The picture of Barbara’s trousers has been taken on the way back from the concert ‘Ecosonic ensemble with Ouija Board’ where she invited us on Saturday – it was a the Union Chapel, in Islington, an amazing place:
We were at the Union Chapel, a beautiful and old church – http://www.unionchapel.org.uk/ they are using the rent of concert space to refurbish the architecture.
Ecosonic Ensemble with Ouija Board
Baroque Flutes: Stephen Preston, Eva Caballero
Ouija Board: Peter Coyte, Matt Cargill
Cellos: Thomas Gardner, Laura Reid
After the concert, walking to a pub to get some food for our thoughts, Amandine was saying to Barbara she really liked her trousers: short legs but huge top part which reminded us of some trousers one can see in Egypt – since it was a Tartan we spoke about the Clash’s cover of ‘Rock the Casba’ by the algerian rocker Rachid Taha:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DbFYsi9iSg 350 300]
I like also form him the ‘Voilà voilà que ça recommence’As a strange reminiscence, Barbara’s trousers made me think about what I felt during the concert, however neither the Tartan pattern or Rachid Taha has anything to do with the concert we just saw (at least not that I know) – it’s nice to have different kind of music suddenly related trough a bit of fashion design:
It’s a kind of trousers one could define as being a closed long skirt. With a minimum use of means, the Tartan fabric is enclosing the leg just above the ankle. The fabric then moves in a somehow nice transfixing movement: and you suddenly find yourself thinking what is this that she wears: a skirt? a trousers?
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The ‘Rock The Casba’ trousers has been bought at Comme des Garçons, and it has been designed by Rei Kawakubo.
In a way, like for the trousers, the stage design used a minimum of means (if not, none at all) – something a bit like a DorkBot in a disaffected London east end warehouse.
On stage there was 4 chairs and an orange structure with 4 vertical legs partially covered with a white piece of fabric, with 3 metal boxes on the side, one with a computer on top of it; there was also the microphone of the performers, and a few instruments: 2 violoncellos and 2 flutes, a bright light was on top of the stage, a couple of cables were lying on the floor, 6 performers catched our attention and hears for the next hours or so.
So far, it looks quite familliar to me: ‘you plug, you hack, it works’ is my moto since a few years now.
There was 4 improvised acts; the first one saw all the 4 instruments playing together and 2 guys in the back moving their hands over the white piece of fabrics, triggering noisy loops from the computer. the remaining acts were based on couple of instruments. Those couple were articulating in the manner of a discussion like in a lot of improvisation performance. Those instrumental discussions allowed the public to be maybe a bit more aware of how the classical instruments were interacting with the ‘table’ and the mesmerising flow of hands on top of it: the instruments were recorded live on the stage and the records were then used as sample or loops, played by the hands like on an invisible keyboard. The performance was all made of recorded loops, a re-temporisation of the music just performed on stage.
On the stage design side: instrumentalists are facing the audience, they play in front of. In the background, the table with one or two performers focusing on the table top. When an instrumentalists finished to play its bit she or he looked at the table – in a manner of saying: ‘it’s your turn now’ – and maybe this was a bit too demonstrative of the process: to show how the ‘things’ were actually working was clearly didactic.
image via: Project Gutenberg’s Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall, by Henry Bursill
The electro acoustique performance was relying heavily on the Reacting Table Top – the ‘Ouija Board’. The light on top of the stage was projecting shadow of the hands on the top of the table: a piece of white fabric hang by a structure of 4 feet. Underneath: a camera, filming the shadows. The shadows are then transcripted into music trough the use of the computer which is recording the music. The computer use MaxMSP to translate the hand position into a ‘push a button action’
The movement of the hands over the table top reminded me of this film I recently watched Les Enfants du Paradis written by Jacques Prévert and filmed by Marcel Carmé – which narrates the love affairs of Baptiste a pantomime (a theater mime) in Paris back in the 1820s or 1830s.
Those handled performance were implicating both performative and demonstrative aspects. Performative in its relationship with the dancer, Demonstrative in its relationship with actor (transmitting a meaning like a pantomime)
This ‘Ouija Board’ made me think of an instrument made of a hollowed instrument – here but not here, made of its own absence.
My e65 camera phone is really bad at taking any kind fo picture; nonetheless the over exposed zone (the aura on the picture) is actually the place where the hollowed and somehow magical instrument was situated
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After discussing with the composer at the end of the performance i had the confirmation that nothing on stage was in anyway designed – which it happens I quite like – much more than if it would have been.
I like this design principle: designing something without designing it actually, letting things happen and reacting upon discussions and new discoveries – it is a little bit the same process Åbäke and us used to work on the Kitsuné website or on the Digitalism’s ‘Idealistic’ cover – but I keep the Dome story for a bit later…