Multimedia Performance Studio
presents
Cyburbia Productions'
SILENCE & DARKNESS
a live movie for the cell phone age
When
Sept. 22 - Oct. 3, 2004
Wed.-Sat. at 8 pm, Sun. at 2 pm
Where
Harris Theatre
Center for the Arts
George Mason University
Fairfax VA
Sponsored by
Department of Art and Visual Technology
and Center for the Arts
College of Visual and Performing Arts
&
College of Arts and Sciences
Reservations and Information
(703) 993-8865
kmalone@gmu.edu
info@cyburbiaproductions.com
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Fairfax, Virginia, August 26, 2004—Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison embark on a 21st century journey, set to a techno-industrial soundtrack featuring animation, live action, live music and video in Cyburbia Productions’ SILENCE & DARKNESS, a live movie for the cell phone age, presented by George Mason’s Center for the Arts’s Multimedia Performance Studio at Harris Theatre, Wednesday through Saturday, September 22 through October 3, 2004.
Performances are Wednesday-Saturday at 8PM, Sunday at 2PM.
Join Edison and Bell on a cyber journey in this live movie—a multimedia performance which integrates live action, song and dance, with digital projections and sound design. Here is a world in which humans attempt to connect—enmeshed in a techno-sphere of cell phones and satellite dishes, chat rooms and web servers, artificial intelligence's and content providers. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison appear as robotic personas to witness all the "improvements" their inventions have wrought.
Co-creator Kirby Malone writes that "animated video projections construct a sort of 'poor man's virtual reality' in which cell phoners swarm from corporate barracks around ghostly prom queens behaving like 18th century automata, caught in a world that is no longer ever silent or dark." The performance is punctuated by passages from Jean Baudrillard's Simulations, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Heiner Müller's HamletMachine, George Orwell's 1984, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Donna Haraway's Simians Cyborgs and Women, and Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."
Multimedia Performance Studio (MPS) is a research and producing/presenting unit of the Department of Art and Visual Technology (AVT), College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason University. MPS was founded by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White. MPS is committed to creating innovative, thought-provoking productions which bring together collaborative teams of guest artists, resident faculty artists and students. MPS combines new and traditional technologies, with elements from theater, cinema and music, to create "live movies," multimedia installations, and other new performance and exhibition forms for the 21st Century.
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Cast and Crew
Writer and Director
Kirby Malone
Multimedia and Scenic Designer
Gail Scott White
Production Manager and Lighting/Scenic Designer
Dan Hobson
Costume Designers
Terral Bolton, Stephanie Lundy (associate)
Sound Designer
Sean Lovelace
Automaton Designer/Sculptor
Robin Hernandez
Actors and Singers
Taylor Coffman, Jen Haefeli, Joshua McCarthy, Chris Parsons,
Prince Rozario, Mike Solo, Kelly Wilson, Grant J. Wylie
Composers
Sean Lovelace, Kelly Wilson, Matt McGarraghy,
Matt Cain and Grant J. Wylie
Music Director
Kelly Wilson
Music Producer
Chris Andrews
Musicians
Matt Cain (turntables), Alison Krayer (drums and percussion),
Sean Lovelace (samplers and electronics), Matt McGarraghy (guitar)
Multimedia Adviser
Ruppert Bohle
Assistant Multimedia Designers
Rebecca Kimmel
Eric Brody
Animators/Multimedia Artists
Chris Andrews, Eric Brody, Soo Jeong Bae, David Danner, Ahmet Dillice,
Young Gi Hong, Won Hee Jung, Pat Kelly, Rebecca Kimmel, Jayeun Ko,
Ioulia Kouskova, Hye-kyung Emily Lee, Hyeki Min, James Allen Orr,
Jin Hee Pak, Sunyoung Park , Prince Rozario, David Rueckert, Mike Solo,
Tate Siev Srey, J Stutt and Gail Scott White
Stage Managers
Kira Hoffmann, Liz Welke, Laura Rozmeski (assistant)
Assistant Director
Chris Parsons
Master Electrician
Mike Novakowski
Prop Master
Renee E. Giamette
Production Assistants
Chris Ashton, Viraj DeSilva, Beth Logan
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Made possible in part by support from Mason Media Lab, CVPA Arts Support Umbrella, AVT InterArts, CVPA Scene Shop,
GMU Costume Shop, Theater of the First Amendment, Department of Theater, Clairvoyant Media, and The Basement Recording Studio.
MPS research is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Cyburbia Productions is a professional multimedia performance company founded in 1999 by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White, and located on the outskirts of the DC beltway, a place that is plugged-in, on-camera, and data-transferred. Cyburbia’s focus is the collaborative creation of "live movies," syntheses of cinema, theater and music, geared particularly to today's multi-sensory young adult audience. The company’s work employs digital projection and sound technologies, and filmic narrative techniques (such as flashback, lip-synch and slow motion), to construct moving stage pictures and sonic theater, in which an ensemble of live actors,singers and musicians interact with animated performers, and emerge from or vanish into projected environments, settings and dreamscapes.
This work is based on the premise that audiences desire live theater that responds to the mile-wide, inch-deep faux-realities of life on a media-saturated planet. The artists who make this work employ new technologies, turning them in on themselves, to cast light on the way they shape and re-configure our world. Cyburbia's artists refrain from worshipping at the altar of technology, although they spend many hours faithfully staring at illuminated screens and hovering over their keyboards like praying mantises.
Cyburbia creates original productions, often drawing on historical or science fiction sources; innovative stagings of opera and new music theater; multimedia scenography for theater, dance and performance art; and indoor and outdoor projection installations. Cyburbia’s artists work in the Multimedia Performance Studio, where they experiment with new and traditional stage technologies, and develop imaginative approaches to the integration of these technologies with the live action and music of theater. In order to accomplish this symbiosis, the company operates simultaneously as a performance ensemble, a film and animation production house, a digital garage band and a stagecraft laboratory, all geared toward producing dynamic multimedia performance spectacles.
Cyburbia draws on Malone and White’s previous collaborations, including multimedia designs for Smallbeer Theater’s SHAMANISM IN NEW JERSEY, and Theater of the First Amendment’s DOCTOR FAUSTUS. They have created multimedia designs for Jose Rivera's MARISOL, Encompass New Opera Theatre's productions of Hans Werner Henze's THE END OF A WORLD and John Harbison's A FULL MOON IN MARCH, and the Virginia Opera; the outdoor projection installation SPLIT: Hive Mind; and the original productions SILENCE & DARKNESS, a live movie for the cell phone age, and TIME TRAVELER ZERO ZERO, a story of John Titor.
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Multimedia Performance Studio (MPS) is a research and professional producing/ presenting unit of the Department of Art and Visual Technology (AVT), College of Visual and Performing Arts, George Mason University. MPS was founded by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White, with the guidance and support of AVT Chair, Scott M. Martin, as a laboratory for new technologies in the performing arts, and currently maintains an evolving ensemble of actors, singers, musicians, designers, writers, directors, stage and production managers, multimedia artists and animators, sculptors, inventors, dramaturgs, historians, mad scientists, technicians and engineers.
MPS productions include: NAKED REVOLUTION, an opera collaboration with artists Komar & Melamid, composer Dave Soldier, librettist Maita di Niscemi and conductor Sybille Werner; the original performances AUTO-BODIES, TECHNOCRACY and FLESH-BOT; and multimedia designs for choreographers Jane Franklin and Elizabeth Price, and a production in celebration of Langston Hughes.
MPS is committed to creating innovative, thought-provoking productions which bring together collaborative teams of guest artists, resident faculty artists and student artists, in the belief that it is just such a combination of talent, energy and commitment that led to many of the ground-breaking developments in music theater and performance in the 20th Century, in centers of experiment such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College.
The Multimedia Performance Studio is in its fifth year at Mason, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts in the form of a $125,000 grant for the "New Stage Technology Project." For this project, MPS engages in intensive research into the development, harnessing and synchronization of new technologies for the stage, and their integration with live actors, singers and musicians.
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Kirby Malone
Gallery and Multimedia Performance Studio Director
Assistant Professor of InterArts
Department of Art and Visual Technology
College of Visual and Performing Arts
Mailing Address:
MSN 1C3/C200 College Hall
George Mason University
4400 University Drive
Fairfax VA 22030
(703) 993-8865 (work and voice mail)
(703) 222-5184 (home, no machine)
kmalone@gmu.edu
Gallery: www.gmu.edu/gallery
MPS: www.avt.gmu.edu/mps%20website/html/MPS/htm
Cyburbia: www.cyburbiaproductions.com