A theatre is not the place for these pieces

The theatre space paradigm is wrong for the setting of these pieces. I need to work more with the Palassmaa-ness of staging, finding site-specific spaces that inform the sense of place within the opera; e.g. CJA in an ice rink or meat locker, ASJ in hotel lobbies, Illiad in war cemetery or paintball arena.

Taking these into consideration would free up the individual media to speak their message - the CJA video projection is not, nor was it overdone, but it was trying too hard to be something more than it is.

I am reminded of Infra http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7588062453697698538# by Wayne McGregor and how I perceived the video element to be a projection from the minds of the dancers. In CJA the musicians should be allowed and seen as musicians embodying the material and their instruments and the projection be 'from them' in a way that we percieve it to be so (perhaps projected on a screen above their heads). This is different to CJA @ Shift Happens which tried to immerse the 'characters' in a virtual place - and miscounted the fact that these are simply musicians in a theatre - thus making trying to decieve the audience through visual representation instead of feeding their mind with another vague sign.

The employment of my iPhone streaming will help this site-specificity greatly, and more-so the added media of 'being in a space'. It also brings into the equation the work with Seven Sisters and cyber-SFM.

These decisions still relies on the creative minds of theatre makers, but circumvents the 'old' meanings of the theatre hall and its pros arch.

Prof. Juhani Pallasmaa – Eyes of the Skin:

A walk through the forest is invigorating and healing due to the constant interaction of all sense modalities; Bachelard speaks of ‘the polyphony of sense’. The eye collaborates with the body and the other senses. One’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this constant interaction.

Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue and muscle. Architecture strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense off being in the world, and this is essentially a strengthened experience of self.

The body is not, however, a mere physical entity; our perception is enriched through memory and past experience, of vivid imagination and dream, of the past and the future. There exists an exchange between the intellect and the intrinsic, mediating the senses with the imagined, the existential and the metaphysical.

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creases an experience of interiority. I regard an object, but sound approaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives. Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return our sounds back to our ears.

Pallasmaa J., (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Wiley Academy, Chichester.