"Solo from Blinde Liebe," "Trio/Walking Lines," and "Conversation"—Program Notes

These pieces were the result of a residency in the summer of 2005 of the Palindrome Intermedia Performance Group at the Forum Neues Musiktheater, the experimental performance wing of the Stuttgart State Opera. The residency culminated in two performances that included these pieces. At the heart of a Palindrome performance is the EyeCon video analysis system created by Frieder Weiss in which a video camera is trained on the performance space and the video is streamed to a computer running the EyeCon software. The software detects various features of the dancers' movements such as their position onstage, their height, their width, and the amount of activity and passes those parameters on to another computer running sound software. This is where I come in. As the composer I program the sound software, Max/MSP, to produce sound in a variety of ways and to map the incoming parameters to features of the sound such as the pitch or set of pitches, the loudness, the density of a cloud of sounds, etc. This particular residency was themed "Talking Bodies" so much of the sound contains the human voice manipulated in various ways.

"Solo from Blinde Liebe" originated as a part of the Dance-Opera Blinde Liebe created by Palindrome in early Spring 2005 (this solo was my primary contribution to the opera). The piece was reworked during the Stuttgart residency into its present form and choreographed by Julia Eisele. There are four distinct scenes in this piece. In the first scene, the EyeCon software is analyzing her upper and lower body separately so that upper body movement controls one type of sound and lower body movement controls another. In the second scene, Julia's activity controls a cloud of verbal fragments. As her movement increases, the density of the fragments increases as well as the intensity of the fragments. The third scene is controlled by her position on stage and, in certain places, her width. The fourth scene consists of two phrases in German that essentially mean "come to me" and "get away from me." Movement in one direction allows her to "scrub" through one phrase while movement in the other "scrubs" the other phrase.

"Trio" is broken up into sections by a series of "huddles" followed by choreographed movement in which the sound response is controlled by the overall amount of activity and the dancers' position on stage. The texts spoken by the dancers are intentionally unrelated and are used as a sonic and theatrical element rather than as a "content" element. An additional feature is the randomized occurrence of the word "freeze" at which point the dancers stop for a period of time and then resume. "Trio" transitions into "Walking Lines" in which the two female dancers carry on a strange conversation by moving laterally across the stage.

"Conversation" is a duo based on the idea of an asymmetrical conversation in which one person speaks a great deal and the other responds with short replies. The choreography reflects this asymmetry as well. The actual content of the conversation is rendered unrecognizable, but the general emotional state of the "speaker" is still perceivable.