Results tagged “Maureen Fleming” from PianoMorphosis

I perform a piece with Butoh artist Maureen Fleming in which I play Philip Glass's Etude No. 5. The performance includes a video of Maureen moving, projected larger-than-life-size on a scrim. Behind the scrim, Maureen performs live. In front of the scrim, onstage, I sit at a piano and play the etude.

Maureen made the video first. She started improvising movements and shooting video, with careful, subtle lighting. The movements are slow and slow changing. Her body makes the shape of a triangle: her back arched, her thighs down flat, one forward, one back, her knees and feet bent up and grasped and ungrasped by her hand behind her back.

The film was made in segments and edited. The angle of the camera shifts very slightly through the finished piece. After the film was nearly complete, Maureen found the music. She fitted Glass's own recording of his Fifth Piano Etude to the images.

Before our first rehearsals together, Maureen gave me the video with Glass's playing as the soundtrack. This is music I have played quite often. I didn't want to copy the details of Philip's playing. I tried to find the points of coincidence between notable details of the movement, and punctuations and cadences in the music.

My goal was to be able to accompany the film (with the sound turned down), making the phrases of music line up or make sense with Maureen's filmed movement -- without exactly mimicking Philip's tempos or rhythmic inflections. It's tricky. Some phrases of the movement patterns go by more quickly. A completely steady, unvaried pace in playing the music is not possible.

Once we got into rehearsals, I played through the music with the video several times, as Maureen drew my attention to details of the movement. "You see my thumb touches the floor there." Or, " My chin disappears behind my arm, on 'four'."

On stage, Maureen performs these same movements live. She can see some of the projected moving image, and she can hear my playing. Often, her live performance virtually matches the film, but never exactly. I feel that a lot of the beauty and overall emotional quality of the work come from this friction -- this failure of the live performing to exactly coincide with the movements seen in the film.

So there are layers:

• There's the video that doesn't change (although it's murkier or easier to see depending on conditions in each theater).

• There's me trying to match my live playing of the music to what I can see in the video.

• And there's Maureen watching and listening, and doing the movements in sequence in real time.

I've done performances with other dancers using "live video" -- real time projection of events taking place in the moment. Some critics and audience members thought my performances with Maureen used live video. Perhaps these observers were mesmerized, and didn't notice the subtle changing of camera vantage point, or slightly asynchronous cadences.

Live video would be easier. I could play more freely. But then, the fragile, elusive links from the "script" -- the pre-made video -- to me, and to Maureen, would not be part of the art.

Tim Page suggested I play some music by Philip Glass. It was a solo piano arrangement of part of the opera Satyagraha -- Gandhi's final, Act 3 aria. Tim wanted this music for a solo piano CD we were making for BMG's Catalyst label.

The arrangement wasn't easy. According to Tim, the pianist Rudolf Firkusny had struggled with it, and given up -- Firkusny thought it was too hard to play! Though the Catalyst recording was never made (some details of the story are in Norman Lebrecht's The Life and Death of Classical Music), I learned the Satyagraha arrangement and performed it.

Glass himself got me involved in a dance performance at St. Mark's in New York, in the East Village, in which I played "Metamorphosis 2." That piece seems to exert a strong pull on choreographers. Since the performances with Polly Motley at St. Mark's (a two-dancer piece), I've done the same music with Maureen Fleming (her entrancing solo "The Stairs"), and again in a larger-scaled piece,"Extremely Close" by Alejandro Cerrudo at Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago.

The unmade Catalyst recording morphed into another project. I prepared all five pieces of Glass's Metamorphosis, as well as Mad Rush, and the Satyagraha arrangement. I went down to Third Street to play the pieces for Glass. (Before my first visit to his house, he gave meticulous directions about how to get there on the subway, including details regarding which end of the platform to use to transfer trains, and which stairways are most expedient.)

On Philip's home Baldwin, I found the middle C and the A below it (his favorite two notes!) almost toneless -- worn out. He was encouraging, mentioning a few ideas about how the recording might be engineered, and advising me to carefully count out all the repetitions within pieces...

Glass's piano music is personal. He plays it himself. At the same time, he seems to welcome others playing it. He showed me a cadenza he wrote for a piano concerto by Mozart, and got me a copy of the six etudes he wrote in 1994. Glass was writing more etudes and reserved the right to make the first recording himself, but he encouraged me to learn the music.

I returned to play through the six etudes for him. Philip penciled a few alterations into my score. And I did perform these etudes at Harvard University, in London, in Los Angeles, and in Manila. Philip continues writing piano etudes. He recorded ten of them in 2003. My own recording of the original six etudes has just appeared this month.