"Ruin"
Sound Collaboration with
Kyle Marshal Choreography
@ Philadelphia Museum of Art, Great Hall
"Ruin reflects on the natural rhythms and elemental rituals that shape humankind by excavating body percussion and our physical relationship to sound.
[Kinaesthetic and] Dynamic listening devices designed and constructed by sound collaborator Cal Fish will be used throughout the dance.
Through their magic, the ground and air become sources of sound and amplification. In real time, music is cultivated by performers,
Bree Breeden, Jose Lapaz-Rodriguez, Kyle Marshall, Nik Owens and Cayleen Del Rosario. Ruin will have costumes, hair and make-up designed
by KMC visual director Edo Tastic constructed by Meagan Woods, with lighting by Itohan Edoloyi. In this dance, we reflect on the artifacts of our actions.
Through acknowledging these echoes of history, we reckon with the syncopation of our modern lives and the dynamic cycles of human civilization."
photos by Albert Yee...
"Kyle Marshall Choreography presented Ruin -a new dance commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in cooperation with its popular :Matisse in the 1930s"
exhibit-in a series of performances over the past weekend (January 20-22) in the Great Stair Hall of the museum....
Marshall joined forces with sonic wizard Cal Fish and visual artist Edo Tastic to create an organic fusion of dance, sound, and design. The various elements
are interdependent, yet make breathing room for each other-and for the audience too.
Fish developed "dynamic listening instruments" for the piece, which include hand-held buckets that the dancers swing to generate sound. Fish also embedded copper
plates into the floor, turning the entire stage into a soundboard as the dancers step on the plates to trigger recorded sound samples. During the performance,
Fish was stationed on the side of the stage, mixing the ambient noises from the museum's public space together with the sounds produced by the dancers.
The dance itself arises from the rhythms of the dancers' stamping feet, with the gradual addition of hands clapping and slapping their bodies. It feels like the
movement and percussion are in their bones. The dance builds up in waves-an ebbing and flowing of percussive and silent passages. In one intensified section,
the dancers gather into a close bunch to create a complex percussive unit and then advance toward the front of the stage in syncopated formation.""
- Jane Fries in The DANCE Journal
"Sound collaborator, Cal Fish miked the dance floor and arranged copper wires that used the conductivity of the dancers' bodies to trigger percussive sound samples.
The dancers themselves created the kinesthetic sound sculptures which were then repeated and looped often sounding like water trickling or branches brushing a window.
Fish, in costume as a performer, appeared onstage first to sound check the mikes and then stepped to the side to amplify the gently soaring score.
Handmade by Fish, the dancers carried objects that contained "Dynamic Listening Instruments" that included speakers and copper coils allowing them to manipulate
latent sounds present in electromagnetic fields at the front of the stage. These buckets and fields shared sounds from recorded archives including crickets, voices,
and drones.
One by one, the performers, Bree Breeden, Jose Lapaz-Rodriguez, Kyle Marshall, Nik Owens and Cayleen Del Rosario, entered the space each holding vessels that could
carry water, an aquarian theme that runs through many Matisse paintings."
- Merilyn Jackson in the Fjord Review
