Category: Projects

DERMA plays again…

Galerii U – Centrum Reanimacji Kultury
Jagiellończyka 10d, Wrocław
Friday, March 14, 2014 18:00

A night at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.

WOLIERY 10
Friday, January 31 at 6:00pm
MWW Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław
Here are some photos from the last Derme show courtesy of Magdalena Placek

Next Derme event: December 21, 2013 at Cafe Rozrusznik.

While working on Enter Face, the performers were standing around looking at footage and someone said “That should be a trailer for the show.” A volunteer appeared out of nowhere and said I’ll make it. The next day we had a trailer. I then began to notice throughout our laborious tech load in and rehearsals this volunteer was always popping up saying he would do something and then he would do it. So when Pedro Ferrara asked me if I would do something for him I had to say yes.

On December 14, Fragments Live Cinema Performance was performed in his apartment for a dozen or so friends. It involved super 8 projection, video projection, light manipulation, electronic music and some improvisational humming by me. In Pedro’s own words:

In a world of crossfade songs with no space for silence, we try to slow things down. A state of meditation and inner peace. Experiencing time and conscious of space, no rush for chord changes, no rush for new sounds. Noise is music, repetition is new information. In the era of sampling, compression and bit, we cross between media. From the atom to the bit analogue and digital technologies are face to face, questioning where we are now throughout rhythm and motion. We believe in sharing and collaboration. We collaborate with visual and media artists, performers, musicians and sound designers, poets and writers. DERME live cinema performance talks fire for the ears, wind for the eyes and honey for the soul.

Update from Enter Face: This process is bizarre to me. But I dig it. Right from the beginning we sat around a table and talked about our ideas. Some proposals sounded cool or strange or interesting and it was decided that they we should try them and video tape them. We wrote them all down and then we made a list of stuff to go buy. The list resembled a material supply list of my kindergarten art class. String, balloons, confetti. But it also included fake wig, tin foil, potatoes, candles and so on. Just toys for our playing.

The substance of what our leader is looking for has been revealed slowly. He shares with us the video he has shot and immediately I get why he finds some ideas interesting and others not. He plays the footage backwards, with basic effects layers, he slows some material down or has the image upside down. There’s a teenage playfulness in how he sees and hears what we do.

After I made a video of a visual idea which included some text the project leader said “Now how to make it theater and not a film.” But what he sort of meant was how to remove the narrative of my chosen text (it was a Shakespeare soliloquy). On a walk from our lunch to rehearsal he told me that the institutional theaters in Russia who are doing Chekhov and such don’t really interest him. Some of their practices as tools could be useful and of course he would take work designing lights or implementing video for a traditional company. But I sorted out from our rehearsals and from this conversation that what he was doing would be generally labeled as time-based contemporary performance.

So we are trying to strip away the performance with extreme elemental / plastic / material confrontations. The research is about what lies beneath and asks if we can get there through the face. I don’t know where it is going. That in itself is a refreshing discovery in the rehearsal room.

“Enter Face” with Akhe Russian Engineering Theater. Tasks for day 1: make a self portrait, make a list of 10 childhood smells, bring images or video that provoke the senses.

Concept:
Maja Godlewska, Daniel Han, and Marek Ranis

Performers
Gabriel Rodriguez Almagro, Sam Alty, Emma Bonnici, Seth Compton, Joshua Doerksen, Daniel Han, Alexandra Kazazou, Magdalena Koza, Diego Pileggi, and Anu Salonen

Movement Direction
Daniel Han

Narration
Joshua Doerksen

Set/Instillation
Marek Ranis and Maja Godlewska

Photography
Karol Jarek

Music
Sean Mulcahy and Mathew Tuly

Editing
Chris English Pittman

Film by
Mark Ranis

The Game was played during Survival 10 Art Review, 21-24 June 2012, Wrocław, Poland.

The Game from Marek Ranis on Vimeo.