May. 19, 2010 - Issue #761: Public Enemy

Prevue

Uncertain knowledge

Knowledge Box's stretched sounds go beyond recognition to inspire dance

It's not every day that you learn a new word which actually fills a hole in your lexicon, but today Shawn Pinchbeck has provided just that. The electro-acoustic musician—one of the founding members of BEAMS and international mover of sound composition—is currently working with Mile Zero Dance on Knowledge Box, a contemporary dance exploration of the macabre themes found in the sketches of American illustrator Edward Gorey, who you may remember from such works as The Gashlycrumb Tinies, or that silly alphabet that starts off with "A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs."

In describing the score he's been creating with dancers Gerry Morita, Katrina Smy, Richard Lee, Eryn Tempest and Danica Smith, Pinchbeck uses the term "acousmatic" to describe the nature of what the audience will hear. The sounds he's using are everyday, household noises that have been stretched, shortened, processed or changed in some way—and because you can't recognize the source of the sound when you hear it in morphed form, these sounds can come across as pretty darn creepy—perfectly suited for the score of a piece examining Gorey, Pinchbeck notes.

There you go: acousmatic. Think of it like repeating a word over and over again until it loses meaning and starts to sound, well, weird. A balloon squeaking, a door closing, birds chirping—these sound objects can all be made so unfamiliar that your brain doesn't know what to do with them.
"My music can sound quite spooky and creepy at the best of times. I guess I have that gene, whatever that is," Pinchbeck says. "For me it's quite easy to come up with ideas for this sort of thing. The scenery really suggests a lot, and when you're doing processed sound it has this otherworldly quality ... You can't identify that sound anymore. It's something else, but it's not a real sound: you can't associate it with anything, so then it's spooky."

As for the scenery of Knowledge Box, that seems a little spooky, too. In the week before production, MZD Artistic Director and choreographer Gerry Morita describes what she sees around her: a mess of teacups, white bridal gowns, characters of crones and voodoo dolls and little girls, lots of black mesh, high heels and a big fur coat—and these are just a few of the things set to appear.

What started out as a performance piece at last year's feats festival has now become a full-length show, this time complete with the hovering, puffy coated man seen in many of Gorey's illustrations. The point being to provide a similar sense of dramatic but simple tension found in his drawings—many of them which featured cute, wide-eyed children teetering on the brink of rather tragic situations.

"The characters have a lot of little deaths in keeping with Gorey," explains Morita, noting that the show also employs live video of the dancers projected over themselves. "There's a lot of macabre, strange little disasters along the pathway of these characters. You get a really interesting assimilation of interactive bits of technology on top of these Gorey images that are really pre-technology—they're more from the mechanical era. It's quite bizarre to have that combination." V

Thu, May 20 – Sat, May 22 (8 pm)
Knowledge Box
Featuring Mile Zero Dance
La Cite Francophone, (8527 - 91 St)
$20 – $25

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