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THE PESTILENCE PROJECT

We are asking for your support for an extraordinary work we are developing. While our goal is a theatrical production, we are process-oriented so that the making of the work is equal to our objective of presenting it. We harness our backgrounds in the traditional modes of production with contemporary practices, taking post modernism beyond theory.  

This is a departure from our usual collaborative process in that principal artists Jack Waters and Peter Cramer are rexamining their roots in concert-based theater. In contrast to the on-the-spot immediacy that has come to define their work over the last decade the group is taking the more structured approach of developing this project sectionally over time. While team roles are delegated to the traditional status of director/producer/designer/technician, the multi-skilled team moves easily between those designations. The artists are experienced in the multiple forms of artmaking that an opus of this scope is comprised of. The seamless merging of music, visual art, drama, and lighting is common to the traditions of opera and film. Waters and Cramer have moved freely between the worlds of the performing arts and the moving image over the course of their combined careers. Pestilence is enhanced and informed by the principles of biology, physics, sociology and anthropology. The living body and the human voice are the central mediums as narrative and conceptual themes are delivered in motion photography, motion capture and recorded sound; a mixing of analogue media and digital technology.

Yet the work will be true to our usual spontaneous in-the-moment site specificity of approach.  Although the structure of Pestilence is designed to be constantly transforming and adaptive, the nature of the piece will necessarily entail more of a permanence of the elements of production. This will engage more people to organize as our production team grows.

WHAT IS PESTILENCE?

Pestilence is a musical theater work that melds the technologies of science and art  in a lyrical expression that considers the brain an organ of sensory stimulation;  It’s a  primordial, post-apocalyptic opera that tracks culture from its origin as single cell life form to the terminal end of society in the digital age of post information overload.  

Pestilence is a cycle in three parts:

The narrative is cyclical,  a continuum of conjoining and replication - dissolution and reintegration.  At each repetition the story collects another layer while retaining the simplicity at its base.  Pestilence is about process.

The music’s motif originates from numerical relationships of wave frequency. Resonance begets a dissonance whose imbalance causes the natural desire to re-establish harmonic balance until that stasis is again undone by the physical propensity for change and development. The score will sample from World music. Classical themes, pop, jazz, rock – every imaginable type of music and sound figures as the opus scans the history of humanity as part of the nature of things.  

PRINCIPAL COLLABORATORS

Pestilence is a collaboration between Jack Waters & Peter Cramer who have lived and worked together for over 30 years in visual art, dance, film, video, and performance.

Jack, the director of Pestilence, is the writer and theorist of the scenario. Peter is overseer of visual elements including set, lighting, and action.

The Collaboratorating Team:

As longtime creators of group works Waters and Cramer engage their collaborators ascreative proponents, not just as interpreters of the process. Although everyone has their own role there is a unity of vision that comes from the fact that the core team members are professionals in areas of social, political, theoretical, and scientific practice that extend the boundaries of traditional art production.

Among the creative team in development are:

André Azevedo, Fabrizio Brua, Donald Gallagher, Sylvie Degeiz, Ricardo Horatio Nelson, and John Michael Swarz.

Incoming Artists  include:

Brian Bizzy Barefoot and Ensemble Lucidarium.

HERE'S WHERE YOUR ASSISTANCE WILL BE GOING:

Incurred Expenses During the Venice Residency (travel, photo and video equipment, art supplies):$6,300

Book Production (artist fees, production costs): $5,000

Stipends for Artists during HarvestWorks lab/workshop: $3,750

Stipends for Artists for Emily Harvey NYC (equipment, lab and studio, travel for international collaborators): $10,800

TOTAL:$25,850

WHAT WE’VE DONE

·      Pestilence was conceived at Emily Harvey Foundation’s residency program in Venice in 2006.

·      The characters and scenes from the work done in Venice were developed in two years of workshops, performances, and videotaping in New York City and Berlin.

·      A scenario based on the workshops was written by Jack Waters in residency at Yaddo in 2010.

·      In January/February (2013) Waters and Cramer were again invited to Emily Harvey Foundation Venice. There they planned the production phase of the opus with the assistance of Carlo Maria Ampil who accompanied them on this travel. The scenario was divided into sections to be distributed by chance operation to a group of collaborators for rewriting and development I the direction of a libretto. While in Italy the artists traveled to Milan to meet Avery Gosfield and Francis Biggi of Ensemble Lucidarium.

·      In April 2013 Harvest Works Digital Media Arts Center NYC provided the space to explore their digital media tools and expertise for developing Pestilence. John Swartz and Andre Azevedo began applying principles of electronic media to the organic materials of the live human voice as well as generating the interactive set elements based on the process of fermentation and culture. Sylvie Degeiz continues to consult on the theory of prime numeration and frequency. From those principles we generated a set of electronic  tones whose frequency corresponds to elemental processes such as the Earth’s orbit. The tones will be the base of the musical motifs. Degeiz demonstrated her pre-Columbian flute collection explaining how the resonance of their tones may have been applied for communicating in the forest, as well as for psychotropic therapy, and for their sonic capacity to transform matter such as the shattering of glass.  Singer Donald Gallagher vocalized the names of the two principal characters that initiate the verbal passages to Pestilence. The names are constructed of vowel sounds which pronounced together form a palindrome. Fabrizio Brua introduced us to the sitar whose c# tuning corresponds to one of the electronic  tones we generated. Photographer and videographer Ricardo Horatio Nelson has been documenting the process. Images generated from this phase will be incorporated into the media element of the opus.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

The recordings we made at Harvest works are being edited and analyzed for score drafting and later surround sound recording at Harvestworks.

WHAT WE’RE PLANNING                                                        

·      Spring 2013 -  Material generated from Harvestworks will be presented at showings like the redaction of John Cage's HPSCHD at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in NYC on May 3rd.

·     Summer 2013 - we will meet Ensemble Lucidarium in NYC to discuss plans for a collaboration at the Museo Ebraico di Venezia in relation to sections of the developing Pestilence score.

·      October 2013 - we will mount our findings at Emily Harvey Foundation’s NYC Gallery where the sculptural and sonic elements produced at Harvestworks will stand as models for the set design and score.

·      The scenario continues to develop as a collective process as we shape a libretto from the narrative.

Wait, Book Production? Isn’t This An Opera?

Our active collaboration will produce a book--in the vein of Heiner Müller’s scripts that have been turned into books--an archive of the overall work process, complete with notes, diagrams, drawings and other images. Before this book is set to paper, it will exist as a shared document for collaborators to comment and edit--which is where all the tasty interdisciplinary cross-pollinations are set to occur. This shared document will then solidify (or, gasp, canonize) into a “story bible” which will guide the librettist, inform the production design, and map the structure of the moving image/sound media. A pictoral version of the book will take the form of a graphic novel culled from the Pestilence storyboards. In the final stages, this book will be ready for limited printing and distribution to generous patrons and interested individuals/institutions.

The current form of the book is a treatment for the Pestilence scenario. This will be one of many other premiums that supporters will receive, as our way of saying thanks for your many years of support!

As the production develops the creative team expands to include a wide group of composers, librettists, designers, musicians and cast.

Our contributors have generously contributed to this project showing their interest in exploring challenging and novel approaches to the production of  music based theater.  We need you to be a part of this amazing adventure!

**This is a campaign and project conducted under the auspices of Allied Productions, Inc., a registered 501(c)3. All contributions are tax-deductible to the full extent allowed by law.**