An elegy for the modern age
THE New Territories programme of performance and dance comes to an end next Saturday, after more than five weeks of events at the Arches and Tramway. American composer Joe Diebes's beautiful piece Strange Birds lent the festival the aura of an enchanting farewell kiss.
A self-defined "contemporary multimedia chamber opera", it is rooted in artistic forms as diverse as 19th century orchestral music, electronic compositions, gallery installations and computer generated visual art. Diebes electronic score and visual designer Jeff Sugg's images are joined by the live voices of four superb singers, two female (galienne Eriksen and Vielka Kelly), two male (Daniel Neer and John Rose).
The stylish, emotive high modernism of the piece is not unfamiliar to Tramway audiences. The venue has, in the course of its turbulent career, played host to many artists -- from Quebecois theatre master Robert Lepage (Elsinore, The Far Side of the Moon) to Belgian performance geniouses Victoria (Ubung) -- who have combined, to extraordinary effect, the ancient forms of theatre with modern technologies.
Strange Birds resembles a traditional chamber opera about as closely as a Bill Viola video installation resembles a family snap. In the center of the performance space, on a risen patform, Diebes and Sugg stand surrounded by banks of high-tech audio and video eqipment.
At the four north, south, east and west of them are four more small platforms, upon which a single singer sits, a large video screen suspended above their heads. Around the edges of the space, and surrounding the base of the computer and designer's platform, are chairs for the audience members, who can sit or walk within the space as they choose.
The conscious separation of the four performers, who remain almost entirely still throughout is, perhaps, a metaphor for the disconnectedness which has, paradoxically, accompanied the era of the internet and the mobile phone. The song they perform expresses the alienation and the resurgent, insulted humanity of the modern (over) developed world.
The singers' wordless language represents the comunication of the futuristically human creatures of the works title. This is the concept, at least, but the round vowels of the extraordinary song and the abstraction of Diebes's music transcend conceptualism. If I were the composer, I would have been tempted to take the Beckettian route, and call the piece, simply, Untitled for Theatre.
There are, in the score, shades of the great Polish composer Henryk Gorecki and the outstanding American minimalist Steve Reich. Indeed Reich's Different Trains is evoked toward the end of Sugg's subtle kaleidoscope, in which half-defined human forms are interwoven with elemental images in a visual cornucopia which is, by turns, seminal and futuristic.
The music directs the voices to moments of solitary contemplation, tentative duets and explosive moments of mutual recognition and urgent communication between all four singers. The sadness and the solitude are challenged by an essential, undeniable and rebellious assertion of collective experience.
reviewed by Mary Brennan | The Herald, Scotland | Music | March 10, 2005
Strange Birds | Tramway, Glasgow
STRANGE Birds is one of those hybrid works that finds a natural home in the New Territories programme. For, like other performances in this season, it plays according to its own ground rules -- yes, it's a contemporary chamber opera sung live, but then it's also a video installation with electronic soundscore . . . add those strands together, mix in the futuristic scenario and exquisite wordless vocalising, and you soon realise that the event eludes strict categorisation. Best, therefore, to simply follow American composer Joe Diebes's instructions and explore the world of Strange Birds on your own terms.
That can mean standing in one place, listening and looking. Or moving around. Diebes and Jeff Sugg (the visual designer) occupy a central island banked with various technologies. The four soloists sit well apart from them on the periphery: one to each side of the square, underneath a screen that ebbs and flows with moving images. But whether you stay rooted or promenade, you can't escape the sheer physical impact of the music that is by turns delicate and haunting, sonorous and majestic. Voices swoop and soar through the darkness, pouring out individual cascades of pure, sweet sounds or coalescing in gorgeous harmonies -- these are future-people who communicate across isolating distances with bird-like calls while projections of wraith-like selves morph and meet within the virtual realm of the screens. The air simply thrums with a ravishing, uplifting meld of live song and electronic orchestrations -- it's opera, but not as we know it . . . a memorable excursion into New Territories. Repeated tonight.
reviewed by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin | The Austin-American Statesman | Monday, April 16, 2007
Fuse Box Festival Ignites
Joe Diebes and Phil Soltanoff took the audience on a charming yet also mesmerizing and thought-provoking little journey Friday night at a massive sound stage at Austin Film Studios, the first night of the indie arts festival Fuse Box brought to you by the folks at Refraction Arts.
Diebes and Soltanoff dubbed their piece ‘I/O’ after the computer technology abbreviation for input/output. Concerned with the most basic ways people physically interact with technology, Diebes and Soltanoff staged ‘I/O’ last summer in New York and plan to stage another iteration of the piece next year in Europe.
Diebes, a New York sound artist, and Soltanoff, New York theater director, are onto something with ‘I/O.’ And I’ll follow.
Mother Nature got in on the collaboration Friday. As if on cue, gusts of wind blew and lightning cracked just as sliding doors rolled open to the audience assembled outside, revealing eight performers under sparse lightning each standing in front a speaker.
Dressed in casual street clothes and sporting wireless microphone headsets, the performers each began to utter delicate breathing noises. Those utterances were then instantly recorded by Diebes, a New York sound artist, who sat at a console laden with equipment in the middle of the sound stage. The recorded sound was then electronically sampled, mixed with other sounds and projected on top of the live sounds of the performers.
That fugue-like patterning of sound grew in complexity as performers, changing their breathy utterances to spoken or sung words, re-arranged themselves and their speakers throughout the massive space. The audience was invited inside, at first standing in a self-conscious group around Diebes and his console. But then as the 45-minute piece evolved, people splintered off and wandered freely, as if they felt invested in being a part of the theatrical action.
As the sound grew in aural intricacy into a lush wall of hauntingly lovely music, the actions of the performers gained complexity. Again neat fugue-like patterning came into play as the performers crisscrossed the sound stage, jogged around its edges, issued each other commands for various movements and toted their speakers now and again, the action building in speed and in density.
It ended where it began, in a contemplative hush. But what a sweet ride.
reviewed by Andy Campbell | ...might be good | Tuesday, April 17, 2007
I/O: Joe Diebes and Phil Soltanoff
As part of Refraction Art’s Fusebox Festival, Phil Soltanoff (an experimental theater practitioner) and Joe Diebes (a New York-based sound artist), along with a troupe of a dozen or so performers, presented I/O, an investigation into the matrices of the organic and the technologic. The work was performed in a large warehouse belonging to Austin Film Studios (née Mueller Airport Hangar). The performers, dressed in their street clothes, appeared shortly after the large studio doors were opened to an anticipating crowd outside. Slowly and confidently, the performers lined up in the liminal space between indoors and outdoors. Then, they began to breathe. Traveling quickly through the wireless microphone headsets to a tangle of chord and computer existing in the middle of the warehouse, the sounds of the performers’ breath were transformed by Diebes via laptop into a fugue of human exhalation, and then broadcasted over the many speakers dotting the massive space.
I/O is a collaborative work in the purest sense. All of the sounds emanating from the multiple speakers during the three performances April 13, 14 and 15, were created in-house and in the moment. Thus, the improvised aural tapestries Diebes developed were interwoven with the task-oriented movement of Soltanoff’s troupe. The performers—I dare not call them strictly dancers for there were some very operatic moments—were no doubt given, as with any great improvisation, a set of rules. Rules are boundaries that exist, much like the liminal space between indoors and outdoors, to restrict and are only effective because they can broken. But the performers rarely seemed to break. In fact, their commitment to the ensemble was so strong that even the audience felt part of it. Circling like satellites, we moved freely in the large hangar, letting intuition and will guide our movement choices. It’s rare that an interactive artwork actually manages to involve the audience in a meaningful and entrancing way. It’s an astonishing effort, to be sure. And because I/O succeeds, it should be given credit as one of the premiere performance art events to grace this city in years.
The influences of I/O are multiple and the potential readings are multivalent. At one point, the performers run together as a clump around the massive soundstage, which called to my mind Kathy Duncan’s Running Out of Breath, in which Duncan, decked in street clothes, jogged until she literally ran out of breath. Such task-oriented performance is the backbone of I/O. Rather than resting on this premise, I/O takes it one step further. The ubiquitous speakers (raised on tripods) become principal performers as well; performers often treated the speakers as their analogue doppelganger. Although these stereophonic sentinels don’t have the convenience of a body that can move and articulate, the I/O performers make you aware of what incredibly expressive creatures speakers can be. The speaker often seems to be talking, or singing to us when we listen to the radio. But who ever talks back? The I/O performers do. The relationship between performer and speaker more emulates the relationship between an actor and a mask. A mask, once inhabited by an actor, works upon the actor and not the other way around. Here the speakers seem to be the prime mover, with the humans, occasionally, seeming incidental.
Soltanoff, Diebes and their collaborators (both analog and organic) presented an entranced audience something meditative and moving. It left the question “Technology, do we need it?” in the dust and asked a much more vital set of questions: “Technology, where do we take it? Where does it take us?”
Andy Campbell studies contemporary art/history at The University of Texas at Austin.