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As part of the InTransit Festival…a walking cabaret evening of strong currents, potent drinks and local legend as part of the InTransit Festival.
Over three weeks in June, local World’s End residents (the neighbourhood surrounding Chelsea Theatre) were invited to answer this question; WHAT WAS YOUR JOURNEY TO WORLD’S END? The answers will form the basis of a cabaret performance in various locations around the World’s End Estate and Chelsea Theatre.
Worlds End aims to create unique and exciting community engagement; local people’s stories and locations become the jumping off point for our hosts, internationally acclaimed performance company ‘Curious’, in a urban twist of the project ‘Slipstreaming’ which was first developed at the RSC in Stratford Upon Avon.
The romantic but spatially challenged cruise director Miss Paris guides the evening with reckless abandon, as sultry chanteuse Cloudy Shoreline lures us closer with her Siren Song and the philosophical Purser Hill flairs her famous ‘oblivion’ cocktails while inviting us to contemplate the World’s End accompanied by the swirling sounds of the Slipstream Band.
As part of this project, acclaimed photographer Hugo Glendinning has been commissioned by Chelsea Theatre to take a series of twelve portraits of local residents. Taken in a location of their choice, the portraits will illustrate the diverse journeys that have brought residents to World’s End. They will be hung in a permanent exhibition at Chelsea Theatre, in order to create a lasting legacy and a physical link to the community in the building. These will be unveiled at the launch of the InTransit Festival on 12th July, 2012.
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris called their company Curious because what drives them as artists is an intense curiosity about the world in which they live. Since 1996, they have developed a reputation for their edgy, humorous interrogations of contemporary culture and politics, work that has been called as smart as it is seductive. As Curious, they have produced over forty projects in a range of disciplines including performance, installation, publication and film.
Hugo Glendinning has been working as a photographer for twenty-five years. He has worked with most leading British theatre and dance companies and is regularly commissioned by The RSC, National Theatre, Royal Opera House and many West End theatre producers. He has published and exhibited work internationally, notably his continuing project of documentation and the investigation of performance photography with Forced Entertainment.
Claudia Barton’s songs (Cloudy Shoreline), beautifully arranged by Ian Grant (the Slipstream band), set the scene.
The end of the world is neither here nor there
You will always be recalled by the way you wore your hair
So steady your sea legs and step aboard – destination? World’s End.
Ian Grant sees the evening out with a set of suitable standards.
I have recently completed the first prototype of a major digital puppetry project that relies heavily on Quartz Composer in an arena of live performance familiar to vj-ers, visual artists and visualists. I have a set of predefined visuals (‘scenes’) and effects and a complex mechanism that lets me composite my real-time singing mouth onto an a character that I (or someone else) can manipulate with a nintendo wii remote. Moving eyes are pre-recorded and in future versions, I indend for the eye movements to be controllable by the wii. The source code for the character control can be found elsewhere on this blog.
I do not intend to post the full patch as it is very dependent on other media, the wii controller and the Behringer midi controller, but you can view the root of the composition in the image below. I have split some of the more useful elements up and will be sharing them in other posts. I attempted (and will develop further) the idea of having a separate ‘buses’ for scenes, effects and transitions – a little like the way (I think) quartonian (and other vj-ing tools) work.
Image (1.8mb large): Screenshot of Root of Performance Composition
The project used some of the following ideas:
Some Images and Commentary
A fuller walkthrough of the final images with a commentary can be found here:
Screenshots and Scene-by-Scene Descriptions Link:http://www.daisyrust.com/quartzcomposer/moocher/
Image (above): Prototype of the Garbage Matte and Chroma-Keying Patch
Download Link: garbage_matte_bluescreen_demo_002.qtz.zip
This demo patch makes uses of Sam Kass’s excellent core image kernels available here:
Link: http://www.samkass.com/blog/
Images (above): Behringer BCF2000 MIDI controller controls scene sequencing and properties of various screen objects and parameters in real time
Image: Real-time Mouth / Recorded (controllable) Eyes Composited into an Image in Real-Time
Full credit and copyright acknowledgment to the Fleischer Brothers Estate for frame grabs and stylistic inspiration.
Custom Software Frame to Frame Motion Analysis (2008)
