photo by Victoria Hunt
Last year I did the soundtracks for two parts of an ongoing project by De Quincey Company (the company of acclaimed dancer/performer/choreographer Tess de Quincey). Embrace developed from DQC’s residency in Kolkata in 2003. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the residency, but members of the company made over 10 hours of field recordings which I was given to work with.
My feeling was that anything I did would be a distortion of reality. A perspective. So I ran with that idea, manipulating the field recordings and not adding extraneous sounds.
Embrace – An Immodest Green was a performance/installation at the Performance Space which took the audience through the eight states of the Natyashastra: Love, Laughter, Sorrow, Anger, Energy, Fear, Disgust, Astonishment. The audience moved around the space to experience the different states, and I performed a live surround sound mix to change the virtual architecture. Part of the performance involved the cooking of a soup, which audience & performers shared at the end of the night. Smell was a big part of this performance.
Here’s a podcast of the soundtrack. It’s stereo, so you miss the spatialisation, and of course the performance, the smell, etc. but I figured it’s documentation worth sharing. It’s probably best to think of it more as atmosphere than music.
Shannon O’Neill – Embrace – An Immodest Green (2004, 192kbps, 1:01:21, 84.2MB)
Following An Immodest Green, I was asked to do a 16 minute redux version of the soundtrack for a version of Embrace called Changing State, which took place in one of the Performance Space’s galleries. The structure is the same – it goes through the eight states – but each state only lasts for two minutes and the changes are more abrupt. Here’s a podcast of it:
Shannon O’Neill – Embrace – Changing State (2004, 192kbps, 0:16:00, 21.9MB)
This project sounds positive. Interestingly, I did one in ‘94 which left me feeling a pretty burnt (worked incredibly hard for a tiny fee and… spent more on the gear to make it work than the fee returned.. and so on…). I am wondering whether you felt supported by DQC as the composer, or whether you felt like ‘crew’? I felt like the latter and was surprised to encounter these attitudes in the contemporary performance scene where many of the people spoke reverentially about ‘collaboration’.
This was a long time ago and maybe times have changed!!
Well… I did feel somewhat burnt out by the end of it, and I did put in a lot of work for a rather small fee…
But I found the experience very useful. I certainly don’t regret it. It enabled me to work in a different way and try some different ideas. I also enjoyed learning more about Indian culture. And some of the ppl I worked with were great!
I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some very creative people over the years. I’ve learnt a lot from working with them, and I do feel that for the most part my work has been appreciated – well it has helped to make them look good! Although as you say, one tends to be wooed as a ‘collaborator’, but treated as ‘crew’ when it comes to the crunch.
But don’t forget – collaboration has another meaning – of helping the enemy!