Streams

Building Children's Games has also been like generating and maintaining parallel streams. At this point, the streams can meander or form eddies as we try out ideas. Eventually they will all converge.
One stream is the video shoot for section one. I've started rehearsing with Fawn Williams, Devin Lucid, Emily Galash, Gabi Villasenor and Alexandra Ramirez as the feral children/runaways. In the studio, we've been working with the list of games from Bruegel, using it to generate both movement phrases and a spoken vocabulary. We've been playing with the language, breaking it into sounds or applying processes of rapid linguistic drift through repetition and distortion.
We've also been playing some of Augusto Boal's theater games (such as the one pictured above), playing a few of the games from the painting and playing games remembered from our pasts.
Running alongside is the live band stream, music that I've been improvising/composing with Taryn Tomasello and Gabi Villasenor. On April 9, we played our first "real" show. I trigger sounds on the computer, play a cheap drum machine, a broken mic and processing. Gabi sings, plays a lap steel through delay and drums. Taryn sings, plays keyboard and drums. These "songs" are deliciously dark and dramatic.

Here's an excerpt from the show, with video projections by Taryn.

Crippled Athlete April 8 2011 from Seth Nehil on Vimeo.