Seriously? No really. Lumiere! has a heck of a lot of sound cues; a combination of music, ambient drones, and foley-sound effects. This is an image of my desktop from when I ran sound for the premiere of Lumiere! at ODC last month.  I’m not a sound designer by any means, but the sound mixes that I create get more and more complicated with every show.  Instead of using Q-Lab application, the industry standard, I used an ad-hoc combination of iTunes and Quicktime files…and arranged them visually so I could move between the two.  Q-Lab would require that the timing of fades be preset in advance, whereas this ad-hoc system allowed me to be more spontaneous with sonic transitions.

It’s important to me to have control over the sound in my shows, because, from the outside, it’s one way for me to control the mood and the flow.  I like to mix from the audience because I can imagine I can get a sense of how the work is being perceived.

However… shifting back and forth between these many windows felt very tenuous, and at any moment I could click on the wrong thing by accident. Stage Manager Matisse convinced me that I would have more peace of mind if I switched to QLab.  There will still be some sense of spontaneity in that I will have full control over WHEN transitions happen, and overall the sound scape will be smoother. So for the next show… the desktop will look more like this:

Still photo by Miguel Arzabe
Video footage by Mark McBeth
Edited by Catherine Galasso
© Catherine Galasso 2011

On May 26 2011 we presented a 15-minute preview performance of Bring On The Lumière! at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as part of an event entitled Muybridge in Three Movements.  In conjunction with the exhibition Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, the excerpt was performed alongside a collection of Muybridge-inspired short films chosen by San Francisco Cinematheque’s Steve Polta; and a Muybridge-driven conversation on cinematic space and time led by author Rebecca Solnit.  We were thrilled to be part of such an illustrious program, and especially psyched for the opportunity to try out an important scene for Bring On The Lumière! — a live recreation of the seminal Lumiere film Workers Leaving the Factory.  This scene had been on my mind for quite some time, from when we first sketched a version of it at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in July 2010.

Here are notes from Macklin Kowal, who assisted me with the preview performance as the Production Manager. Macklin did an amazing job organizing and directing the group. We also had amazing support from the SFMOMA staff, especially from dynamite Public Programs assistant Stella Lochman.  Warm thanks to curator Frank Smigiel for inviting us, and to Muybridge-scholar Rebecca Solnit for making it happen.

Philip Huang and Macklin Kowal

Macklin Kowal: I started working as the production manager for Bring on the Lumiere after Catherine and the cast had already committed a year of work to the project. Their research and rehearsals were evident in the first rehearsal I attended. Principal dancers Christine Bonansea and Marina Fukushima moved with seeming ease through complicated phrases of movement that were modeled after pedestrian movement and gesture as captured in the films of the Lumiere brothers. Furthermore, the two performers demonstrated a deep fraternal bond based in historical notions of the Lumiere brothers’ relationship.

Hilary Palanza leading

Some of her experiments for this project, though, have included large groups of performers animating the canon of the Lumiere brothers in live performance. For a performance at SFMOMA presented in conjuction with the museum’s Edweard Muybridge exhibit, she choreographed an intricate rendering of their Workers Leaving the Factory.

Kat directing

More than thirty people billowed across the stage in the  circular patterns through the museum, using the frame of SFMOMA’s loading dock doors to recreate the continuous exiting in the original film. As seemingly effortless as the performance appeared, it demanded a great deal of direction and patience on Catherine’s part, and she succeeded in maintaining the clarity of her vision while motivating the performers to find enjoyment in the work.

Kat's diagram for the three circular pathways through the loading dock doors

Click here to view photos from the rehearsal at SFMOMA, by Mimi Cave

Huge warm thanks to Phoenicia, Pearl, Harold, Katharine, Lila, Crow, Esme, Daria, Molly, Jordan, Eli, Mimi, Elizabeth, and Mary, for all the brilliant ideas and thoughtful input.  Extra special thanks to Macklin.

While our show probably won’t include this little snippet, I wanted to add this video to the blog as a tribute to Muybridge, and I look forward to developing the idea further for the evening-length premiere.

Christine Bonansea and I made some amazing progress on Lumière last summer during our three weeks at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where we were both  choreographers-in-residence.  When you’re living outside of your regular routine, it’s possible to focus on, and become more subsumed by the life of a work.

About Headlands Center for the Arts

Headlands Center for the Arts’ Artist in Residence Program has earned international renown for bringing together pioneering artists and arts professionals in all disciplines—visual, performance, writing, interdisciplinary, music, composition, sound, film, video, and new media—from throughout the U.S. and the world. The program provides a supportive working environment that allows time for artists to experiment, reflect and grow, both individually and collectively during their stay. Through the support of generous donations, live-in AIRs are provided with a studio, shared housing and five meals a week. Headlands Center for the Arts is located in the beautiful Golden Gate National Recreation Area in Fort Barry in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco.  Headlands’ is housed in a cluster of nine historic, 1907-era military buildings that were artistically renovated by world-reknown artists such as Ann Hamilton and David Ireland.

We are competing in The A.W.A.R.D. Show! semifinals on Wednesday, January 12th in San Francisco — a choreography competition in which the audience vote will determine who goes on to the final round.  The prize is $10,000.

Christine and Marina and I will perform an excerpt of Bring On The Lumiere! and we are spending the next 5 days crafting a perfect nugget of a piece.  In order to win, I believe the piece has to be a mix of virtuosity, humor, and smarts.  I know that Marina and Christine will blow the audience away — my main preoccupation is with the structure.  How do you build an entire journey into 10 minutes?  We have so much material at this point — it’s just a matter of selecting a few different ideas and getting them to flow naturally together.  I have to keep reminding myself to keep it simple… I tend to get carried away with too many ideas.  The audience doesn’t need to know who the characters are based on, but I want them to care, and laugh, and be moved, and not want it to be over while at the same time feel some sort of resolution.

Click here for tickets to and more info about The A.W.A.R.D. Show!

We are in the middle of a week-long rehearsal intensive at ODC in San Francisco.  It’s the first time that I’ve been able to work on a piece with this kind of regularity, and it’s really exciting.  Christine, Marina and I are meeting every day for 3 hours — each day building on the next and the material is getting more and more interesting.  We are mostly meet in the brand new ODC Theater building, but we also worked one night in Rebecca Solnit’s apartment, which was awesome.

At the culmination of the week long intensive, we’re going to have an open rehearsal this Tuesday night November 23rd to share what we’ve been working on to friends and supporters of the work.  I’m looking forward to getting feedback at this super early stage in the process, when everything is still so raw, and I’m not yet attached to any one thing.  It’s a great time for input, because the work is still wide open, and yet the aesthetic is really clear.  We are building a world.