PREMIERED AT CELLSPACE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA (2008)
CONCEPT/DIRECTION:
Amy Lewis, Katie Lewis, Christopher Mentzel
SCULPTURE: Katie Lewis
MUSIC: Bill Wolter
TECHNOLOGY/LIGHTING INSTALLATION: Christopher Mentzel, Ed Dorrington
CHOREOGRAPHY/DANCE: Nan Busse, Jylian Cortez, Christine Germain, Rosemary Hannon, lola a. katie, Daria Kaufman, Amy Lewis, Meg Neville, Kristan Suko, Eleanore Taft
MUSICIANS: Darren Johnston, Jarred McAdams, Nick Peck, Thomas Scandura, Max Stoffregen, Bill Wolter
GRAPHIC DESIGN: Grace Woo
ABOUT
Choreographer Amy Lewis, visual artist Katie Lewis, technologist Christopher Mentzel, and composer Bill Wolter altered mundane, everyday experience through an interactive multi-media performance event involving data visualization, real time data-driven movement, audience participation, and live music. The artists attempted to transform the accumulation of the mundane into beauty, examining the possibility that daily life is important, an entity to celebrate, and fodder for creation. Hate Log was derived from a single system that was created from a log of petty complaints. In order to change the perspective of a frustrating or annoying experience, the complaints were transformed into sculpture and dance, assigning the experience new meaning as a cog in the wheel of an artistic event. We created six categories of upset (Woken-Up, Fear, Interrupt, Thwarted, Disappointment, and Disorder), which became six categories of choreographic and artistic ideas (Stop, Speed, Interrupt, Force, Change, and Become, respectively). Section One of Hate Log consisted of 21 choreographic etudes based on 21 annoying everyday events. In Section Two, the audience recorded their own irritating events, into a computer program that Mentzel designed. Each event in this section triggered the el-wire sculpture to blink in a certain color, at a certain rate and in a certain pattern, all of which the dancers translated to a choreographic sequence. In Section Three, the artists asked the audience to follow a set of directions, like walk in a circle or blow a whistle, when their assigned color blinked on the el-wire sculpture.