STORM

A Collaboration between Theater Grottesco and the Out of Context Orchestra

Performing February 17-26, 2012

STORM is a play about environment;

it's a journey into the social paradigms that prevent the world from taking action:

a breath-taking ride that audiences and artists take together into unknown artistic form.

BACKGROUND: “Conduction” is a real-time musical composition attributed to contemporary jazz musician Butch Morris and driven by a vocabulary of signs and gestures that are transmitted by a conductor and interpreted by an ensemble of musicians. Morris' 25+ years of investigating conduction has led to a musical form that occupies a middle ground between notation and improvisation, transcending style, category and even culture.

Conductor J.A. Deane has worked with Butch Morris since the beginning of this exploration and concurrently launched Out Of Context (OOC) in 1997 to explore conduction with a modern chamber ensemble and to add an actor into the expression. John Flax, Artistic Director of Theater Grottesco, has been that actor since 2002. Flax and the Grottesco ensemble have worked with dance, opera, symphony, circus and original, image-based theater since 1983. Flax’s OOC instrument is text. He reads from excerpts of literature and theater carefully chosen and edited for their spontaneity, combustion and propulsion.

William Burroughs theorized that a good piece of literature could be cut up and reconstructed at random, and the new construction would still create a meaningful experience for the reader: literature's version of the collage. Burroughs wasn't the first. At a surrealist rally in the 1920's, Tristan Tzara proposed creating a poem on the spot by pulling words from a hat. A riot ensued and Tzara was expelled from the movement. Flax’s OOC texts are cut-ups: short paragraphs from different writers that engage the imagination as they come in and out of the music, creating unexpected stories and emotion. Storm takes this exploration a step further; longer, thematically organized collages supported by visual elements create stories and worlds that may be unexpectedly shattered.

Flax and Deane are drawn to the enigma of 6 billion people sharing a delicate planet. From climate change to recession, pandemics to war and terrorism, both science and myth indicate that cleansing is a natural ecological step. New paradigms are guaranteed.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW STORM AS A WORK IN PROGRESS

THE PROJECT: 3 actors portray a chorus archetypical characters responding to scientific hypothesis and news reports that soften, twist and silence under-the-radar social concerns including:

• After WWII, the U.S. promised to feed the world with a new corporate agriculture. The world responded with a population explosion.
• The current world population is unsustainable at the living standards under which many people currently live and to which most others aspire.
• What scenarios have scholars imagined for global and local crises?
• When Americans are told the truth, their response is unpredictable.

Scientific descriptions and news reports of increasingly serious crises create the arc of a three movement opera:
1. There is a storm on the horizon
2. Fire burns through the species
3. The first celebration afterwards

Texts span historical and contemporary thought crossing cultural barriers. The actors move from character to character, colliding with the information and blending with the emerging music. Dialogue, story and a plethora of images spontaneously erupt. Catharsis follows chaos.

Rear-projected video is used as scenography, sometimes in abstraction creating moods, and other times creating realistic images with which the characters interact. Technicians make instantaneous projection choices based upon the rhythmic intensity of the unfolding action and sound. Performances are real-time experiences, structured improvisations.  In the spirit of Tzara, Burroughs and musical conduction, Storm exposes audiences to new artistic form closely capturing the chaotic spirit of these times, wresting fresh emotion from us and insight into hurdles that can no longer be ignored. 

Photo of J.A. Deane taken by Jim Gale, Photo of John Flax taken by Marc Romanelli.