| “There is only
one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up
being an intellectual.” I laughed out loud the first time I heard those
words from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film, Sympathy for the Devil. I
laughed at their pretense; then I whooped with joy at their honesty.
And after forty years of drugs, booze, and TV, I’ve yet to find an
altered reality as naggingly astute. Dig it. Whoa, pilgrim! Holster those light sabers and delete buttons, angry readers! This is not another dull, fuzzy trip down memory’s stoned lane. It’s just that Godard’s words of old offer fine preface to the story of two creative I.U. students and an upcoming performance of theirs that promises to be one of the most memorable shows of 2008. Mark Doerries, a Jacobs School of Music doctoral student in choral conducting, and Sean Smallman, a Theater Department graduate student in lighting design, formed an alliance last year to present multi-disciplinary performances that emphasize artistic collaboration and feature live music combined with live technology (particularly lighting technology). After a very successful production last spring, the boys are back with Dreaming in Darkness, a concert event to be staged against the outside wall of the I.U. Art Museum that will feature choral music, theatrical movement, and a light show generated by Rob Shakespeare’s Light Totem sculpture. Doerries has given multi-sensory performance a lot of thought over the past few years. “We’re the generation of television, Internet, cell phones, PDAs, iPods, all at the same time; so this is an attempt to say we have a culture that is very highly proficient in technology. Why can’t we incorporate that into the performance of compositions; stimulate multiple senses in addition to just the ears?” In 2006, while a graduate student at Temple University, he created the Luminescence Project, an extra-curricular vehicle for his thoughts on modern music performance practice. “A few years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts did a big study on the health of choral music, and they found that for people between 18 and 40 there’s almost no one involved outside of college music students; there’s this gap of young people who are not interested in singing choral music or the works of composers who have been dead for hundreds of years. So this is my attempt to appeal to my interests and hopefully the interests of my own generation, which are multi-sensory.” Doerries secured his Luminescence Project ensemble a concert spot in the 2006 Philly Fringe Festival, then transported his concept here when relocating to B’town last year. Doerries found his luminous counterpart in lighting artist/designer, Sean Smallman. “Rock-&-roll light shows are the flash-and-trash type concert element that our generation is used to and loves. There’s a lot of technique and thought put into those big concert shows; there’s just not much of a narrative being told. So in approaching Dreaming in Darkness, I look at the lighting as combining theatrical narrative and the ‘ooh…pretty…’ element of big rock concerts. Because we’re essentially painting on a huge canvas, the lighting we project will support the emotion of the music and also be something to look at. Dreaming in Darkness will combine the ideas we’re trying to develop for the overall dramatic feel of the event.” So what exactly will Dreaming in Darkness be like? According to Doerries, “There is a loose narrative to Dreaming in Darkness, but it’s not a strict one-to-one translation between what’s going on in the music and what’s going on in the lights. They complement each other; they contradict each other; and hopefully when you walk away you’ll take some kind of large picture with you. And there will be two actors doing movement without spoken text. Thechoir will provide the text, but I’ve chosen the music so we don’t have literal correlations. Hopefully you can watch this combined show and everyone will come up with their own interpretation, a slightly different idea of what’s going on.” And this is where Godard’s conflicted premise finds its conceptual echo in the creative vision of Doerries and Smallman. Doerries again: “We have interests that may not conform to the clichés or standards of typical theater or music study. We’re of a certain generation and culture and we’re following what interests us; what would make us feel inspired. We’re not setting out with the purpose of doing something that’s never been done before, but I do think our goal is to create some sort of synthesis of the arts. “I think that choral music has become a little stagnant; we get up on stages and we perform in stoic settings where people sit over here and we perform over there, and you all dress up one way and we dress up another way, and you clap only when you’re allowed to clap, and if you don’t then we’re going to glare at you and look at you like you don’t understand. And Dreaming in Darkness is all about getting rid of all those walls. You should feel you can clap or cheer or you can cry whenever you want to and we’re not going to ostracize you. You don’t need to know anything about classical music in order to attend and participate; it’s open to everyone. Some musicians are afraid of opening that door; it’s much easier to feel comfortable with the way things are than to suddenly realize that someone with no musical training may get as much emotionally from a performance as someone who has studied music all their life. “So I do think that if there was to be a revolution in choral music performance, it would look very different than it does today. It would add something new to our understanding of music. With Dreaming in Darkness, I don’t think we set off saying we’re going to change the world. Maybe it’s just that we’re trying to make ourselves feel something exciting, and hopefully in the process of our discovery those emotions are contagious and felt by the audience as well.” For Smallman, “My ultimate goal for a joint venture like this would be to attract new people who wouldn’t necessarily be willing to go to a choral concert. Even the people just walking by the Art Museum who might stop and say, ‘oh wow, that’s really cool’ – it opens their eyes to something they may not know existed. Often you’ve got to have that ‘wow’ factor to get people to experience something new that then they’ll want to further experience on their own. If we’re doing anything, it’s to say look at what you can experience that you didn’t even know existed. We’re going to create a collaborative artwork where the whole event is hopefully better than the individual pieces.” So what exactly will Dreaming in Darkness be like? Against the outside wall of the I.U. Art Museum (facing south), Doerries will conduct a choir of Jacobs School of Music all-star student singers who will perform six dynamo choral compositions, mostof which were composed in the last 15 years by mostly young composers. While the choir sings, two silent actors (I.U. Theater Department students) will perform movement that will portray or suggest different emotional dynamics between two people. The choir and actors will perform in a giant wash of changing colored lights designed and computer-programmed by Smallman, and generated by the much-loved Light Totem sculpture created last year by visual artist and I.U. Theater Department Professor, Rob Shakespeare. This multi-media performance will last a brief 30 minutes and will be presented on two nights: Friday, December 12 and Saturday, December 13, beginning at 7:30pm each evening. Following both performances, the Art Museum will host an indoor reception in its atrium, which will give all in attendance an opportunity to warm up with hot cider, hot cocoa, hot coffee, and light munchies. The Friday and Saturday night performances and receptions are free and open to the public, and the whole affair is sponsored in part by Duke Energy. Or put another way: imagine a HUGE GOB of remarkable artistic talent squeezed tightly into a zip-lock bag, and that bag then compressed even further until the only possible outcome is a most excellent and energetic explosion of creative spewage. Dreaming in Darkness promises to be that kind of hella-cool rush: provocative multi-sensory performance channeled with the full force of youthful vigor. Hot-cha-cha-cha! |
 "Rock-&-roll
light shows are the flash-and-trash type concert element that our
generation in used to and loves. There's a lot of technique and
thought put into thoes big concert shows; there's just not much of a
narrative being told. So in approaching Dreaming in Darkness, I
look at the lighting as combining theatrical narrative and
'ooh...pretty...' element of big rock concerts."
- Sean Smallman "imagine a HUGE
GOB of remarkable artistictalent squeezed tightly into a zip-lock bag,
and that bag then compressed even further until the only possible
outcome is a most excellent and energetic explosion of creative
spewage. Dreaming in Darkness promises to be that kind of hella-cool
rush: provocative multi-sensory performance channeled with the full
force of youthful vigor. Hot-cha-cha-cha!"
- Paul Sturm  |