Williamson Park Photo Blog

Some photos from The Dukes’ promenade production of Peter Pan in Williamson Park, Lancaster. The show is set over 5 locations throughout the park, and is operated from a modified milkfloat! Peter Pan ends its run tonight, and has been a huge pleasure to work on – thanks to everyone involved!

Some Thoughts on Mixed Arts Performance

Just before Christmas we completed a 6 week jaunt around East coast US and Europe with Pictures Reframed – Leif Ove Andsnes and Robin Rhode. A wonderful collision between classical concert, theatre aesthetic and contemporary video art installation; the show captivated, delighted and challenged audiences far and wide.

More information can be found here.

From a technical standpoint, the idea of merging these artforms (classical performance and video art installation) presents a number of challenges which highlight how formulaic the traditional presentation methods of each have become. Indeed, from the very kernel of the mixed arts concept, there emanates an incongruity which manifests itself at almost every level of planning and execution. For example, for a show such as this to run successfully, two key things are required:

1. Concert hall acoustics – to really immerse the audience in the musical side of the show, to bathe them in sound.
2. Theatre style rigging and lighting facilities – for all the rest of it: the installation of any set, to build the atmosphere with lighting cues and effects: the general razzle-dazzle

Now these two things, as it turns out, aren’t mutually exclusive – many halls and venues can be adapted to house and present a wide variety of shows wonderfully. But it is quite rare that a venue has facilities which excel in both areas.

And why should they? We are in a transitional period where technology is only just allowing this kind of project to exist – to bring it hurtling from the artists’ imagination and right into practical reality. And many halls and theatres were built a long time ago to do their job, to be a theatre or a concert hall, and do it extremely well. The thing is – like jumpers on a school playing field – the goalpoasts are moving.

And then, there’s the performance.

For video and live music performance to coherently and meaningfully share a stage, they each need to be a living, breathing entity. One cannot be slaved to another. If a musician is playing to a metronome, or concentrating on hitting certain notes at certain cues in the video, is that really a fully nurtured performance?

Part of the appeal of live music in general, for me at least, is that one can share a journey with the artist, and an audience can interact with the performer, even through silence. They can affect the mood and tone and tempo and texture of the concert. They can share the peaks and the troughs, the fortes and the pianissimos of the piece with an almost tangible sense of occasion and communication – which I can only imagine has been a treasured feeling warming the hearts of audiences since Homer was touting his Odyssey, and before.

So if we were to get to the present day and decide that a musician must play at a fixed tempo to concede to the whims of a stubborn video installation, trundling along at its own pace, we would be throwing all that away – an unthinkable concession. No, today we have the ability to pitch the video to coincide with the performance.

With a video operator who knows the cue points within the video, and knows the music and is able to marry the two in performance, the musician/s can play with complete freedom. Therefore gaining all the benefits of mixed arts concerts, with none of the drawbacks.

And what are the benefits? How about a completely new re-imagining of a work? Adding a new dimension to what has become a predictable format. In today’s society, where we absorb so much information through visual media, taking audiences on a completely different journey to hearing the music alone – and using a sense that is often neglected in classical performance.

Such an addition is arguably akin to the transition from mono to stereo, from Standard Definition to High Definition. Experiencing something familiar in a completely new way. Sure enough, there have been failures. Quadrophonic sound came and went, Betamax lost out to VHS, but these are merely stepping stones, the victims of progress, of technical natural selection.

And just like the poor MiniDisc players gathering dust, long forgotten in the back of so many drawers the world over, there have been and will be mis-matches and a learning curve in mixed arts performance. But I believe that the continuing technical and artistic development will yield great things in the future.

We’ve always had the imagination, we have the technology – now we should brace for exciting times.