Crippled Athlete

Band practice at The Mouth - with Taryn Tomasello and Gabi Villasenor.

Preparations

Sebastian Healy recording the voice of the ghost child.


Tracing the Children's Games diagram to black fabric.

3 weeks to go

Rehearsal photos by Hillary Murphy.


Crippled Athlete makeup and video shoot.



First rehearsal with video projection.

Previews!

A wonderful preview article by Ben Waterhouse here...
A work-in-progress showing of Children's Games will be presented at the Portland Actors Conservatory, this Saturday, September 17th at 2pm. I welcome your feedback on this still-developing work! Joining me will be Hand2Mouth, with an excerpt of their sci-fi meditation, Uncanny Valley.
You can learn more about Children's Games (and download free albums) at my website, and help support this performance at our IndieGoGo campaign.
Here again is the trailer for the performance - look for a new trailer and rehearsal videos coming soon!

Children's Games trailer from Seth Nehil on Vimeo.

Fundraising!

The Children's Games campaign has been launched! We need your support, large or small. The entirety of your contribution will go to the actors, singers and musicians. Please visit our indiegogo site to learn more and make a donation.
Come to a free work-in-progress showing SATURDAY, Sept 17 at 2pm: Hand2Mouth's Uncanny Valley + Seth Nehil's Children's Games - Portland Actors Conservatory, 1436 SW Montgomery.

Rehearsal spaces

In Mary Sutton's basement, Matt Carlson leads the trio in process-based scores: lovely rotating and hocketing phrases are locked into a steady groove held by the keyboards. Minimalism with slightly melancholy or elegiac tendencies...

Meanwhile, at the Mouth Studio, the chorus has been exploring vocal patterns and physical shapes. Some of these shapes are determined by the score or follow a simple geometry, others are taken from the actions depicted in Brueghel's painting. His dynamic clusters of game-playing children give us body configurations, and we can expand or contract into those arrangements.
The "entropic process" has been one of the most prolific techniques in Children's Games rehearsals - morphing a phrase through rapid and repetitious passing. In this recording, you can hear the development of a sound and its associated melody from the beginning of the process. Starting with the name of a game ("Bowling with Knucklebones"), Elie and Katy face each other, passing the phrase back and forth. Meanwhile, the other four performers take turns pounding rhythmically on the singer's backs. Through incremental change, the phrase mutates, ending in beautiful onomatopoeia bell sounds and trilled tongues. In this way, a melody emerges.

Bowling With Knucklebones by Seth Nehil

"Yo-yo, Mama, caca"

As I conducted research for Children's Games, there were texts I encountered which seemed to encapsulate one or several of the core themes. These almost always related to ideas of language, pre-language, repetition and signification. Finding a text like this, I could read it as a score - a set of sounds and actions. Thus, the theoretical leads directly into the practical...

From Formless: A User's Guide by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (pp 219-220):
"Yo-Yo. We could see it as the relatively sophisticated, commercially produced equivalent of the little object Freud's infant grandson made famous, as he threw the spool onto his cot to make it disappear behind the bedclothes and then pulled on the string attached to it to draw it back into view, the first gesture accompanied by a mournful "fo-o-ort" and the second by a joyous "da!" And the yo-yo is servicable in this connection in yet another dimension, since its very name cycles around the field of linguistic principles that the "fort/da" instrument articulates.
For the yo-yo belongs to a whole series of childish terms - the very earliest being "mama" and "papa", and subsequent ones being "caca" and "peepee" - in which the wild sound if infantile babbling is suddenly articulated, or spaced, or cut out, not just into perceptible rhythmic regularity but into the freestanding condition of the signifier, through the act of repetition. For it is repetition that doubles back on the first sound to mark it as deliberately phonemic by the very fact of being repeatable. Thus, as Roman Jakobson says, the basis for the translation from wild sound production to verbal behavior is, precisely, reduplication, since it is the repetition of the first sound by the second that serves to signal "that the uttered sounds do not represent a babble, but a senseful, semantic entity." Thus, for Jakobson, it is duplication that is "linguistic essence", since it transforms sounds to phonemes by marking, or re-marking them, by establishing that they "are to be recognizable, distinguishable, identifiable; and in accordance with these requirements, they must be deliberately repeatable."
"Fort/da" is not, however, one of these redoubled vocables, although the game played by means of it - in both its verbal and mechanical guise - did involve constant repetition. "Fort/da" is, instead, a game of rhythmic separation and reconnection, in which something disappears from sight and is recognized again, both disappearance and return accompanied by language that penetrates this activity almost to the point of becoming its support. For Freud articulates the "fort/da" as allowing for the rise of linguistic representation in the negation of the object (throwing it away while simultaneously producing a substitute for it in the form of a verbal sign: "fort") and in the separation of the field of the represented (the sign, the fantasy image) from that of the real ("da!"). Indeed, it is in this founding act of negativity that Freud locates the intellectual feat on which language as well as culture in general would be instituted."