & 3!