FEAR OF FALLING – 2004

Category: Video

In the spring of 2004, Laura Chiarmonte and Marvin Marzocco of the modern dance company  Creative Arts Melting Pot, contacted Deb Vogt and I, to see if we were interested in contributing a multimedia performance for their upcoming show about fears.


IMAGERY
After a brief conversation about our fears and our creative abilities, we decided to pursue the fear of falling.  Deb, who is generally a jewelry maker by the name Delevo, had recently been performing on a range of different trapeze and wanted to use that media to discuss her fears.  I decided that I wanted to use video art to try to ‘lift’ her out of the room and put her high up in the sky, so I began collecting video of birds, planes, and people falling and jumping from great heights.

fear-of-falling-justfall 01 fear-of-falling-justfall 05 fear-of-falling-justfall 07 SOUNDfear-of-falling-justfall 09fear-of-falling-justfall 10
Next, we decided to contact some musicians, we decided that we liked the analog / digital difference between our visual medias and wanted to continue that in the sound.  We drafted Ryan Bockenfeld as our digital musician, he has been performing at galleries and nightclubs on the scene for years under the handle, RSB1000.  Dominic Johnson, our acoustic musician, is a concert violist and cofounder of the New Millennial Orchestra.

STRUCTURE
We discovered that we were going to need a contraption.  Apparently, you can not hang anything from the ceiling at Links Hall, so hanger, Debs Trapeze was out of the question unless we built a cage.  This worked conceptually because “how ironic, a bird with the fear of falling”.  We contacted our builder friends, Josh Sheldon and Dan Simborg to build our cage.  They built it to be portable, as we were only one act in a 4 act evening. Dan also did the rigging on the trapeze (which became instrumental to the performance).

FALLING

We rehearsed the performance for a month and discovered that falling was a constant, not because Deb was a bad trapeze artist, or that Dan’s rigging was insufficient, but that it made the performance better.  We had two different endings, one if the rope broke and one if it didn’t.  Therefore, a cushion below Deb became necessary.

Although, we recorded the performance all four evenings, the best version is this one where the rope broke.