Bryce Dessner is a founding member of the band The National but also a trained composer from Berkeley School of music in Boston. He grew up in Cincinnati and remembered, as a child, the controversy that sprung up around the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect [...]
In January 2019 we went up to MassMOCA in North Adams, MA to tech a musical piece called Triptych. Triptych is a musical piece composed by Bryce Dessner with a libretto by Korde Arrington. The tale of this piece is long and winding. Since I’m really here to write about LEDs displays in [...]
Split Sides was a very exciting project with Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The concept was to have two independent sets of each element: two 20 minute sets of choreography, two sets of costumes, two decors (set designs), two 20 minutes musical compositions and two light designs. Before each [...]
Lynn Nottage won a Pulitzer Prize, her second, for her play Sweat. When writing it she spent years getting to know the city of Reading, PA, where Sweat is set. Reading is the perfect embodiment of the rust belt. The rust belt is an area of the the U.S. which had at one time been amongst the [...]
I made this piece with Meredith Monk in the late 90s. It was a smallish opera made distinctly for her ensemble. It was a kind of mourning for things gone; objects that still exist but that have lost their purpose. During the piece the objects were ceremoniously dipped into a vat of molten [...]
I’ve not played in Montreal often. I was born in Vermont and Montreal was only a couple of hours drive north. We’d go there often as teenagers. It was partly because that was the closest real city. You could see all the big touring bands there. I saw The Cars, The Moody Blues, The [...]
The majority of a dancers’ time is spent in a studio. You work to perfect your techniques, learn from your mentors and collaborate with choreographers. It is a physically arduous undertaking requiring the highest degree of dedication, discipline and passion. But for most dancers who seriously [...]
01 Intro ☐ Laying down and taking up marley is a routine part of life in the dance world. Although it is labor intensive and a bit tedious following a simple procedure will get the job done with excellent results. 02 Always sweep before lay ☐ Before you start always sweep very well the area [...]
Gravity defines every physical action on earth. The shape of our bodies and the form of all our creations are all a direct response to its inescapable power. We know that a body in motion tends to stay in motion until acted upon by a equal or opposite force. For a dancer a step is […]
I had been working for L.A. Dance Project for several years when I quit in late 2016. I passed the production management on to a good team but it turned out that their tolerance for the company’s nonsense, that I had endured for almost five years, was much lower than mine. Then they up [...]
