Live Art

Spark Festival; concert number 9.
I feel like its going to be hard to blog about these performances if no one else experienced them. But I’ll try to make it relatively painless and go through each one one at a time and give my thoughts.
And Death… Jason Bolte
If I had to retitle this piece I would call it; The most beautiful and terrifying thing I’ve ever heard
It was a sound piece based on Dylan Thomas’s poem And Death Shall have no dominion. Of the sounds I could identify (among them seagulls, flames crackeling in a blazing fire, rhythm, a train screeching on its hot tracks)I found the most interesting aspect of this piece to be the way the sounds were stung together and layered to reflect the inspiration the artist derived from Dylan Thomas’s poem. I looked the poem up and read it after the performance. I feel this work did more than justice to it, it made it better. It made its meaning have a new level. I like that idea of taking someone else’s piece and making your own piece out of it. We all just sat there in the dark marveling at the pieces unsuppressed beauty.

Sweep Doug Geers
If I had to retitle this piece I would call it; Fucking Brilliant
The piece consisted of a violinist, a South American percussionist using very beautiful, very tribal looking and sounding percussion instruments, and this is the best part. An assembly of young men standing with laptops at their feet playing synthesized music on……. Wait for it……. Wait for it……… Wiimotes. The violist commenced the piece with a sort cabinet of dr. caligariesc solo. Her solo alone had a lot of drama and grace and when the wiimotes and percussion joined in, the drama in the piece was heighten. The piece explored motion in a variety of different ways. The violist was the most mobil member of the ensemble making very organic sweeping motions while the Wiiists were confined to their station and their sweeping motion was much more digitalized. The percussionist looked like he was enjoying himself the most, he had a very carefree way of playing and expression on his face. The actual product of the piece was very refreshing. I loved the innovation and variation of both music and electronics as well as motion within the piece.

Liminal Surface David Btihell and Ali Momeni
If I had to retitle this piece I would call it; Retarded in the worst way
This pieced really got under my skin for a lot of reasons. First of all it was set up without regard to the audience’s field of vision. I’ll try to paint a mental picture for you; In the center of the stage was a small square table with the two performers profiled to the audience. There was a small screen just in back of them. Which was blank at all times except a few dull moments of prerecorded footage of one of the actors holding a small block looked at it, terrified in the background. Then, on the large screen in back of them, there was s projection of what they were doing on the small table, which was, making percussive sounds with small blocks and symbols. People, let this description of this performance be a lesson to you; too many moving components in a piece can destroy the piece!! I think it could have been pretty cool actually, but I couldn’t even really see what was going on because of the small screen projecting nothing most of the time! The way it was set up was retarded in the worst of ways. But the truly worst part about this performance was that one of the performers had a smug little smirk on his face the whole damn time. I had the urge to get out of my chair, walk up to the bastard and slap that shit eating grin under the guise of a smirk of his face!

Some things about my body and moving large piles of sand Patrick Holbrook
If I had to retitle this piece I would call it; Retarded in the best way
The artists used dual images in a lot of his work that we saw on Wednesday when he visited our class. This film was a split screen. On the bottom there was a single shot image of a large barge moving slowly down a canal carrying several large piles of sand. On the top screen was shots of Patrick doing things with his body (such as pushing his nose down to meet his upper lip, taking his shirt of and putting it back on 3 times, and my personal favorite pointing to his hair on his head, then on his beard and holding up two separate piles of hair on a piece of white printer paper. I loved this piece, although I don’t know why still. I don’t know why I have such a strong positive reaction to his work. I think part of it is because it’s funny. I see a lot of art that makes me chuckle in a smug way that’s like “haha that’s funny cuz I’m smart I get it.” But his work tends to be funny in a way that actually makes me laugh out loud like I’m watching The Family Guy or something. I also think his work is also very distinct to our culture. Even though I think its possible that he’s trying to bridge a gap between cultures in a lot of his work, I can’t help but think that this piece would have a whole other meaning than the one I experienced if people were viewing it in say, China. Now I feel like I’m kind of contradicting myself though because he deals with some pretty specific political events in our country which we saw in his work, and he works with cultural memory so much too, which is definitely culturally specific to us, maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to it then, because I feel so connected to it….. and because it makes me laugh. Like just now, I realized that he and I have a common view point on some things. When I set out to write about these performances this afternoon, I thought of it as I am performing, it never crossed my mind that I could be doing anything but performing right now. Which is a parallel thought to what he said about how we’re actually performing interactively with the internet and the larger world when we are online. Wow, I better get on with the next performance before I alienate everyone reading this.

Ritual #2 Zac Crockett
I don’t have a made up title for this one, cuz I like the original one, and cuz it makes me laugh giggle inside every time I read, say or hear the words “number” and “two” in that order… hehe, see, I told you I love the family guy.
This piece was about meaning. How we as cultures and as individuals construct meaning. The piece itself was very beautiful, and so was a meaning, i.e. meaning.
Ok, thanks for hanging with me until the end here folks.