[Nov 7/8] Christina Campanella, Latitude 14: I Went To The Lighthouse (And It Wasn’t There)

Fusing sound art and durational performance, LIGHTHOUSE is an immersive 3D sound installation that plumbs a world in which the seas have risen—in particular, the uneasy psychic terrain of an inundated New York City. Campanella’s impressionistic electronic score is designed for one live performer and a multi-tiered 8.4.1 system of speakers that surrounds the viewer/listener from all sides and above.

[Nov 7/8] Christina Campanella, Latitude 14: I Went To The Lighthouse (And It Wasn’t There)

Christina Campanella
Friday, November 7th 2014 at 8pm (Opening Reception)
Admission: $15 at the door, $10 online: http://www.hyphenhub.com

Saturday, November 8th 2014 12-5pm (Open Viewing)
Admission: Free

Location:
Hyphen Hub at The Red Door
140 West 24th Street
New York, NY (Chelsea)

From beneath the flooded streets, a lone radio-operator navigates tenuous threads of communication, spinning imaginary worlds from one erased by rising seas.

Created in collaboration with sound designer Jim Dawson and Latitude 14, composer/performer Christina Campanella’s musically minimal, meditative score of archival short-wave dispatches, natural and urban climatic noise and sonic ephemera moves like an aural palimpsest across vertical, horizontal and temporal lines, conjuring a visceral sense of space—both confined and expansive, replete with sensations of motion and travel. Via fractured songs, soundscape and attempts at transmission, Lighthouse evokes the dimensionality of future landscapes while exploring the isolation endemic to the radically altered topography of a drowned world.

Constructed in part from sampled recordings that include wind-blown sail-cloth, radio, space and aquatic telemetry, and an obscure cadence from an Ives sonata woven into a shifting musical system of electronic tones taken from antiquated communication systems, Lighthouse slips almost imperceptibly from pure installation—an oppressively still, empty basement-like bunker activated by sound—to inhabited space and back again. Compelled by the notion of stasis as a field for performance, the piece examines how the meditative space shifts our experience of sound, focusing our attention in a new way—and how the suspension of a fixed directional orientation toward listening allows an audience to enter new territory.

From a pared-down palette of sonic material, a looped soundscape (approx. 1 hour in duration) forms the foundation of this non-linear 5-hour work, which is designed to experiment with our perceptions of time. Free to move about, the viewer/listener, who may stay for a few minutes or a few hours, wends her way through a forest of sounds as shards of narrative unfold and traverse the space. Within this architectonic environment, the composer/performer creates new landscapes in response to the moment, adding streams of spoken and whispered text, snippets of song and recurring motifs on a Wurlitzer piano, exploiting the narrative potential of sound by shifting and merging sonic terrains.

A short preview of the work will be presented at The Red Door in Chelsea on Friday, November 7th at 8pm, as part of Hyphen Hub’s Salon Series, in a shared evening with fellow Harvestworks Resident Artist Tim Fodness. An experimental phase of the full piece will run on Saturday, November 8th from 12-5pm at the same location; viewer/listener may visit anytime throughout the 5-hour showing.

I Went To The Lighthouse (And It Wasn’t There) was developed through a Harvestworks residency and mixed by Chief Audio Engineer Paul Geluso.

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LATITUDE 14

Christina Campanella is a composer, performer and sound artist in music, theater, visual art and film. She has worked with composer-visual artist Joe Diebes, kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson, multidisciplinary theater-artist Jim Findlay, and directors Phil Soltanoff, Toni Dove, Mallory Catlett, and Richard Foreman. Scores for film and live performance include: Parts Are Extra (with filmmaker Peter Norrman), Red Fly/Blue Bottle and Tinder (with Stephanie Fleischmann and Latitude 14). Her live-sound installation Breathe (Ganson) is on view in the Museum at MIT in Cambridge, and she will appear in Dream Of A Red Chamber at Mass Live Arts (Summer 2015). She has performed throughout the US and abroad, and received support from NYSCA, Mass MOCA, HARP, American Music Center, Whitman College, Mid-Atlantic Arts, Meet the Composer, LMCC, and NY State Music Fund.

Sound Designer Jim Dawson has been a creative force behind innovative uses of audio technology in performance since 1994, as a longtime collaborator of The Wooster Group, Trisha Brown, Jim Findlay and others at the vanguard of experimental theater and dance. He has worked in film and TV, toured the US and internationally, been nominated for an Emmy, and garnered Drama Desk, Independent Film Spirit, and Jeff Awards.

Writer Stephanie Fleischmann is a 2014–15 Howard Foundation Fellow in Playwriting and an alumnus of New Dramatists. Her current commissions include two operas premiering in 2015. She has received 2 NYFA fellowships, a NYSCA commission (for Red Fly/Blue Bottle), and Frederick Loewe and NEA Opera/Music-Theater awards.

Director Mallory Catlett works closely with a handful of theatrical enterprises: Latitude 14 (Tinder, Red Fly/Blue Bottle), Banana Bag and Bodice (The Sewers, The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen, Beowulf, Space//Space), Aaron Landsman (Patient Boy, City Council Meeting) and Juggernaut Theatre Co. (Oh What War, The First 100 Years, Hair Blood Vinyl). Her 2013 This Was the End garnered an OBIE, 3 Bessie nominations and a Hewes design award.

Latitude 14 makes work that excavates the memory of objects and blurs the boundaries of concert, theater, cinema and installation. Founded by: Campanella, Catlett, Fleischmann and Peter Norrman in 2009.

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