June 3rd, 2010
Team Boombox
photo by Omer Yukeseker
I’m doing some transmission and tech work for a wonderful show by Toronto dancer extraordinaire Susie Burpee— A Mass Becomes You.
It’s a solo piece, inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #122 (1983), featuring Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor and a host of boomboxes. Susie is an amazing performer with such intensity and a laughing-to-keep-from-crying Beckett-like sensibility that really drives this absurd and beautiful work.
My job involves some composing, a lot of boombox wrangling, and keeping all the little radios working as they should. Designing Mozart-meets-radioworld has caused some weird musical organisms to occupy my inner ear– like a choral reef, you might say.
For those of you in Southern Ontario, the show happens at the Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival at the River Run Centre in Guelph on Friday June 4 at 8PM, and at the Canada Dance Festival at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on June 9 at 4PM.