Yumi Umiumare, Impro-lab photo Mayu Kanamori |
With these artists, Jim Denley (wind instruments), Chris Abrahams (keyboards) and Amanda Stewart (voice) completed the often dense if subtly realised aural dimension of the second of the Impro-Lab evenings at the Studio. The quiet presence of video artist Samuel James, sitting on the floor of the performance space with cameras, yielded some high impact imagery on two large screens.
Training his camera on small details of the space and slowly manipulating focus and intensity, James created transfixingly radiant abstract images that appeared to have organic lives of their own. They became doubly potent when performers entered their aura: Tess De Quincey locked into a scarily intense quivering, Tony Yap into tight sinuous revolutions, Yumi Umiumare richly expressive against James’ film noirish transformation of the Studio wall slatting into venetian blind-like shadows.
Jim Denley, Yumi Umiumare, Tess de Quincey, Impro-lab photos Mayu Kanamori |
live cinema
I asked Sam James to describe his approach to working on Impro-Lab. He wrote that he used three live cameras attached to a vision mixer which could mix between any two found images. He “wanted to keep it all analogue” to be authentic to the environment and to the improvisation: “Because of the difficulty or the vulnerability of using three lenses with different qualities and without effects there was a truthfulness to the space and the performance.” James prefers doing what he calls “live cinema” instead of working with a laptop and pre-recorded imagery, where he sees an “artificial impression of realtime image creation.”
James clearly enjoys the spontaneity of his approach: “With the live camera, as something happens the camera operator’s response is immediate and sometimes impulsive, and often much of the strain of the work is controlling the immensity of the outcome. It’s a very sensitive medium to use for live projection…there’s a visceral response with camera movement, control of focus, exposure and zoom to the immediate sound and physical environment…I see what’s there with each of the cameras and the images begin to feed off each other, creating a kind of transcendence, of the sum of the space.” James is determined to continue working this way after a year of part-time development of the approach and working with experienced improvisors.
Improvisation sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. However, at its best it's the expression of relationships between artists who have worked together for extended periods and are highly reponsive to each other. Impro-Lab came of out of such contact with an intensive program of laboratories and residencies held in Japan and Australia in 2006 involving Asialink’s Neon Rise program, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and Critical Path in Sydney.
DeQuincey Co and Machine for Making Sense, Impro-Lab: Transparencies, dancers Tess de Quincey, Peter Fraser, Yumi Umiumare, Tony Yap, musicians Chris Abrahams, Sachiko M, Jim Demley, Ami Yoshida, Amanda Stewart, video Samuel James, lighting Clytie Smith; Australia-Japan Year of Exchange; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 25
RealTime issue #77 Feb-March 2007 pg. 45
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]