The Opened House
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Live performance of works in English and Mandarin, 9th Annual International Taipei City Arts Festival, Forum Theater, Taipei Taiwan. Open House was initiated by a series of commissions by Taiwanese percussionist Aiyun Hwang. When we began working, we were interested in creating a project situated between percussion and theater, pushing the limits of both, to explore multiple versions of similar experiences. When I was asked to come to Taipei to present 4 pieces from the series, I was excited by the possibility of recombining them into a single theatrical work. Our original intention was to examine the domestic space with its political implications by employing games, musical theatricality, and personal narrative. Gender roles, division of labor, and behavior modification or training would be examined through the lens of musical theatricality. What emerged in Open House however was a different story told with moving bodies. There are no singular characters that tell this story; rather, there are physical narratives haunted by a multitude of emotional states activated by rhythm. We only see characters in brief moments of embodied gestures often at odds with the texts they present. The texts’ relationship to the narrative is oblique and informs us only of the dynamic flow without revealing its direction or origin. These texts are culled from over 40 literary sources related to a series of poetic concerns about behavior and trust by many authors. I would like to thank the amazing Music Forum members and staff for their on-going commitment to exploring new forms of music and performance at the highest level of skill. I would like to thank Professor Bor-Nien Hsu for giving international contemporary music some of its most competent and exciting performers. I would also like to thank Aiyun Hwang for many years of friendship, collaboration, and commitment. |
Open House
- Pattycake, for 2 people
- “Adieu, notre petite table!”
for kitchen table, boy, girl, and 2 knives - Call it Sleep, for 3 people
Open House is a series of intermedia works initiated by Sean Griffin and Aiyun Huang. The 5 parts of Open House suggest different rooms of a house. Our intention is to examine the domestic space and many of its political implications by employing brutal games and musical theatricality.
Pattycake
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The first piece, Pattycake is to be performed in a child’s room. It examines the violence of children’s clapping games and the process of rote learning implied by child development brochures. The complex physicality of the gestures patterns paired with children’s poems, stream-of-consciousness text, distils the nature of repetition and rote.
Adieu, notre petite table!
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The second piece, Adieu, notre petite table! a setting for kitchen table, boy, girl, and 2 knives to be performed in the kitchen, examines the enforced sex roles implied by the space and dramatizes the struggle for unison and transcendence. Out of phase rhythmic patterns in the dangerous game of stabbing a knife between one’s fingers are paired with texts by authors considered the to be the greatest (Nabokov, Shakespeare, Plath, etc.) with text by Amanda McKittrick Ros, considered by many to be one of the worst authors in the English language. Texts from self-help manuals from the 1980’s exploring recovery and transcendence are pitted against layers of random and sometimes conflicting gesture patterns.
Call it Sleep
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This performance in 8 short sections pushes the musician to theatrical extremes. A violent scene unfolds before going to sleep at night. It returns in dream-form and is quickly forgotten at the breakfast table.
To be performed at the Künstlerhaus Boswil in Swizterland. November 14, 2003