Ballet Mécanique
Date: Apr 2019
Categories: Audiovisual Performance, CREATE Ensemble
Categories: Audiovisual Performance, CREATE Ensemble
Performance Description (written by Karl Yerkes)
Ballet Mécanique is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil. However, the film premiered in a silent version on September 24, 1924, at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna presented by Frederick Kiesler. It is considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking.
The CREATE Ensemble members improvised with their own instruments based on the scene changes of this silent film while the film was showing. The scene changes were systematically chosen and labeled by a custom program written by the director, Karl Yerkes.
This piece was an opening performance of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) concert, ‘The Music Easel’ on April 18, 2019 at Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara. (see details at https://music.ucsb.edu/news/event/1845)
Performers: (from the left) Myungin Lee, Hannah Wolfe, Sihwa Park, Karl Yerkes (director), Alexis Crawshaw
Performance at the MAT 2019 End of Year Show: MADE [at] UCSB, Elings Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara
Performers : (from the left) Alexis Crawshaw, Diarmid Flatley, Myungin Lee, Tim Wood, Sihwa Park, Karl Yerkes (director)
In these performances, I played my mobile instrument, ARLooper.