I made this presentation on May 21, 2008, at the end of a 2-week residency. What you see is a loosely structured movement improvisation built around a character's interaction with a series of objects. The sound you hear is being produced through the character's interaction with a complex sound environment.
To create this environment I worked with the composer Benedikt Schiefer. The goal was to create a highly reactive space wherein every sound or movement an actor makes has the potential to set off a unique series of events in sound, lighting and/or video.
Inside a space like this, a person might repeat the same movement or sound several times but the system would never respond in exactly same way twice. As a result, the actor can never know in advance the effect his actions will have. He must therefore strike an extremely delicate balance; on the one hand he must be highly present and aware of what's going on: listening, reacting, and adjusting to his environment as it changes; on the other hand he must be capable of disregarding his environment and not letting it distract or destabilize him.
Such a space can be thought of as a training environment designed to put the actor into a state of crisis and thus develop his ability to maintain his concentration and his detachment.
This residency period was dedicated to building and calibrating a working prototype. The next step is to develop the concept further, to work with this environment in such a way that it can begin to appear intelligent and represent a strange form of life.
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