Isit possible to make background imagery the key subject in theater? How would artists from outside the theater use imagery to represent their art on stage?
When Tony Wu (吳俊輝) was asked last year to organize the 2009 Guling Street Little Theatre Arts Festival, these questions, and many more, weighed heavily on his mind. The result is three weekends of performances that examine the image-making process by presenting audiences with the techniques and equipment that usually remain hidden in cinema.
“Traditionally, all the filmmaking processes are concealed from us when we go to a movie theater. To me, there exists a sense of openness in contemporary art and theater. [They are] open to an instant happening, enable audiences to see images being made right on the spot and artists to rethink the elements that are eclipsed in conventional forms of filmmaking,” Wu said.
Known for her “Performative Cinema” series, which has been shown in galleries and museums but never before in a theater, Malaysian artist Au Sow Yee is an experimental filmmaker whose interests are light and the passage of time.
In Performative Cinema VI: Songlines, Au improvises and plays with a fallen leaf, a butterfly wing or her own fingers in front of a film projector, thereby creating images through her performance art.
Immediacy and improvisation are also highlighted in Live Cinema by experimental filmmakers Guy Sherwin from the UK and Lynn Loo of Singapore. Their work involves four projectors playing four original 16mm films simultaneously onto the stage to create a dazzling theatrical performance.
Taiwanese dancer and choreographer Su Wen-chi (蘇文琪) opens the festival tonight with Loop Me. The performance is divided into two parts with Su dancing a slow solo in the first half, which will be recorded and projected onto the backdrop in the second half of the show.
In the latter segment, Su retires from the stage and the digitally manipulated images are played in a continuous loop, which creates a new on-stage character. The idea behind the work: is a performance without a performer still a performance?
“The work starts with the concept of looping in contemporary video art. The question that follows is about how a body presents an idea ... Today, when living things, cities and even human progress can be duplicated, I reflect on my own survival as a dancer. To me, dancing in a loop signals a sense of irreversible destruction,” Su said.
The lineup for this weekend includes musician Sandra Li’s (李婉菁) experimental musical Dark Baroque (黑暗巴洛克). A former keyboard player with heavy metal band Chthonic (閃靈), Li teamed up with rapper Chang Jui-chuan (張睿銓), heavy metal vocalist Chi (小祇) and soprano Chen Wen-yu (陳文鈺) to put together a hybrid theatrical show of classical music, hip-hop and heavy metal sounds. The performers’ images will be transformed in real time by VJ Nina Sky into a visual orchestra.
Tickets for Dark Baroque are selling fast.
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