The game is on...

Children's Games received a RACC project grant for 2011!

A few excerpts from the proposal:

The goal of Children’s Games is to produce a rich musical experience that is simultaneously dramatic and allegorical. After several years of collaborating with choreographers and dance companies, I am passionate about exploring a challenging, idiosyncratic and hybridized use of the theater to create a work somewhere between music concert, cinema and performance art. My primary impulse for this work is a deep concern for the ways in which corporate, big-budget fantasy images are increasingly colonizing and replacing undirected, self-motivated, small-scale play in both children and adults. Children’s Games will dramatize this struggle in an allegory of the movie-theater audience as willingly infantilized, hypnotized and receptive to dominant ideologies. Using cinematic images against themselves, I will deconstruct their effects, allowing viewers associative and imaginative freedom.

The piece will be comprised of four distinct layers: 1) a large HD video projection with stereo sound, 2) a ten-person mixed-voice choir, 3) several synchronized video monitors, and 4) a live electronic band. Each of these four zones will contain a series of "games" - scores or procedural devices that result in rhythmic and narrative behavior. Distributed throughout the performance space, individual games will overlap and interact. Organized by rhythm and intensity rather than narrative and character, Children´s Games will expand and contract, drifting from solo voice to full choir, from a single video to a dense interplay of cinema, sound effects and evocative electronic songs. Merging media and expanding the definition of music, this performance will celebrate the associative, fragmentary and irrational aspects of imaginative play.

Children´s Games will be an adventurous work filled with haunting images, vivid compositions and strange sounds. Drawing on research into film theory, cognitive science, the loss of play in children, catharsis and special effects, I will examine the power of narratives to shape our view of the world, and argue for the independence and freedom to play.