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Moore is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello, set in the Pacific Islands, at the intersection of Race, Language, and American Empire. Directed by Justina Taft Mattos, UH Hilo Fall 2020.
TRAILER:
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MOORE Soundtrack:
Character sketches:
Moore & Sea Bass
Lt. Johanson (Iago) & Capt. Martinez (Cassio)
Desdemona @ the Blackened Catfish
Click Photo below for Reading Photo Album:
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Paris 1909
“So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!… Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!… Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!… Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!”
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Paris 29 May 1913 in Paris
Opening Night Stravinski’s Rite of Spring
(The Birth of the Modern)
THE LANGUAGE OF THE STAGE: It is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams. – Antonin Artaud
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“[I]t is the mise en scene that is the theater much more than the written and spoken play. I will be asked no doubt to define what is Latin in this way of seeing opposed to mine. What is Latin is this need to use words to express ideas that are obvious.
In any case, and I hasten to say it at once, a theater which subordinates the mise en scene and production, i.e., everything in itself that is specifically theatrical, to the text, is a theater of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e., Occidentals.”
In the Company of Antonin Artaud
Signals Through The Flames
is a documentary film on the work of Julian Beck and Judith Malina as the founders of The Living Theatre performance company. The title of the film is taken from the work of Antonin Artaud in his book on theatre theory called “The Theatre And Its Double”.
It was produced by Mystic Fire Video as a project of the now defunct Mystic Fire Video bookstore in New York City. It was directed and edited by Sheldon Rochlin.
Signals Through The Flames contains first person interviews with Beck and Malina, archival footage of performances and street actions from various news reporting sources of the theater’s political life in the late 1960’s. Particular
attention is given to Paris in 1968 in a performance called “Paradise Now” and the occupation of the Odeon Theatre. Excerpts from the Company’s filmed productions of original work “The Brig” and “The Connection” are also part of
the documentary.
Signals Through The Flames is the story of political action expressed through experimental theater and is for those archival purposes of theater history and lessons from the movement.
An entry for the film was made to The International Movie Database (IMDb).
citationhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235764/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1
Julian Beck died in 1985 of stomach cancer. Judith Melina continued to work as a director of The Living Theater in New York City until her death in 2015 at the age of 89.
Riccardo Vaia (Endimione)
This film is a free reinterpretation of Artaud’s writings, and of his vision of the peyote’s rite, during his trip to Mexico in 1936.
‘Ciguri’ is a word where a multiplicity of symbolic and anthropological rotations intersect, eventually dissolving in pure image.
According to William Burroughs’ ‘Ah Pook’, the meaning is always subject to a linguistic scrambling eventually decaying into hallucination: the place where signs become ‘meat’ and ‘vegetable history’. The space described in Artaud’s ‘Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara’ is a space where geographical coordinates become lines of sight and lines of the body: the ‘mountain of signs’ which dispossesses the standard ontological systems of identification of Western culture.
In this film the peyote’s rite, the ‘primal flower’ according to the Tarahumara’s ancient culture, describes a celebration wherein the ‘virality’ of the image and of the word conspires to formulate what for us is the concept of ‘desert’ of vision. A place where the world reveals its ‘nihil’.
Words and images. Seeing and speaking. Or ‘being seen’ and ‘being spoken’… An apotropaic knot of our postmodern era; and even more a central point of cinema.
What triggers mirages and deeply enthralls, is moreover the disappearance of the image – since it generates a repetition and a difference in giving itself and withdrawing itself, while it disseminates sings, hieroglyphs, doubles, icons and resonances around itself.
Burroughs (in almost every work) wrote about ‘interzones’ when he was commenting Mayan Codes, their images, their glyphs, confiding that they could be the most effective signs systems for tracing a ‘History’ where images, and their referents in the world, could contaminate each other in order to form a sort of real ‘cut-up’. This cut-up would then be able not only to segment language, but also the biology of bodies and of the world itself. Today ethnic cinema (beyond the obvious social values it represents) troubles itself on many levels looking for this boundary, with no result. This because it is still involved in a ‘theatre of cruelty’ dependent upon representation.
On the contrary, in ‘Ciguri’ it is Artaud’s idea of ‘post-cruelty’ that is expressed: a circle where the Eleusinian Mysteries are staged by a ‘sect of assassins’. At the same time Burroughs’ Habban-I- Sabbah gets rid of the sacred ‘enjeu’, revealing its intrinsic fiction.
Artaud and Burroughs conspire ultimately for silence, just like the sierra losing its ‘geography’ (the ‘hand-writing’ of the earth, the graphèin as Derrida would have it) in favour of a space still unexplored.
Where the visible ‘Ciguri’ ends, the one of the image and of the living, begins the ‘Ciguri of the Aztec Hades’: the ‘ritual of the dead’ to which belongs the invisible. The only testimony, like ashes under an extinguished fire, are possibly the glyphs, the lines, the tattoos on the foot (the last frame of the film) that throbs upon the chthonic earth. The pounding of bones drumming on the ground: a sound coming from somewhere else and that resonates upon vegetable signs, upon the terror of the primal flowers, of the primal colours appearing in the world and in the visible light.
‘Ciguri’ is a film for explorers.
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Worlding the Beats:
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The 15th of September, Independence Night, Mexico City: A salesman, a politician, a narco-traficante, his scorned wife, a DJ, a federal agent, a poor little rich girl, a methamphetamine cook, and a sixteen year-old prostitute try to escape a city-gone-mad. There is only one night, one opportunity, and one way out of the land where no good deed goes unpunished.
Click on title for print edition (Amazon) or on icon to read the ebook now:
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Elliot Anderson & Jim Bierman & Danny Scheie
For an entire year, the DANM Mechatronics Group partnered with the Performative Technologies Group to create a collaborative research cohort to develop interactive art and design projects as part of the “Monuments and Entropy” project.
The work began with Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey as a way of understanding movement, time, place, the monument and entropic conditions. Smithson operates as both camera and guide, where the reader/viewer is led through a landscape of impressions and reflections. The work is both textual and visual, which is the reason we are brought along on a tour. Given the structure and ways of seeing and understanding landscape, the text provides a rich foundation for dramaturgy and the creation of visual imagery. Our proposal was to have the graduate students create a performative “non-trip to a site from a Non-site,” creating space and giving physical shape to the concepts of Robert Smithson’s text, through re-staging / reconstructing a local entropic monument.
The students were encouraged to explore opportunities to address larger socio-political issues like climate change, destruction of landscapes and environments within this framework. They were also asked to reflect on their experience of the “monumental” in their daily lives. This conception of the monumental would include institutions and political conditions and conflicts.
The research group applied a systems based approach for fabricating functional experimental art devices that combined principles of sculpture, kinetics, electronics, motion control, sensors, actuators, motors, and other control devices with Arduino Boards using Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing as the primary programming languages. The fabrication methods included, woodwork, metalwork, moldmaking, and rapid prototyping to build and advance iterations of the mechatronic platform. The conceptual framework of the projects created by the Mechatronic’s group were developed in response to the art and science research topics chosen by the cohort.
The project group met weekly to focus on the design and prototyping of tangible user interfaces in order to create meaningful correlations with user gestures, controller interface, and the output of that controller as it related to the project theme. Interaction design concepts included perceived affordances, translation of physical action into digital information, and user observation. Applicants selected for the project group were required to demonstrate skills in 3D modeling and animation, art, music, gaming, programming, video, engineering, robotics, and design.
The outcome of the project group would be an interactive performative work, incorporating sound, animation and live action. The work could have been a traditional theatrical production or a collection of site-specific smaller works that would constitute a “theater-as-tour.” There were a number of opportunities for local sites to explore, both as content for the work and also as possible venues to perform/enact the work. Entropic sites such as the decommissioned cement plant in Davenport, the fabled “Santa’s Village” in Scotts Valley, or and the abandoned settlement on Año Nuevo Island all have rich histories and complex landscapes, but also are environmentally complex. Año Nuevo Island is a marine sanctuary and the cement plant requires environmental remediation. These sites provided an opportunity for student researchers to work with historians and scientists throughout the one-year project. After careful consideration, the Davenport Cement Plant was selected as the research cohort’s Entropic site of Inquiry.
“El Muro” – a Ceremony (Political Pop-up Performance with Projection Mapping)
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“El Muro” – Projection Mapping Content
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Prometheus Unplugged: Our hideous progeny (a ceremony) by Stephen Richter
Concept Pitch:
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Prometheus Unplugged Mood Board (Victor-as-Corporation / Factory as the Creature / Prometheus)
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From Mexico City to Las Vegas, Nevada, two men make a hypnotic journey into the dark heart of the sports gambling industry. They race against the clock to get the girl, the cash, and get the hell out of Dodge, as the streets of Sin City erupt with blood and mayhem.
For print edition click HERE or on image:
Read eBook NOW:
A short Film based on Stephen Richter’s novel, Unload!
Public Reading from the novel Unload!
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Click on image for photos:
Prototyping Video:
“Stuffed into a Bratwurst” :
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Photo Gallery: (click image below)
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Harry Porter and the Heretics of W.O.S. was a thirty day challenge By Professor Renee Fox to recruit an intrepid band of students from her LIT80Y Course and adapt J.K. Rowling’s characters and novels into a performance of some sort, recontextualizing the Harry Potterverse and using the material to speak to culture of The University of California Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley, and the conditions facing local students here and now, in their own pursuit of higher education and the mastery of “magic,” (whatever magic would signify or represent in the world of “Slugworts,” if you will…) Professor Fox’s highly anticipated and wickedly successful Textual Analysis megacourse: Literature 80Y – Harry Potter, was a ten week long journey through all 7 of Rowling’s Books, with over 380 students, eight Teaching Assistants (2 per House) on a collective mission to examine the similarities and differences between reading the series as a child and reading the texts critically, as adults and scholars and questioning what new significance emerges from the text, when one reads or transplants the world of Harry Potter to the U.S.A.
Click Poster for link to filmed performance video below:
Feb. 11th: Day One
Table read and auditions
“In the Bunker” – 10 days of writing, rehearsal, digital asset creation, and Tech: click image for album
Highlander Tech / Dress Rehearsal (there can only be one…) click image for album
Harry Porter and the Heretics of W.O.S. (Theatrical Intervention ) T-Day click image for album
Harry Soundtrack Playlist:
Mar. 11 Day 30:
Harry Postmortem and raw footage screening:
Full Video of Performance? Lecture? Event? Who knows….
SlideShow:
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Odyssey 2016 was a one year, intensive research and production project that brought together a creative team from around the globe: Historians, classical studies scholars, professional theater practitioners, digital artists and media designers worked in collaboration with teams of student research interns in a collective effort to reimagine Homer’s epic tale as a work of ambulatory theater that would open on a (reverse-seating) proscenium thrust mainstage, travel through an interactive exhibition of large scale installation art (with Odysseus among the audience group), encounter other members of the cast along the way and “experience,” first hand, Odysseus’ journey home to Penelope, Telemachus, and the suitors who have taken “Island Hospitality” to its brazen and orgiastic limit point, up and down the hallowed halls of the now bushy and unkempt ancestral palace grounds, for the climax of the play.
Six months into the project, during the summer break, I abandoned the script I was working on for the theatrical portion of the show and began to write a short story in metered verse instead. The result was “The Mission,” which would later become the inspiration for the 2nd half of the play and serve as a bridge between the two spheres of dramatic action: Odysseus’ departure from the ancient world of the Mainstage and his return to the postmodern world of the exhibition space and blackbox theater at the Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) where Odysseus, now dressed as a homeless veteran, is harassed by Real estate developer, Antinous Baros and the New Ithaca building project’s security unit during , “Book XVIII – the Beggar King of New Ithaca.”
Under the direction of Kimberly Jannarone and an extremely talented production team, the show successfully navigated a complex series of tech rehearsals in three different locations, with final dress rehearsal taking place on Election Night 2016. By the time the cast and crew had finished washing off the blood of the suitors from the final scene and left the theater that night, like Odysseus, we all returned home to a very different world than the one we had departed.
The Mission by Stephen Richter. For printed copy click the image below:
A man returns to San Francisco after a ten year absence to find his home replaced by an exclusive condominium development. When asked to leave by security, the situation escalates. The form of the book that of a Real Estate Brochure, from the development company that built New Ithaca on top of Marine Corps Veteran, Ulises Malheur’s childhood home. Click below to read the eBook version .
Channel 850B Ithaca consisted of a 3 x 3 70′ LED Monitor Grid Video Installation, playing on a loop throughout the performance inside the New Ithaca Complex.
“The Beggar King of Ithaca” was an interactive performance component bridging the two worlds of the play together. Click image below for image Gallery:
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Winner of Chuck Lorre’s Dharma Grace Award in playwriting and the University of California Santa Cruz Humanities Dean’s Award. “More than simply an adaptation of Euripedes’ Medea, this multi-media, transtemporal piece draws on a variety of literary and cultural works, from The Tempest, especially stagings that reverse the gender and race of the characters, to the Latin American telenovela and media imagery of the black body. The result is a striking experiment in linguistic and cultural translation.” – Susan Gillman
For Google Drive version of Production Video click on image below:
Production Photos (click image)
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