Monday, June 25, 2007

SLippery SLope Dress Rehearsal

Here I am performing with both my hypercello and my purple HUD backpack alongside the HUD designer, Bingo Onomatopoeia. Quite the action shot, eh? Photo by Evo Szuyuan.

Hey performance art and muzak fans,

Yaaay! The attendence was superb for the dress rehearsal of my brand new composition "SLippery SLope" for the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. We will be playing the premiere as part of the Pages Exhibition in London on June 30th. Spinster Voom will be curating this event.

Anyways, the orchestra performers were very resilient and rarely slipped on the 3 SLippery SLopes that DeThomas Dibou made for my composition. I think we can perform this within the 30 minute time frame offered by the curator. I am also very pleased that the AOM is starting to be more "orchestral" in scale...I think I had a full string section (well, a string quartet of cellos anyway) and at least 2 flutes!

Here is the quick bit of PR about SLippery SLope that I wrote on the fly to meet Spinster's looming press deadlines...

"Wirxli Flimflam's SLippery SLope is a performative composition that enables each orchestra performer (avatar) to navigate through the SLopes designed for him/her (Wirxli is gender neutral) by DeThomas Dibou in Virtual Haidplatz.
Wirxli has divided the roles of each orchestral performer into 2 groups: Classicist and HUDer. The Classicist plays "conventional" classical instruments such as cello and flute. The HUDer wears a HUD (Heads Up Display) whose interface was designed by Bingo Onomatopoiea. The goal of each performer is to climb up 3 SLippery SLopes without falling. Aleatoric instructions are given to each orchestral performer in order for them to determine how to musically interpret these 3 SLippery SLopes."


I want to thank Evo Szuyuan for taking such great action shots of yesterday's rehearsal. If you want to see more of here photos from this event, click here.

Well, here are a few more from Evo's Picasa website.

Here is an aerial view of Virtual Haidplatz. This gives you a general sense of what the entire performance space looks like with all 3 SLopes visible. Photo by Evo Szuyuan.


This pic was taken near the beginning of what I think is our 1st dress rehearsal. We are on the 1st blue SLippery SLope which I think is the most difficult one to ascend without falling off. In skiing, the "Blue Square" is the intermediate level, but this felt more like we were skiing uphill on a "Black Diamond" ski run...yikes! Photo by Evo Szuyuan.


It looks like Bingo and Jannne Janus have successfully reached the crest of the blue SLope...yaaay! Photo by Evo Szuyuan.

Bluewave Ogee also made a concerted effort to finish ascending the blue SLope. Maybe she just liked the colour blue because it matched her name? Maybe she was fixated on the colour or something? LOL! ;-) One tip I have for the performers is to take a run straight up the blue SLope without looking back - be brave and the blue SLope will be bypassed. Photo by Evo Szuyuan.

Here is proof that I actually eventually made it to the concluding purple SLope...phew! Photo by Evo Szuyuan.

Here is Jannne Janus triumphantly playing his hypercello on the edge of the pink SLope...what a cliffhanger....er...SLopehanger! ;-) Photo by Evo Szuyuan.

This a lovely pic of my good friend Chi5 Shenzhou who decided to perform as a HUDer for my composition...yaaaay! Photo by Evo Szuyuan.

My composition was not the only one we workshopped for June 30th. In fact, the orchestra also previewed Miulew Takahe's brand new composition, Fragula. Here is a pic of the two of us performing it...the way this photo was taken, you would think it was a duet or something. ;-)



....anyways, I look forward to performing premieres of both my composition SLippery SLope and Miulew's piece Fragula on June 30th :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

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