Catherine Cabeen @ Seattle Changing Room

It’s a strange thing to blog about a different kind of Farfetcher endeavor. But here I go…

May 21^st through 23^rd Catherine Cabeen put on a dance concert at the Seattle Changing Room. It was a great success, selling out every night, and last night (Sunday) there was a standing ovation that Catherine could not stop even as she tried to get attention to thank the audience and announce the post show q&a session. I was lucky enough to be involved not only for technical support – I also composed the music for the third piece performed “Composites.”

My good friend Jay McAleer, who used to work at On The Boards theatre with me as the technical director and master electrician was responsible for getting this project started, and for including me. I was honored to be asked; we had talked about working on a project together, but it was still a surprise to actually get down to doing it for real.

Jay approached Catherine about creating a piece, using a text he wrote. The intention was to sidestep the ways that text has been used before in dance, by avoiding literal references, and instead focusing on the syntax and rhythm of the words. Catherine took this perhaps too literally (haha) and began devising a phonetic movement vocabulary, with the intention of actually translating the words into a new language, word by word, even syllable by syllable! This turned out to be an amazing way to create dance abstracted from the meaning of the words, but still directly related to the text. At the same time though, it proved to be a very slow and difficult way to choreograph a piece. The 1^st, 5^th, and 12^th (last) sections used this method, but in the other sections Catherine returned to a less prolix method.

Jay and Catherine met once a week for rehearsals, in which he would read his words aloud as she worked through the movement she developed in her own practice earlier in the week. Jay and I also met up a few times and talked through the kind of music that would work, and in the spirit of not recreating the ways we had seen text used before, I suggested recording him reading, but then running his voice through synthesizers and processing to obscure the actual text while retaining the musical delivery of the words, the timing, and the rhythm. After our recording session I put together a first draft basically using every trick I had in the bag. We all met up at one of the Saturday afternoon sessions, and listened and discussed, eliminating some of the (ahem) bad ideas, and choosing the cooler stuff.

Back to the Farfetcher basement. The first section of the text refers to the “fife and drum” and to the fiddle, and here I was semi-literal myself! I pulled up samples of actually flute, African drums, and a pizzicato violin section.

In this vein I also dug into the sound effects library for these quotes:

Some sailing sounds - “If you must know, I was thinking of myself as sailed into Athens”

A train whistle - “During the 1870s, railroad companies in the United States maintained 50 different time zones”

Some rain – “All day long with the rain on the window, and the cracked teacup by the phone”

Jay meanwhile was adamantly stopping Catherine from being too literal in the dance, and he stayed the course with me too, reminding me to abstract more, to go for the moods, meter and feel of the text. I was being too…anti-metaphorical. Overall, the words we decided captured the overall vibe of the text were “the thick residue of experience,” and so everything got a bit darker. (I know I keep quoting from a text you don’t have – but you will have to buy the chapbook from Catherine’s site to get it, at least until Jay publishes it in another form.)

We added a typewriter sound (recorded with the laptop off and me beating away on the keyboard) and I reprised that sound later by playing snare drum samples on my midi keyboard as if I was typing. I used the flute to indicate the spaces between sentences for Catherine to cue off, since she was dancing to Jay reading, and now we were erasing huge sections of text from the mix. A few musical themes emerged, the characteristic flute punctuation, a pizzicato violin part, and a syncopated finger-picking pattern on my trusty Les Paul Special. I don’t know why, but the music turned up all basically in E though it drifts between major and minor. Catherine loved a rhythmic gated effect from the trial draft, but we moved it to a different section and I “technofied” it with an electronica snare roll and a dance style syncopated bass line.

My favorite cool trick may have been putting a gate on a wind sound, and then using Jay’s voice as a side chain, so that it came in only when he was speaking. I had a lot of fun with panning, delays and a truly massive reverb on the guitar. The “bro” turned up for the penultimate section (dobro I mean) – it’s a Gold Tone, tuned in bluegrass open G if you were wondering J

In the final section, Catherine spoke part of the text aloud in the room, which was then repeated by the recorded Jay. Remembering this sonic moment and its 3 dimensional performance reminds me that the piece is really all the parts, you have to see the dance, hear the text, and hear the music to really connect to this. Perhaps the video will be a viable approximation, and I promise to alert you when it turns up, until then – hopefully this tunepak (below) will work (or you can go to my reverb nation profile here). I had to break up the music into sections because of space limitations - anybody with a good free podcasting host please comment! Actually – all comments welcome, no-one has reviewed the show yet, so be critical and say what you feel. (I will delete spam and useless profanity though)

Thanks to Catherine and Jay for being incredibly fun to collaborate with! Thanks to Scott, Jay, BC, Tom & Joy, Rich and especially to my lady Anne for getting me through my art music debut!

The music is here: http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/2671983

Other links :

http://www.catherinecabeen.com/dancer.html

http://o.seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2011913599_cabeen21.html