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Below are links to two photo sets from the March 1, 2020 Monteverdi Vespers performance with the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble, Baltimore Baroque Band, and Peabody Renaissance Ensemble, conducted by Blake Clark.
The videos for the performance are in our previous post.
Concert images, click here to see the entire set on flickr
Still images from our videos, click here to see the entire set on flickr
Our studio created the visual art for for the March 1, 2020 performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers at Shriver Hall in Baltimore. The performers included the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble, Baltimore Baroque Band, and Peabody Renaissance Ensemble, all conducted by Blake Clark.
Our video project included entirely original footage shot in Italy, Spain, and the US. Some of the imagery is based on, and includes excerpts from works by Fra Angelico, Andrei Rublev, Jan Van Eyck, Aert van der Neer, Mosaics from the Basilica di San Marco, Venice, and The Osservanza Master.
Below are links to the movements with this recording of the Vespers by John Eliot Gardner. We developed the project using this recording.
In part II of this documentation we will post imagery/clips from the live performance in Baltimore.
The performers on the recording are:
Ensemble: English Baroque Soloists
Choirs: Monteverdi Choir / London Oratory Junior Choir
Conductor: John Eliot Gardiner
Soloists: Michael Chance (Countertenor), Bryn Terfel (Bass), Alastair Miles (Bass), Ann Monoyios (Soprano), Sandro Naglia (Tenor), Nigel Robson (Tenor), Mark Tucker (Tenor)
Year of recording: 1989 (Basilica di San Marco, Venice)
A great inspiration to us, in addition to the music, was the painting of Fra Angelico. As we did some research into Fra Angelico’s work we found some incisive theoretical writing by Georges Didi-Huberman. Didi-Huberman observed what he terms dissemblance and figuration in Fra Angelico’s painting. Didi-Huberman’s writing can be found in Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. These ideas resonated strongly with our concept for the project.
An example of dissemblance is below, an excerpt from Fra Angelico’s Noli me tangere, where the marks/colors for the stigmata are identical to the marks/stigmata of the flowers near Christ’s feet. The stigmata are displaced and the same marks become flowers in the pictorial space. These marks reference things we know (flowers and wounds) and know as different, yet here they are visually identical, and neither literally portrays what we know them to be.
What is evoked, experientially, is a meditation on materiality, essence, and meaning. The quantity of marks — five flowers, echo the five wounds of Christ. Figurability has to do with experiences evoked from visual media that are unique to visual media, an a-rational realm of experience and thought exemplified in Fra Angelico’s work.
To us the spirituality of Monteverdi’s Vespers, and part of its mystery, is evoked by activities of transfiguration (we understand this is an Orthodox/Alchemical concept — things Monteverdi would have been familiar with). In Vespers the sacred and secular are interlaced, as are the traditional and new — a radical schema in its day. The work begins with a quotation from Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo, yet, unlike the serial working out of the narrative found in his great opera, Vespers seems to present a parallel/simultaneous meditation on the essence of spirit and the sublime, where objects are formations of spirit — God is not “in” things, things are “of” God. The practice of the artist/alchemist/priest (Monteverdi, later in life, was definitely two, and may have been all three) is to evoke this revelation, not through argument, but via experience. In Noli me tangere the dissemblance evokes precisely this.
Lastly, our treatment is inspired visually by the tradition of Vespers as a candlelight/twilight service.
Please play the videos at fullscreen and make sure they are playing in HD.
Movements II-IV played without pauses, including visual crossfades between movements.
II. Dixit Dominus – psalm 109 {Motetto ad una voce}
III. Nigra Sum (Canticle) {Octo vocibus}
IV. Laudate Pueri – psalm 112 {A due voci}
V. Pulchra Es (Canticle) {Motetto à 6}
VI. Laetatus Sum – psalm 121 {A due voci}
VII. Duo Seraphim {A dieci voci}
VIII. Nisi Dominus – psalm 126 {Prima ad una voce sola poi nella fine à 6}
IX. Audi Coelum {Prima ad una voce sola poi nella fine à 6}
X. Lauda Jerusalem – psalm 147 {Motetto à 7 voci}
XI. Sonata à 8 {Sopra Sancta Maria ora pro nobis}
XII. Ave Maris Stella {Hymnus à 8}
XIII. Magnificat {Septem vocibus et sex instrumentis}
*European Premiere in September 2019 at the Kontakte Festival in Berlin*
Filmmaker Susanne Elgeti has completed a documentary on the Shanghai New Art Festival that features our work “Woven” from 2017 (a collaboration with composer Weilu Ge).
Susanne conducted interviews with us in Shanghai for the film and kindly provided the audio files. We talk about the ideas behind the project, the instruments, staging, our collaboration, Bu Xi (continually, without a break, ceaselessly) as it relates to our project, East/West cultural forms/relationships, and our experiences in China.
Caesura (pictured in the article) was in Pushing Buttons, curated by Benjamin Wright. The exhibit was ranked #5 in Hyperallergic’s Best exhibits of 2018, Brooklyn.
Catalyst Euterpe was conceived as a series of events and objects based on the Seikilos Epitaph. In our research to prepare the debut of the work we learned about the Antikythera Mechanism and incorporated it.
At the core of this project are objects that embody the seemingly contradictory qualities of the eternal and ephemeral. One, an ancient funeral Stele inscribed with a poem and music about the eternal and ephemeral (with a complex history), and the other, the earliest example of an orrery – and considered by some as the world’s oldest computer. Both objects, believed to have originated from approximately the same time and place, exhibit a complex orbital path through time and culture. Within Catalyst Euterpe their internal and external qualities orbit each other at “angles” created by media, form (time) and perception.
This kinetic interrelationship has a heterodoxical effect on the qualities of both original objects. This effect is a poetry embodied in the objects and forms that comprise the work – the sculpture, code, video, music, and performance. The eternal and ephemeral are real, and persistent, but their reality is kinetic and transitory and influenced by known and mysterious forces. Culture is formed from similar dynamics across a wide range of qualities. The perception and experience of this bounded fluidity, this ebb and flow, embodied in various states and degrees and perceptions is central to the aesthetics of Catalyst Euterpe.
flickr set
music (featuring Carlotta Buiatti)
video
interview about the project on Cosmos Radio, NYC.
essay about the project
For this first installation we had two elements: a collaborative, networked performance with artist/vocalist Carlotta Buiatti and artist Fabiola Faidiga, entitled Catalyst Euterpe/Through the Waves, that took place on November 18, 2018 in the Hydrodynamic Station of the Trieste Old Port, and a sculptural installation composed of 3d resin prints, video, and sound, that was exhibited at the Fesival di Art e Robotica curated by Maria Campitelli at the Hydrodynamic Station of the Trieste Old Port during November 2018.
A future performance of Catalyst Euterpe/Through the Waves is scheduled for March, 2019 in Malchina, Italy as part of L’ENERGIA DEI LUOGHI, curated by Fabiola Faidiga and Casa C A V A.
The sculptural installation included two 3d prints in resin, based on the Seikilos Epitaph and Antikythera mechanism, video, and music.
Below is information about each of the elements of the installation.
About the original objects:
The Seikilos Stele and its inscriptions.
The Antikythera Mechanism.
About the objects within the installation.
Our installation for the Cooper-Hewitt’s The Senses: Design Beyond Vision exhibit curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps.
The individual glass pieces were made at a residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, a residency at Pilchuck Glass School and at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn.
In addition to kinetic and sonic qualities produced by electromagnetism, this new installation includes a haptic section where visitors can touch the glass and feel resonant frequencies pulsing through specific objects.
Inspired by the translucence of glass, our work embodies invisible forces indexed in the shapes, behaviors and sensual qualities of each object. Electromagnetism and code influence the movements of round neodymium magnets inside some of the pieces. The resulting sounds reveal unique acoustic properties.
from the exhibition label:
“Inside two display cases are glass volumes in the shape of cones, domes, and droopy tubes. Tiny metal spheres roll around inside the vessels, tapping lightly against the glass. These little spheres are powerful magnets. Installed underneath the tabletop are electromagnets. The tiny spheres change direction when the electromagnets switch their polarity from north/south to south/north. Created by Lili Maya and James Rouvelle, the piece sounds delicate and irregular, like falling rain.
Some glass shapes are exposed on the tabletop. Artists Lili Maya and James Rouvelle created this special touch component of their piece especially for this exhibition.”
Our work is also featured in the exhibition catalog.
the live performance.
video from inside the VR environment during the performance.
River and State was commissioned by the ICOA Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Feng, Conductor, as part of their New World/New Music series. The piece is in honor of the 125th anniversary of Antonin Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, From the New World, and was premiered at the Bohemian National Hall in NYC. The accompanying composition is Dvorshock by Bruce Adolphe – also commissioned by the ICOA. The premiere of River and State featured a live performer, Laura King-Pazuchowski, on stage with the orchestra, interacting with the VR environment we developed.
Our concept for this virtual cinema performance is about the promise of a new world in both the late 19th and early 21st centuries, with its unlimited potentials, personal freedoms and inevitable progress, and how technology (the subway, opened in NYC in 1904, and the recent VR fascination, as examples) has always played a role in complicating these fantasies.
Our performer, Laura King-Pazuchowski traversed the membrane of our shared environment of lived experience and the fantasy of virtual, illimitable, dream-space.
The VR environment features renderings of Lower Manhattan, Inwood Hill Park, Ellis Island, and an amalgam of different Subway stations. The piece is also inspired by observing flash floods on certain Manhattan streets built above drained streams. whose resulting chaos suggest the transposed, consistent presence of foundational forces occluded by the trappings of contemporary material culture.
The Tulips are a reference to the Tulip tree of Inwood Hill Park where the initial meeting, and subsequent purchase of Manhattan from the Native population occurred. The tree died in the 1933. The sculpture of the Tulips encountered during the capsule scene is a rendering of a currently infamous Jeff Koons sculpture that has a connection to the Statue of Liberty.
The metronome seen at the beginning on the shore returns in the final scene as a monument sized rendering of Man Ray’s “Indestructible Object”. The character in front of the metronome in the final scene is a rendering of the actor.
The translucence of glass – the ability to see through a solid form, has always interested us. In our previous work with glass we explored sound as another less visible aspect of the medium – but a quality with enormous physical resonance and emotional power. The invisibility of sound waves, their coupling with the physical realities of the objects that create them, and the translucence of glass are, for us, situated at the border of understanding and imagination.
Curated by Benjamin Wright, our new work for Pushing Buttons @ UrbanGlass can be understood as a tableau — a portrait, but a portrait absent of a specific, human subject. Yet the evidence of a presence, the things that would be around a person, or a group of persons, are all there. An absence is perceived in an act of both observation and imagination. This is a kind of transparency of a foundational structure that to us is analogous to glass.
The relationship of Artifice and the natural world is at the center of Caesura. Yet the natural world, represented by replicas, appears authentically only in video on tiny screens. The electronics, glass and other manmade components are presented in various contradictory situations as if the persons who inhabit this world have lost a clear sense of a conflict between organic and inorganic, between reason, and fantasy.
Caesura is not a synthesis, it is an amalgam. The irregular rhythm of the metronome, placed within the tableau at the scale of a monument and covered in a large symmetrical glass bell with a funky handle, suggests that one’s reason is prone to produce mysteries and data in equal measure. Perhaps pitting these aspects against each other is obscuring a perception of the invisible, formative structures of which we are a part, and within which conflict is an illusion.
Full Flickr set/video here.
This video is from the first performance at the Mercedes-Benz arena and was recorded and edited by Shanghai Television
This video is from the second performance at the Shanghai Theater Academy and was recorded and mastered by Grammy nominated recording engineer Matthias Erb.
Conceptualized by maya+rouvelle, with a composition by Weilu Ge, Woven was created for the Shanghai New Art Festival 2017, whose theme was “East/West, Scenery in a Mirror”.
The piece was performed twice in Shanghai at the Mercedes Benz arena and twice at the Shanghai Theater Academy in October, 2017.
Scored for Glass instruments, Bass, Percussion, and Pipa. The staged version included an actress and live video.
Description:
Throughout the performance the actress is accumulating wearable artifacts that embody the binaries of past/present, male/female, east/west. These artifacts are arranged in specific groupings at different locations on stage. Each group of artifacts embodies a different mix of binaries and the performer is tasked with integrating the materials and their concepts into her evolving character throughout the performance.
The audience is understood by the performer as a mirror upon which she tries to organize and understand her multilayered persona.
At the conclusion of the piece the actress joins the audience, takes a seat, and photographs the scene that she has recently departed.
Program note from the festival:
We change as we adapt to our environments, and through that process we become amalgamations of each other. If we allow ourselves to see and be seen as these unusual reflections across space, time, and cultures we allow ourselves to learn through empathy, and cultivate wisdom. There is an essential human force that connects past and present, male and female, East and West, the known and the unfamiliar. Its goal is to weave us together into a stability of change.
Our project is about this energy. Spanning binaries, it is a force that builds social cohesion as it fosters individuality.
But we must do our part, to both weave and to allow ourselves to be woven, to permit the process to live within and around us. Without it things unravel, and we become lost in a pile of tangled threads.
The ensemble:
Actress, Ni Yingying (Mercedes-Benz Arena)
Actress, Wenling Zhao (Shanghai Theater Academy)
Pipa, Yiming Feng
Glass Instruments, James Rouvelle
Electric Bass, Jiawei Zhang
Percussion, Tianyi Zhang
Live video/PTZ Camera, Lili Maya
Electronics, composer, Weilu Ge
Recording Engineer, Matthias Erb
Concept, Maya+Rouvelle
Composition, Weilu Ge
“…But heaven is where it always was…”
Footage from Lascaux, the launches of MUOS V, and Saturn V, an abandoned stone dwelling in Matera, Italy, the The Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo, Spain, and St. Eustache Rupestrian Devotional Church in Parco Della Murgia, near Matera.
flickr set