Let’s build a giant room-sized theremin with 16 antennas!
We would like to invite the tag-team of artist/engineers David Beaulieu and Christian Pelletier to this year’s Pop Montreal International Music Festival (September 30 - October 4) and see them build a Theremin room in our special Art Pop and POP Symposium headquarters.
The duo was last seen breaking musical boundaries with their loud-speaker suits worn by Patrick Watson and his musicians at this year’s Festival de Jazz de Montréal.
The installation of massive proportions we want them to build will invite festival-goers to participate (alone, or in groups!) in the creation of on-site, mind-blowing, improvised music as they interact in a room with 16 antennas suspended above and around them. As they are activated, the antennas trigger psychedelic sounds that are bound to excite and solicit interest from all sorts of human beings
It’s gonna be spontaneous, it’s gonna be an immediate and visceral experience, it’s gonna be communally created art instantly diffused, IT’S GONNA BE SO COOL! We’re asking all lovers of theremins, lovers of art, lovers of interactive experiences, lovers of electricity, lovers of music and lovers of the world everywhere to help us make this project happen. Your money will be used to pay for David & Christian’s hard work and the equipment they will need to make this happen.
Check out our kickstarter page, where you’ll see all the amazing REWARDS we’re offering to people that back this project. Among those, you’ll find:
- a limited edition DVD of animations made by local animators
- a DIY theremin kit
- a hand silk-screened limited edition t-shirt with a theremin on it
- an mp3 of an exclusive track from Gentleman Reg or Dishwasher
- a FULL PAGE photo of you in the Pop Montreal segment program
- a VIP Festival Pass to the Pop Montreal International Music Festival
- a personal festival friend and a cozy bed to sleep in
- a musical about you and 3 of your friends, written and performed by us. we will tape it in Montreal in front of a live audience, and send it to you.
- a custom-made Loudspeaker Suit built by Beaulieu and Pelletier
Of Man, Mouse & Dance…
Ok, so perhaps I shouldn’t say this straight off in my first blog post, as initial impressions cling to the body like scared little ghosts forever threatening to haunt you, but I don’t like dance. Or perhaps more aptly put, I don’t tend to appreciate dance, which is an altogether different type of creature although perhaps no less offensive.
This admittance comes from wanting to be totally frank here about my approach to aesthetics and the ways in which I pick the bits off the bones of the work I encounter on a daily basis, whether they be my own or this one at the gallery or that one those birds peck at constantly. It also comes from a certain type of confoundedness I have about my face’s automatic scowls in regards to the medium.
Which is one of the reasons why this first post of mine here inside the depths of our dear frozen mammoth is about dance. To fell these branches of generalized mistrust I have towards said world might not be such a bad idea.
And the aiders and abettors in the fight to cut away the scraggly-toothe’d fears I have about this type of artistic physical movement come in the form of 4 fiendishly rebellious Montréal dancer/choreographers who have come together under the moniker The Choreographers.
About 1 year ago, Katie Ward, Thea Patterson, Peter Trosztmer and Audrée Juteau banded together to create this rather unusual troupeau that blurs notions of authorship and creative process by at once being a dance group and their own choreographers at the same time. Think à la baroque ballroom where everyone danced to the music but could play it, too.
I don’t know if it’s this concoction of utter investment (of both creating and performing within such a communal structure) that shapes their works into ones so absolutely arresting and immersive, or if it’s just because they’re all so darn gorgeous (ah, seriously…) but The Choreographers have managed to do for me what Devora Neumark did for my attitude towards performance art - totally kick my ass through my head and leave me thinking that perhaps, after all, it may just be me that has the problem, and not the whole dang medium.
Last something-night (Wednesday?) I had the pleasure of being one of those in the audience at the Salon Illusion Coda Club to witness their latest creation, Man and Mouse. The pictures here in this post are not of that night’s performance, but of the piece in an earlier incarnation which lacks the flavour of the immediate but still retains an accurate idea of what it all looks and feels like.
The work is loosely based on the themes and relationships found within John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, but is supported by the narrative of his work similarly to how a stoner might be by a magic eye poster - the characters of Lennie and George as Steinbeck renders them are used here as a point of departure for dancers Audrée Juteau and Peter Trosztmer and choreographers Katie Ward and Thea Patterson.
Filed under artists, dance, local, review | Comments (2)
