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Event Reactions

Dumb Type Voyage

The event entitled Dumb Type: Voyage was one of many breathtaking events premiered at the opening weekend at the EMPAC center. One after another, these remarkable performances managed to blow me away while keeping in mind of the utilization of the deep and technologically advance resources at EMPAC – it was an experience I will most certainly never forget.

Dumb Type: Voyage was performed in the smaller, more personal, experimental theater – though not as universally “impressive” as the grand concert hall, still had its moment of glory. As the lights faded down over the full house, a repeating thunderous blow from the speakers began to emanate, surrounding the audience in a cloak of dark mystery; and we were off. As I acclimated myself to not only the impressive volume in the theater, but the level of social and cultural significance in the actions being performed, I watched in awe.

The piece itself was comprised of a series of short yet powerful environments; one of which involved a fair girl in a red dress, lying down on a circular patch of emulated grass, speaking her wishes and dreams of the world out to the audience, as the screen above her displayed graphically aggressive flashes of digitally rendered text in a “matrix” style format. The contrasting impressions of the two facets left the viewers frozen in their seats.

Another equally entertaining environment that was presented, involved a man wearing tighty whiteys, holding a silver serving tray which had a toy space aircraft floating over it by the use of a rod through the middle. As he meandered around the space of the stage, five stewardesses followed him around. This was all accented by an avant-garde interpretation of a jazz song in the background.

When recollecting my thoughts, probably the most visually stunning aspect in this performance, which never goes without notice in this type of event, is the lighting. More specifically though, the opening scene, which consisted simply of three large perfectly spherical balls, placed on the stage; the surfaces of which were of a cloth-like material, in what seemed like a relatively random arrangement. A girl, partially surrounded by these three large balls, performed an interpretive dance to the thunderous “booms” mentioned before. What struck me was the lighting on these balls specifically for three main reasons:
The first being that the room as a whole, had amazing control over extraneous, environmental light, specifically being that there wasn’t any. With such a high initial degree of lighting control, this provided a perfect plateau to work off of for this event, and many events to come in this theater.
The second reason is that the spot lights on these spheres were so meticulously positioned; it created a perfect highlight-shadow relationship which resembled those frequently seen shadowed balls in pencil sketches. On one side of the sphere, the outline was so drastically visible, and on the other side, the object just faded into pure black. Stunning.

The third reason, is that not only were these lighting conditions so perfectly generated, but angle of lighting dynamically shifted around the spheres through time. The direction of the “sun” was shifting, therefore revealing multiple versions of lighting over the same three objects. I acknowledge this as being a tedious and complex job to accomplish, and I applaud them for that, in addition to the performance as a whole with five stars, two thumbs up and as many brownie points as one can give.

In the Flesh

Billie Cowie’s In the Flesh is a brief, four minute 3D presentation of a girl on the floor of a small, dark room who “interacts” through the space up to the audience.

As brief as this presentation was, I was truly impressed by the solid use of technology in a non mainstream, low budgeted fashion. The techniques and construction used to create the piece were clearly visible, and in an Institute such as RPI, this was bound to enhance the experience.

The content of the video itself was somewhat abstract, most of my attention was directed toward the effectiveness of the 3D element, though from what I could retain, the video explores the boundaries of the use of the 3D space, with motions such as reaching up, spanning the girls arms over and around the frame. Some of the most impressive imagery was when she simply moved her body, and looked up.
One very interesting element of this venue was its non-traditional housing; Rather than a static audience, the viewers were standing, and therefore able to carry themselves. The viewers were able to explore the space, and experience the presentation from different elevations, or angles. The change in perspectives was, in itself, quite a sight.

Something that I thought could render the event slightly more immersive would have been the use of surround sound audio. Though the audio was not the focal point, it was certainly considered “half-assed” by many.

That said, I appreciated that the artist didn’t spend much time on the aesthetics of the “theater”, I felt it gave a more honest tale of “In the Flesh”. Sometimes I find myself distracted by the meaningless chatter of extraneous junk around a performance, that I never get the time to pay attention to what’s really going on. As far as I can say, I was impressed.

Spectropia

As described in the playbill, “Spectropia is a highly imaginable live-mix cinema event, a ‘scratchable’ movie performed by video DJs playing a movie instrument”, Spectropia was certainly imaginable and original, though the imagination stopped with the creators, and never quite leaped out to the audience. To be completely fair, I must admit that in the beginning I was both awed and captured by impressive presentation of the flashy equipment and the 3 massive projector screens on the focus of the stage. Even as the show opened I was excited with what was to come; unfortunately, what was to come was a consortium of disappointment and confusion.

There were two different elements to the performance: the three main screens were showing the presentation itself, and the two creators/operators of the show were off to the right standing in front of their digital cinema interface which might as well have been a flashy gizmo from Fisher Price. The presentation itself was an original film by the creators, involving time travel between the years 2099 and 1931, and was located in England and New York City. More could be told of the story, if more was understood. Unfortunately, the majority of my time in the theater was spent trying to orient myself to the dazed and dull acting between the performers on screen and on stage.

The video “DJ mixing” system was a clever idea on behalf of the creators; by the use of a motion sensing device attached to a laptop to be able to decode the individual hand gestures made by the operators, and recall their respective definitions to operate the film by either scrubbing forward, backward or pausing the film. It was, without question, the most impressive element of the performance. Although I was not blessed with time for remaining in the theater once it ended for the Q&A, I was told that the broad scope of the film was decoded by the creators and those who remained, were shed more light on the story.

I, for one, knew my shadow would have a hard time keeping up with me on my way out. Goodnight, Spectropia.