"A hysterical film noir" is how artist Catherine Sullivan descibes her video installation piece The Chittendens.
Made in collaboration with Los Angeles based composer Sean Griffin (2005 Global Connections awardee), the piece uses a wide range of historical and cultural references - including film noir, avant-garde cinema, contemporary art and the history of theatre - to explore the tensions between performers, their roles and their audience.
Seeing his musical and interdisciplinary works as being positioned at the intersection of sound, performance, and theater, Mr. Griffin has developed interdisciplinary methodologies for performance artists, musicians, and actors, creating large and small scale musical/theatrical and video performances exploring rhythmic movement and sound.
His work has been presented by Los Angeles' Hammer Museum and REDCAT, La Jolla Symphony, the Whitney Biennial, Berlin's Volksbühne, Secession Vienna, and Opera National de Lyon.
The Chittendens is currently showing at London's Tate Modern through Spring 2006. MTC recently spoke with Mr. Griffin via email about it.
MTC: How did you approach the collaboration? SG: Theater, film, and music are by nature collaborative arts. Many of my recent works explore ambiguities of interdisciplinary incongruity. For instance, writing a musical piece for movements alone or scripting musicians as one would an actor.
Last year Catherine and I worked on a theater piece for the Volksbühne in Berlin. For the past 4 years we've worked on training actors to move and emote to complex rhythm patters. I composed a basic structure called the D-Pattern. The actors were trained to move and articulate in 14 shifting modes of "self-possession" in a basic, multi-tempo 93-beat rhythmic cycle projected and interpreted by live musicians. This offered a vehicle to tie actors and musicians to the same structural pattern with different materials that could inform each other.
Listen: "Primitive Robot"
excerpt from The Chittendens
Suite (mp3)
For instance, an actor could move to a particular area on the stage for 10 beats while embodying an attitude like "Patriotic Feeling" or "Bitter Nun" and the musicians could play in a style suggestive of 1920's Nationalism or Olivier Messiaen creating a complexity of references tied together by rhythm.
We used the same methodology for The Chittendens. All of the actors had to learn the pattern and perform complex scores. Each actor had 14 base attitudes that were subjected to constant variation. The effect is rather hysterical and cacophonous but the repetitions of the pattern provide a perceivable kind of temporal cohesion. The pattern is used to rationally organize something that actors do which is essentially subjective and fleeting. They do not embody the narrative, it passes through them in compositional relationships.
MTC:How would you describe The Chittendens music? SG:For "The Chittenden Suite," the core concept was a shaky amalgam intended to encourage a kind of forced hybridization of deliberately vast and vague concepts: Nautical-Modernica. "Nautical" meaning tonal, heavily coded in history, colonialism, over-wrought emotionality, and 19th century desire. "Modernica" meaning a kind of pre-fabricated, atonal, angular, rational but abstract 1960's style. The musicians would ideally hold both world in their minds and slip between them in a shape-shifter fashion, creating something all together different.
The suite, scored for violin, viola, cello, harp, percussion, piano, and primitive electronic keyboard, consists of movements in these opposing styles that are then forced together creating a strange seafaring, thrash punk, romantic, impressionist Baroque dance suite with musical references ranging from Piercy Grainger and Leopold Godowsky to LaMonte Young and Milton Babbitt. The pianist Andrew Infanti called it a "delinquent, decadent, and sentimental sonic incarnation of Hollywood's sad cortege: Dagmar Godowsky, Béla Lugosi, Rula Lenska, et al." and a musical "Betty Ford Clinic." I like to think of it as a collection of orchestrated incongruent sentimentalities.
Listen: