In 1961, Ellen Stewart revolutionized the New York performance scene when she opened Café La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street tenement. The African-American fashion designer-cum-impresario imagined the new space as an alternative to popular Off-Off Broadway venues like Caffe Cino and the Gaslight — small spaces that were relics of, and still very much associated with the Beat coffeehouse scene.

Those early venues had been created with a particular ambiance and with a specific audience in mind. Stewart’s innovation was to create a truly neutral performance venue to serve as a tabula rasa for emerging playwrights, allowing them to create new work on their own terms. La MaMa was truly a “black box” — a theatrical architecture that inspired future generations of underground performance and spawned what might be called a micro-theatre movement in the East Village and the Lower East Side that continues to this day. But the black box wasn’t the only experimental innovation happening in the 1960s New York art world.

Early in that decade, ideas driving the convergence of art with cybernetic and computer technology, being conducted in Europe by Roy Ascott and others, reached the United States. In 1966, American composer and sound-art pioneer Max Neuhaus teamed up with NYC radio station WBAI to create “Public Supply” — an experiment in two-way aural public space in which listeners could contribute to a composition in real time by phoning into the station and having their voices electronically transformed into components of a musical composition. The project is considered one of the first successful artistic collaborations over an electronic network in real-time. The same year, renowned abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg met an engineer from Bell Telephone Lab named Billy Klüver. Together, they launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), with the aim of connecting artists and technologists to launch experimental explorations into the intersection of art and technology.

Meanwhile, Ellen Stewart connected La MaMa with theatrical communities worldwide and built a global circuit of independent theatrical practitioners. Networking, collaboration, and technology were all emerging into the cultural zeitgeist — blending, morphing, and generating new art forms and schools of thought.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that in 2009, La MaMa launched CultureHub — its own art and technology incubator, in partnership with Korea’s Seoul Institute of the Arts. The collaboration is dedicated not only to blending technology with performance but also to using tech as a tool to continue the theatre’s long tradition of connecting cultures around the world. The new laboratory’s stated mission is to provide “a shared space for artists to collaborate, share ideas, and create interdisciplinary works of art that explore emerging mediums and technologies.” For the past four years, they have been doing just that. In addition to presenting art/tech hybrids in their wired black box studio on Great Jones Street, CultureHub is equally invested in youth media and educational initiatives, conducting workshops for students, teens, and young artists. Virtualab, one of its flagship programs, connects students and professional artists via distance learning.

One of the core technologies utilized by CultureHub specifically for this purpose is something called telepresence, which might be thought of as a hyper-customized version of teleconferencing. As opposed to participants sitting around a table and projecting to a single screen, telepresence uses live video to build virtual environments, utilizing multi-camera viewpoints and projecting video to an entire wall, creating an atmosphere of virtual “liveness.”

CultureHub Artistic Director Billy Clark says that by incorporating this technology on a larger scale and using multiple cameras, you can “get to a certain level of abstractly feeling like you’re there.” CultureHub has already implemented this technology for several projects, including workshops conducted with students at their partner organization in Korea and a virtual spoken word workshop connecting youth from New Orleans and New York City in collaboration with the Hip Hop Re:Education Project (reeducate.org). The latter experiment was so successful that, after the workshop, the students in Louisiana raised their own money to travel to New York to meet their “classmates” in person.

“It’s never going to be entirely like being physically present,” said CultureHub Managing Director Anna Hayman, “but you do make eye contact, you do hear people breathe.” She also pointed out that the technology seems to increase the engagement of its participants, particularly kids. “They feel like they’re being treated to something special. It’s actually more engaging than a conventional classroom where they’re just sitting there. Kids forge real relationships in that environment.”

Though the young organization represents an exciting new direction for La MaMa, CultureHub recognizes its place in a continuum of artists working with technology — and acknowledges that, while the work they create and support is innovative, it also builds on decades of experimentation by prior artists. Clark concurs, noting, “The ideas aren’t that new. Nam Jun Paik was doing this in the late 70s and early 80s. But now the technology is more ubiquitous, it’s cheaper. High-speed Internet is on all the time.”

That ubiquity has necessitated a cultural space for artists — some of whom have never used technology in their work — to experiment with tech in a low-risk environment. “We’re trying to support artists in their very early stages of development,” Clark said. “We want to give them a space where they have access to technology and can just try something, like a sketch. Some might get developed, and others end up as more of a one-off. It’s a learning experience.”

Having worked on a project-to-project basis since its inception, CultureHub is borrowing a page from the theatrical establishment by launching its first-ever “season” of technologically based works (running until the end of the year). The centerpiece of that season is RE/FEST — a three-day festival of mediated performance, interactive installations, and talks taking place from November 29-December 1 at CultureHub’s Great Jones Street studio.

RE/FEST kicks off on Friday night with an evening of performance curated in collaboration with the annual RE/Mixed Media Festival (which returns in April 2014 at The New School). In addition to performances by Adriano Clemente and David Commander, Friday’s kickoff event will feature a piece called the “Long Table” — a discursive art form pioneered by performance artist Lois Weaver that begins with eight artists seated at a table discussing a topic provided by the curators. As the conversation progresses, audience members are invited to come to the table and add their voices to the discussion. They may even ask for one of the participants’ seats if the table happens to be full.

Saturday and Sunday will continue with work by, Culture Hub says in a press release, revealing “how new technologies are changing performance practices, how networked screens and communications technologies are changing the way artists collaborate and create, what the exhibition/performance venue of tomorrow might look like, and how the nature of storytelling is becoming cross-media, multi-modal, and multi-locational.” Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, will also be on hand to present work he’s been developing with the Seoul Institute which, according to Hayman, will involve “new hardware and software and have a performative element.”

The partnership with RE/Mixed Media Festival in curating the first night of RE/FEST demonstrates the collaborative ethos that CultureHub has inherited from La MaMa. “So often in the not-for-profit world, you’re forced to have your head down,” Clark said, “you don’t have enough resources, you’re always too busy, you’re trying to scramble. But many of us are scrambling in the same direction without taking the time to look up and say, ‘Hey, they’re doing something similar. What if we worked together?’ We certainly can’t solve that whole problem, but the spirit is one of collaboration.”

In recent years, New York’s micro-theatre movement, which was activated by Ellen Stewart’s “black box,” has foundered in the wake of higher rents and aggressive real estate development. Several storefront theaters that flourished in the Lower East Side in the 90s — Surf Reality, Todo Con Nada, and Collective Unconscious, to name just a few — have disappeared. But the loss of physical space doesn’t necessarily mean that those artists have stopped working. Surf Reality has resurfaced as a producing entity that dabbles in the technological, and Collective Unconscious recently collaborated with Three Legged Dog to produce a 3D cinematic adaptation of their 1999 theatrical experiment, “Charlie Victor Romeo,” a film that was lauded at Sundance and other festivals throughout the country. Other organizations exploring the intersection of art and technology, such as Eyebeam and IMC Lab + Gallery, have developed performative works with independent artists.

Perhaps for the performance community, the current circumstance isn’t one of loss but one of transition — one that may require we revisit the ideals of community and collaboration embraced by Ellen Stewart. CultureHub claims they are “transforming the black box for the new century.” Their MaMa would be proud.

The post The new black box has global reach first appeared on Tom Tenney.

The Brick Theater produces a lot of festivals – it’s kind of their thing.  But festivals at the Williamsburg experimental venue aren’t your garden-variety observance of artist or genre; they’ve become the theatre’s way of exploring aesthetic and cultural intersections.  Sure, some of the dozens of festivals produced during the theatre’s first decade have had a chimerical bent (The Antidepressant Festival comes to mind), but just as often they examine critical connections between live theatre and other arts or performative elements.  Their annual Game Play festivals, for example, present works that probe the relationship between performance and video gaming.  Others, like the Comic Book Theatre Festival, bring divergent artistic forms to the theatrical table.  It’s what Artistic Director Michael Gardner calls “hybrid theatre,” and it makes one wonder what took them so long to come around to sound design.  But come around they did, and for two weeks starting June 6^th, the Brick Theater will present sound scape: a festival of 12 productions that celebrates the sound designer as a driving creative force.

“‘I’m a huge fan of sound design,” Gardner said,  “It’s an unsung art form, and needed a spotlight. In this festival, the sound designer is the primary artist, and sound design, typically in the background in most theatrical shows, is foregrounded.”

While sound and theatre aren’t exactly incongruous forms – sound, of course, is an integral element in theatre – the aural is normally relegated to the role of servile valet to the mighty image, and this is precisely what makes it cry out for a festival of its own.

Scanning the roster of performances, it’s hard to miss the fact that over half the productions in sound scape are based on past works – a fact that is thrilling to Gardner, who also curated the festival. “There’s a lot of classic text in there, and it spans a wide swathe of time,” he said. “You’ve got Homer, Dante, Beckett, and Virginia Woolf.  It wasn’t intentional, it’s just how it fell out.”

One of the most intriguing of these is a performance of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 recording, I Am Sitting in a Room.  A classic among aficionados of avant-garde composition, Lucier’s piece is as much a scientific experiment as it is a work of art.  In the original, Lucier recorded himself speaking into a tape recorder in an isolated room.  The tape was then rewound, played back, and re-recorded onto a second machine.  This process repeated through several generations, each producing resonant frequencies which harmonized with each other until the artist’s voice was obliterated, and all that remained were reverberating tones.  This was groundbreaking stuff in 1969, and sound designer Ryan Holsopple’s revival as a concert-style performance designed using 2013 technology (the multimedia program Max/MSP) may be considered a scientific experiment in its own right. Holsopple will employ the Brick’s new 5.2 surround sound system, but his use of modern tech is aimed towards maintaining the original piece’s simplicity.  “It’s very stripped down and simple at its core,” he explained, adding that a public performance allows the possibility of the audience becoming part of the composition itself, in the tradition of John Cage.  “If people get up to go to the bathroom, cough, move around, or if a siren goes by, every sound becomes a part of it because the room is constantly being recorded.”

Chris Chappell also plans on exploiting the Brick’s new sound system to the fullest. His piece, ELE↓↑TOR, was developed specifically for the kind of theatrical spacialization that a surround system can provide.  The play takes place in an elevator in the Empire State Building slowly ascending through a sonic spectrum on its way to the 80^th floor.  Elevators are awkward and uncomfortable, and Chappell sculpts his sound to evoke this feeling in the audience. “We’re trying to create a feeling of being pushed into the confinement of a closed space,” he explained. Chappell sites 2 disparate sonic inspirations for the piece – elevator music, and the “noise instruments” developed the Futurist Luigi Russolo a century ago.  He views the former as “a really empty kind of music, with a flattening quality that dampens the sharper emotions” – a perfect soundtrack to the social awkwardness of elevators.  Russolo’s influence is a bit more opaque, with pounding, electrical zapping, and the sounds of “unfathomable technology” providing a counterpoint to the corporate, anxiety-mitigating quality of elevator music. Chappell says this theatrical noise “is not about soothing the modern man, it’s very loud and threatening and unpredictable.”

Another interesting sonic play on the past is Commotion Collage, which appropriates elements from the Dadaist simultaneous poem – a form pioneered in 1916 by Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire, in which multiple voices and other sounds combine in a singular sonic composition.  Director Roger Nasser’s appropriation liberates the original form from of its historic cultural context, and yokes it into service as a building block for a more contemporary version of the acoustic collage.  “I’m going to take fragments of the original poems and weave them throughout, as part of the background,” he explained, but he’ll also include contemporary sounds, such as answering machine messages, white noise, and a riff from the Family Ties theme song – artifacts from an electronic culture that didn’t yet exist in 1916.

Given the number of ways the festival’s producers are demonstrating that a focus on sound can spur such theatrical innovation, it’s unlikely that sound scape will be merely a one-off festival, and may even become a staple of the Brick’s annual offerings.  “I like the idea that theatre began as an auditory experience,” Gardner said, “Today, one thinks of going to see a play, but we want to remind the audience that they’re there to listen.  I hope this is an opportunity for audiences to reinterpret what the stage is to them, and to re-imagine what a theatre-going experience can be.”

The post Brick Up Your Ears first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In a 1913 letter to the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo declared, “The variety of noises is infinite…today we have perhaps a thousand different machines, and can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.” This letter, which became a known as “The Art of Noises,” advocated a new sonic vocabulary through the imitation of machines and became one of the most important manifestos in the history of sound.

As technological advances at the turn of the century paved the way for a revolution in mass media, they also created new possibilities for individual expression. By mid-century, the computer had opened new sonic territory by permitting unprecedented extension of sounds and scales, pushing the boundaries of music beyond what the Futurists ever imagined. In 1983, seventy years after Russolo’s letter, a British avant-garde electronic group that called itself The Art of Noise (after the manifesto) released a song that mixed sampled sounds of car engines and industrial machinery with time-warped drum beats and orchestral stabs. This song would become one of the most influential instrumentals in the world of hip-hop, sampled by artists from X-Clan to Marky Mark. The name of that song was “Beat Box.” A year later, an 18-year-old rapper from Harlem by the name of Doug E. Fresh pioneered the art of imitating electronic drum machines using only his voice — the art of “beatboxing” was born, and the verity of Russolo’s vision was, once again, affirmed.

As do all musical genres, beatboxing has evolved in the intervening three decades, spawning a variety of techniques, including the “human turntable,” a style invented by Wise of the group Stetsasonic, and “mouth drumming” developed by Wes Carroll. From May 24-26, the Third Annual American Human Beatbox Festival at LaMaMa Theatre will give New Yorkers the opportunity to sample some of the most eclectic beatboxing styles by artists who make percussive rhythms with the human voice.

Now in its third year, this three day exhibition of performances, workshops and film kicks off on Friday night with a battle, not of beatboxers, but beatrhymers, performers who beatbox and rhyme at the same time. Beatrhyming was developed and popularized by the festival’s curator, Kid Lucky, who coined the term, and who characterizes the new style as one that allows the performer to move beyond simply providing a beat. Beatrhyming adds language – poetry, rap, song, spoken word – to the vocal effects, freeing the piece to take off in new directions. “Beatboxers listen to the beat,” Lucky explains, “Emcees listen to the words. With beatrhyming we listen to the whole concept of the song.” Kid Lucky isn’t the first to beatrhyme, and readily acknowledges those who went before him, like Biz Markie, Darren Robinson of the Fat Boys, and Rahzel of the Roots, who astonished hip-hop audiences by beatboxing and singing the chorus simultaneously on “If Your Mother Only Knew.”

For the most part, however, Lucky has seen beatboxers use beatrhyming mainly as a musical machination, a trick for cheap applause. Lucky, who began beatrhyming in the mid 90’s, saw the potential to elevate the style into an art form in its own right. “People used beatrhyming as a trick, or a gimmick,” he says, “I saw it as something much more than that. I saw the possibilities to take the concept and push it beyond the boundaries of what anybody else is doing. That’s how you move from gimmick to art.” He’s also quick to point out that beatrhyming doesn’t necessarily mean rapping, but can include a number of vocal styles including singing and spoken word.

When LaMama approached Kid Lucky to curate the first beatboxing festival in 2010, he saw an opportunity to challenge traditional notions of beatboxing, and bring his innovations to a wider audience who may still maintain rigid definitions of beatboxing as a human emulation of technology. While he recognizes the cultural roots of beatboxing as “man-imitating-machine,” Lucky sees beatrhyming as an opportunity to reintroduce the human element, or “soul,” back into the art. “Beatboxing, which began by imitating the Roland 808 drum machine, is more concerned with the electronic aspect,” he explains, “but as beatboxing moves further, it emphasizes the soul and the feeling as opposed to the technical aspect of it.”

For Kid Lucky, the next step in the advancement of beatrhyming is handing his skills down to a new generation of performers. He teaches weekly beatrhyming workshops at Midtown New York’s famous Funkadelic Studios, and plans to develop them into a school of what he calls “Mixed Vocal Arts” — an institution that will teach not only his signature style, but also an entire array of vocal techniques including humming, whistling, scatting, vocal sound effects, singing, spoken word, yodeling, rapping, and Tuvan throat singing. The concept of the school was born of Lucky’s frustration with the limited number of styles represented in universities and professional training schools. Scat singing, for example, a uniquely American form of jazz vocalization popularized by Ella Fitzgerald in the 1950’s, isn’t taught at most universities. “With scatting, Ella Fitzgerald became a whole entire instrument right there, and people went crazy,” Lucky said. “Why would you stop doing that? Why would you stop pushing that type of situation forward?”

Those who wish to experience this “pushing forward” in person should check out the beatrhyming battle on May 24th, where the performers will include: D-Cross, Kid Lucky, Kaila, Graffiti, Richard, Esalaah, Kenny Urban, Mandibul, Menyu, and Baba Israel. Saturday morning, bring your baby beatboxers to the Kids Beatbox Workshop, and then come back for the emcee/beatboxer team battles at 10. Sunday’s offerings include Nos States, a documentary about French boxer, Priceps, followed by a tribute to the late Steve Ben Israel. It’ll be a unique celebration of music, beats, words, and the art of human noise.

The post Rhyme Machine first appeared on Tom Tenney.