For most of this past Fall, I have been focusing my energies on a new multimedia piece that Rob and I have been creating named Down The Rabbit-hole for two toy pianos, live electronics, video and amplified objects. Like chamber music, I wanted to create something where the video and audio do not cancel one another out, but come together as a whole. The main question I find myself asking is what components of the multimedia piece are absolutely essential? What do we want the audience member to be looking at and at what point? Sometimes it seems that the performer and video can be competing visuals, resulting in a more confused overall statement. I think a lot of our work is aspiring to create a narrative that unfolds through music and images… at certain times the video is what carries the narrative and at others, there are no video but only music.
Now that it is becoming more and more easy to produce multimedia production with computers (and less people), I have found myself as not only the composer/performer, but also the narrator/storyteller. We have become so much more conditioned to take visual and aural stimulus simultaneously that the idea of “multimedia” is perhaps more of a common-life experience. With this in mind, I hope that the immersive environment that is created in Down The Rabbit-hole is one that is completely unique and different than our everyday stimulus.
We did a showing of this piece as a work-in-progress last November at the Flea Theater. Premiere date is yet to be determined.