Echoes

October 12 , 1993; Hyatt Regency Ballroom, San Francisco

written by Belén García-Alvarado and composed by Randall Packer

created in collaboration with Charles Rose, Ed Tannenbaum, Chris Van Raalte, and Gerry Burnett

performed by Chris Van Raalte

In the wake of a century obsessed with the traumas buried in the unconscious, Echoes celebrates the nourishing, "capricious" nature of conscious memories: we believe that the obvious is often the key to who we are and why. Our pasts are loaded with images that we cherish and like to retrieve. They are not moments of great transcendence or consequence, but rather bubbles of hermetic intimacy, routines forever broken that once felt set for life, and are now only attainable through the watercolors of nostalgia. Private realities that seem quite universal at their core!

In Echoes, a live character in awe of the future and its promise of technological salvation, hears a voice that yearns for the past. The two are on completely different paths. The voice speaks of her inner world, and relives again and again the dreams, the love, the fears, and the curiosity of childhood. This encounter gradually disrupts the character's mechanical existence and shakes his personality. Eventually, at the crossroads between the free fall of regret and the desert of amnesia, they finally meet and merge...

On a more technical note, Echoes demonstrates our ongoing commitment to empowering the live performer on stage with sophisticated techniques for real-time interactivity. Over the years we have been uniting musicians, dancers, and performance artists with a team of sound, visual, and computer artists who together work as an ensemble to create interactive electronic theater. Here at the core of this interaction is the BodySynth controller, worn by dancer/performance artist Chris Van Raalte, who controls music, video and animation with the movement of his body.

For this performance we have taken our interactivity into the domain of computer animation and digital video. On the left projection screen is animation and QuickTime digital video running in Macromedia Director. Designed by visual artist Charles Rose, these visuals are being driven by a musical score composed by Randall Packer, playing in Opcode Systems Studiovision MIDI sequencer and MAX software. On the right projection screen interactive video artist Ed Tannenbaum manipulates the image of the dancer by superimposing him in "virtual" imagescapes with the NewTek Video Toaster and the Fairlight Video Synthesizer.