party games

Party Games is in your neighborhood.



Our current project takes performance out of the black box and into your party. We are developing short works that will join in the social mingling at local house parties, challenging where we see performance.

Follow our process and development at the Seen Performance blog - and look for news from our first Party Games performance in September.

these walls sing

Architecture and music differ in their relationships to time and space. Though time and space are inherent in both disciplines, architecture creates patterns and forms in space where music creates patterns and forms in time. With These Walls Sing, Seen Performance will explore this difference by thawing the "frozen music" of architectural design to create a physical space inside of music. The audience will listen to the music not by sitting in one place while it passes them in time, but, as performers, by moving through a designed space containing the music. As they pass through each part of the space, they will hear a different layer of sound. Since moving through space also means moving through time, when they arrive at the exit they will have heard the entire piece of music. The speed at which they move and subtle variations in each person's route through the space will give everyone a different, personalized experience of the piece.



We will be developingThese Walls Sing through the end of the year, announcing show dates + venues in early 2009. Please join in the process of getting from here to there at our blog

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on the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing

  

Our first official project, on the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing, is a show about fashion and boxes, a place where inside is out and outside is in, where self perception melds with your perception. It is a place for tumbling into frames, rhythms, and patterns – and getting lost in the seams. Under Esther's creative direction, we first presented this piece March 6, 2008, at Dixon Place.

on the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing is a project about the role of fashion in one’s self-perception and in the outside perceptions of that same self. It is about the open crevices of identity and the intimate arena of exposure.

personnel:
Esther Palmer – choreography & performance
Amiti Perry - performance
David Morneau – music composition & performance
Elle Chyun - costume design & construction
Shana McKay Burns - set design
Kris Diehl - set construction
Tate Evans, JoLayne Morneau, Christie Newman - FOH ladies

Watch video excerpts:


more photos

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where is tokyo?

Our first project as a group, Where is Tokyo? was Esther's mfa thesis project (osu, dance + technology) and is about visual perception of dimension.

It takes its inspiration from the cinema and our experience with the real/imaginary world of the screen. What is the process of seeing the “depth of reality” on a flat screen? In an effort to deconstruct the assumptions behind this, Where is Tokyo? seeks to construct a similar process - and to raise similarly resulting questions - in/as performance. In effect, it is a live cinema.

Where is Tokyo? reconstructed spatially a brief scene from Late Spring [1949 film by Ozu Yasujiro] in which two characters look out over the rock garden at the Ryoan temple in Kyoto.


Still taken from the Yasujiro film "Late Spring".

The reconstruction focused on the nature of the porch as a framing device for experiencing the tranquility of the rock garden. Thus the set incorporated the porch and its function of describing a spectator’s perspective.

Additionally, the set up recreated the reference image and put the audience inside that recreation. Each run of the show admitted only 2 spectators, who were seated on the porch as designated by the reference image.

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