From Blog Director Jill Randall:

Lately, I have been thinking about dance writing and dance publicity. How do we share/invite/entice/preview a work for our potential audience members? Salt Lake City-based artist Molly Heller and I are playing with this idea for the 7 days leading up to her show, very vary, at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley on December 2nd and 3rd. (Get your tickets here.)

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Photo: Michael Wall via Instagram

Today we hear from composer and collaborator Michael Wall:
One of the first questions that always gets discussed with a choreographer is whether or not the piece will have live music or recorded music. These days, I use the same software (Ableton Live) to record all of my music and play live. Molly and I decided early on in the process that we wanted to make a piece with the music performed live.

The next question/problem for me to solve then is “why?”. Why do I need to be live? If I will simply be playing tracks back on the same software that I mix within my studio, why should I do that live? For any live piece that I do, I add acoustic instruments into the mix. My main goal is to broaden the audience’s sonic experience. I try to balance the sound coming from the speakers with any acoustic instruments I am playing.

For the first performance of “very vary," I used piano, pump organ, voice and trumpet along with the electronic parts of the score. The pump organ that I have is a very special instrument to my collection. It is from the 1920s and sounds so amazing because it is so quiet compared to the loud thumping house section of the score. The sonic opposition gives range to the score and lets the audience’s ears rest and “search" for the sound, drawing them into the experience of the dance.

Traveling the piece to Berkeley this weekend left us with a challenge – no pump organ. It is too fragile to fly, so we decided to use the acoustic piano in its place. Although it is not the same timbre, the acoustic nature still has the same effect on the audience. Molly is a thoughtful artist and is open to these concerns, which made this piece such a joy to work on. We are super excited to share the piece with a whole new community this weekend.

Picture: Duhaime Movement Project

Check out a video of the project here.

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very vary, choreographed by Molly Heller

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

2704 Alcatraz Avenue

Berkeley, CA 94705

Saturday, December 2nd at 8pm (post show Q&A with Heller and cast, moderated by Katie Faulkner)

Sunday, December 3rd at 3:30pm

Tickets: $20 General/ $15 Student

veryvary.brownpapertickets.com

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