Techiti Tech

Oh my goodness The Keys Experiment opens at Artery 2010 in one week. Ah! Getting a bit nervous to say the least. Trying to keep cool about it. I had a good meeting today with Dixie Treichel at The Soap Factory working on the sound design. There were like a million people there working on their Artery pieces, which is great. There's this amazing energy in that space. Fiona MacNeill, the curator, says this year has an A List of artists, and she's not wrong. I'm honored to share the bill with the likes of Annie Rollins, Jaime Carrera, and Kats Kats D Fukasawa, who I met for the first time today, and many other very talented artists. I kind of think of Artery as the fringe alternative. Like the Fringe Festival, there's a sense of the eclectic, but I think audience members are more guaranteed to see some performance that is really pushing the boundaries in terms of form and content (I speak of my fellow artists, not myself- I obviously can't be the judge of whether what I'm doing is worth seeing or not).

I've decided, as I did when I did the show at the Red Eye, to err on the side of simplicity. I've decided against the video projection idea, even though I have images and archive footage to use, because I would rather spend my energy working on the movement and text, and choreographing the piece in the very unique space (I'm performing in the Video rooms toward the back of the gallery). Dixie brought me some sound mixes for one of the new scenes, which I'm really excited about although she hasn't quite finished with it yet. The new movement sequence is the largest new section, although there are also a few new monologues (one by a girlfriend of one of the Conscientious Objectors, and a couple of new Ancel Keys monologues). There are a couple of aspects of the space that are challenging- probably the main difficulty being that there are limited outlets and we can't hang the sound speakers. But I trust Dixie completely and I think she has the thing figured out (in all tech matters I must defer decisions to my collaborators who actually know what they are talking about). Another difficulty is finding the time to rehearse. While the nice thing about doing a one woman show is that I don't have to coordinate schedules with other actors, I have found it's stressful to coordinate rehearsal times with my team of artists helping me (director, choreographer, and sound designer) plus the Soap isn't always available, and often there is a lot of commotion going on.) I think we've nailed some times down to meet in there, though, so hopefully I'll feel a bit better once we hammer out the details of how I'm going to do this thing.