Month: October 2009

The Small Things

Current Projects, Dance
Current Projects
The Small Things
The Small Things is a project currently involving myself and dancer/choreographers Caley O’Neill and Gabby Rose which focusses on work which explores the nexus of movement and sound-making performance, and on intimacy as an integral part of performer/viewer experience.
We’re currently working on the show ‘2’, which is about dialogue, between people, between performers and audiences, between media.

The Small Things is a project currently involving myself and dancer/choreographers Caley O’Neill and Gabby Rose which focusses on work which explores the nexus of movement and sound-making performance, and on intimacy as an integral part of performer/viewer experience.

We’re currently working on the show ‘2’, which is about dialogue, between people, between performers and audiences, between media.

The following text is from a draft proposal for the ‘2’ project.

The Small Things Collective is a group of artists interested in exploring the areas between existing art and performance disciplines. We are currently focusing on the relationship between sound and movement and the often unnoticed points at which one form takes on properties of the other, where dance becomes sound-making, where musical performance becomes kinetic. Themes we often work from are: the intricate, the delicate, the intimate, the unseen, the habitual, and perceived patterns in human behavior and the world at large. We are committed to the idea of creating unique audience experiences, and in the works we have collaborated on in the past we have done this by constructing immersive environments, shaping performance and space with a sculptural eye.

2 (working title)

In this production we are exploring the spaces between sound and the performing body, between performer and viewer. It will take the form of a duet between dancer and musician, exploiting both bodies as sound sources, kinetic entities, and sculptural objects. The performances will be intimate and audience numbers will be constrained to less than a dozen at a time to encourage direct engagement between each viewer, the performers and the space/environment.

The Collective Collective

Current Projects, Music
Current Projects
The Collective Collective
The Collective Collective serves as a banner name for music which either focusses on ideas of improvisation and/or experimentation. Members have so far included myself, and composer/improvisor/performers Sean Mears and Luke Paulding.

The Collective Collective serves as a banner name for performance which either focusses on ideas of improvisation and/or experimentation with music/sound as a starting point. Members have so far included myself, and composer/improvisor/performers Sean Mears and Luke Paulding.

Fat Lip as played by the Victorian Police Band

Audio, Past Projects

This last Friday as part of our final assessment for our arranging subject at VCAM we had some big band charts played by the Victorian Police Band. This is my pseudo-concession to commercial band writing, filtered through a recent nostalgia for Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus. Conducted by Daryl McKenzie.

FAT LIP

It’s amazing what the acoustics of a particular room can do to mutate the natural sound of instruments, aside from the obvious distortion resulting from my little recording device being too close to a very loud band you’ll notice that the trumpets seem to get swallowed up in the background, the opposite of what one would expect, consistently overpowered even by the saxes. So in short, the acoustic of the room where this was recorded was weird in the extreme.

Silent Places/Parallel Landscapes

Dance, Past Projects

This show was my second collaboration with Caley O’Neill, and the first of two inspired by the writing of Norwegian novelist and poet Tarjei Vesaas. This piece takes hold of the unique landscapes described in Vesaas’ poetry and abstracts them into vast imaginary spaces. This piece was performed by Alex O’Neill-King and Susan van den Ham in the middle of 2008. The sound drifts between textural sound design and Scandinavian pop inspired electronica.

“…and there where the bottom is clear to the traveller
And shimmers with yellow sand and shoals,
Where the tiny, jewel-like islands
Number thousands, this little lake is almost lost among them –
May all you are be in this,
feel, while still there’s time:
The swelling flow, the current
Lying in the water like waving hair,
and washing out to sea.”
T. Vesaas

“…and there where the bottom is clear to the traveller

And shimmers with yellow sand and shoals,

Where the tiny, jewel-like islands

Number thousands, this little lake is almost lost among them –

May all you are be in this,

feel, while still there’s time:

The swelling flow, the current

Lying in the water like waving hair,

and washing out to sea.”

T. Vesaas

Order & Resonance, Friday November 6

Current Projects, Events

A concert/exhibition/installation of new works by 3rd year composition students of the VCAM School of Music. Featuring new works exploring space and the intersection of technology and performer by composers Dean Gourley and Evan Lawson, Sean Mears, Luke Paulding, and Camille Robinson. There will also be an exhibition of scores and recordings by the composers.

The show will be held at Chrysalis print gallery in East Melbourne on the evening of Friday the 6th of November.

Leaving the Left

Dance, Past Projects

I worked on this dance piece with choreographer Caley O’Neill in late 2007 while I was still in the first year of my undergraduate degree and Caley was completing her postgraduate diploma. It explores the ideas of imprint and memory. The music is dense and beat heavy, an explosion of sampled body sounds abstracted into glitchy drum loops.

Leaving the Left

This is Where They Are

Audio, Dance, Past Projects

This was a dance project I worked on in 2008 with choreographer Caley O’Neill as part of the completion of her Masters Degree at VCA. The music explores space and a kind of lyrical minimalism, using computer editing to tease a short excerpt of piano improvisation into a 25 minute theme and variations. Both the dance and the sound were very much inspired by the words of Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas, in this instance largely by his book The House in the Dark which describes Norway’s involvement in World War II, in particular depicting the goings on in a country house during wartime using it as a metaphor for the country as a whole.

Audio sample

Caley’s words about the piece are below…

Program Notes

This is Where They Are is an installation piece that explores the writing of Tarjei Vesaas. A Norwegian writer with a gift for detail, his novel The House in the Dark has been the stimulant for this work. Written during the war, its controversial words saw it buried in a zinc box for 5 years until it publishing in 1947. Filled with deranged yet fascinating characters this work explores the many physical traits they posses and their inhabiting of the house.

This year has taken me on an amazing journey, on which I have been lucky enough to discover the essence of my own art making. Here I search to find a deeper more embodied performative state in which thick physical environments are created. Through a deeply investigated exploration of improvisation I have tried to create an immersive and intricate physical style that is both interesting and immersive.

Derrida talks of our societies obsession with sense making. However it is here that I ask you to do no such thing. Sit and watch, listen and feel, I ask that you let your imagination do the rest.

I know only how this work is structured…..not what it is about.

Created By: Caley O’Neill

Choreographer – Caley O’Neill  in collaboration with the performers

Performers – Alex O’Neill-King, Susan Van Den Ham and Jessica Devereux

Costume and Set Design – Emily Collett and Caley O’Neill

Composer – Camille Robinson

Lighting Design – Alexandre Malta and Caley O’Neill

This Is Where They Are

This-Is-Where-They-Are

This event at Contemporary Dance Australia