YAAAAAAAHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
http://www.herald.ns.ca/Search/482128.html
pictures to follow... mine sucked, so i'm waiting for a disk from my lighting designer, as well as the official DVD from which we can make stills.
the 2 opera workshop
-
Glorious Amok
- Posts: 551
- Joined: August 16th, 2004, 7:25 am
- Location: in the best of both worlds
- Contact:
the 2 opera workshop
"YOUR way is your only way." - jack kerouac
-
stilltrucking
- Posts: 20607
- Joined: October 24th, 2004, 12:29 pm
- Location: Oz or somepLace like Kansas
Happy for you.
Have you seen this?
It sounds like an interesting and challenging stage production
Heddatron
Morning Edition, February 6, 2006 · An off-off Broadway stage company is putting on Henrik Ibsen's classic drama Hedda Gabler But this production has a twist. The play has been re-named Heddatron and some of the cast are robots.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5191227
Here is a NY TIMES article about it
Do Robots Dream of Electric Lovborgs?
By ALEXIS SOLOSKI
ISAAC ASIMOV'S First Law of Robotics, as any science fiction fan can tell you, states, "A robot may not injure a human being." Perhaps Hans, a gleaming, barrel-chested automaton, hasn't read Asimov. At a recent rehearsal for Les Freres Corbusier's coming play "Heddatron," he defies his radio-controlled commands and zips downstage, thwacking notebooks and coffee cups, as well as the director Alex Timbers and the playwright Elizabeth Meriwether.
Hans's creators, Cindy Jeffers and Meredith Finkelstein of Botmatrix, an art robotics collective, look on with a mix of worry and affectionate pride. Hans may be disobedient, even dangerous, but he's awfully cute. "He's our buddy," Ms. Jeffers explained. "When we were in the middle of making him and he would just be legs, we'd come in and say, 'What's up, Hans?' "
Ms. Jeffers, 31, and Ms. Finkelstein, 28, have spent more than a year designing the robots for "Heddatron." The work is inspired by "Hedda Gabler," Ibsen's 1890 drama about a desperately frustrated woman. (Yes, there are live actors in it, too.) But in this version, which opens at Here Arts Center on Wednesday, Strindberg and Ibsen fight over teacakes and dramaturgy while Jane, an Ypsilanti, Mich., housewife, is abducted by androids, conveyed to their rain forest lair and repeatedly forced to perform "Hedda Gabler."
"Heddatron" calls for five robots: Hedda's husband, George; his Aunt Julie; the maid, Berta; Judge Brack; and the dashing Eilert Lovborg, played by Hans. Hans and the robot Billy, who plays George, are the most sophisticated of the bunch. They not only move and speak, but also emit lights, smoke and ticker tape. Aunt Julie, who also speaks, looks like an elegant silhouette, while Berta is depicted as a bustling broom and Judge Brack as a box on wheels. "But he's dressed up," Ms. Finkelstein said. "He's got a cape. And a wig."
On a cold winter day, the Botmatrix women are dressed in jeans, engineer boots and layers of distressed T-shirts, which Ms. Jeffers accents with a sparkly gold scarf. If one were to believe the Botmatrix Web site (botmatrix.com), Ms. Finkelstein and Ms. Jeffers are robots themselves, escapees from a semiconductor plant in the Philippines and now dedicated to "the liberation and advancement of creative machines everywhere."
Their actual origins are somewhat less exotic: Ms. Jeffers is from Cincinnati and has a background in women's studies and cinematography; Ms. Finkelstein is a Manhattan native with a degree in computer science and philosophy from the University of Chicago. They met at a pretzels-and-soda social for students at New York University's masters program in Interactive Telecommunication, or ITP. As part of her studies, Ms. Finkelstein designed scurrying robots made from chunky cellphones and children's toys from the 1970's. "They looked like stuffed animals," she said. For her master's thesis, Ms. Jeffers built a moving topographical map that monitored protest of semiconductor factories around the world.
N.Y.U.'s telecommunications program once had a school club called the Robotics Society of America, "but it had disappeared," Ms. Finkelstein said. "When we graduated from ITP, we thought it would be nice to have this group again. But Cindy wanted to call it the Botmatrix." The group, which builds all manner of robots, consists of Ms. Finkelstein, Ms. Jeffers and another ITP graduate, Shelley Ann West, currently on sabbatical. Their work sometimes resembles a jollier version of the destructive robot performances pioneered by the San Francisco collective Survival Research Laboratories, and sometimes embodies theories of writers like Ray Kurzweil, who envisions a blend of humanlike consciousness and technology. Perhaps most of all, however, they want people to appreciate robots — for their design, abilities and beauty. "There's a lot of anti-robot prejudice," Ms. Jeffers said, "and we'd like to turn that round."
The women designed mechanized wristbands for activists to wear during the 2004 Republican National Convention and also organized a robotics lectures series at the Tank, a center for visual and performance art. At the Tank, a friend introduced them to Mr. Timbers. For three years, he had dreamed of a "Hedda Gabler" with robots and he floated the idea to Botmatrix. The women looked at the time frame (generous), the proposed budget (less so) and thought they could make it work.
"The process has been fantastic," Mr. Timbers said. "There aren't a lot of women who make robots." To have them build the automatons, he said, that "interact with Hedda, this great feminist hero or antihero, is much more resonant than if we were working with a bunch of 'Star Wars'-loving, potato-chip-chewing boys."
"Heddatron" presented a new challenge for Botmatrix. For starters, the women had never been involved in a theatrical venture. What's more, as Ms. Jeffers explained: "We've never made humanoid robots before. That was the hardest thing. We think robots should not be humanoid and should not be controlled." Ms. Jeffers and Ms. Finkelstein prize robots that display high levels of independence and can respond to changes in light, sound or location.
Still, they recognized that would not quite work for "Heddatron." "When you're doing a play, you don't want robots to act on their own, you want to control them," Ms. Finkelstein said. "You don't want to be innovative. You want the technology to work." And the play's director, Mr. Timbers, required that the robots be tall, humanoid and metallic.
As they all worked together, Ms. Meriwether and Mr. Timbers acquainted the robot designers with the vagaries of blocking, technical rehearsals and the Ibsen-Strindberg rivalry. Last fall, they took a field trip to see Ivo van Hove's provocative production of "Hedda Gabler" at New York Theater Workshop. Ms. Jeffers said she found the show "too emotionally violent," but Ms. Finkelstein praised the design and added that they transformed John Douglas Thompson's vicious portrayal of Judge Brack into a particularly destructive bot. Mr. Thompson's Brack repeatedly shoved Hedda into a wall; the Brack-bot zooms ominously back and forth between the stage walls.
Ms. Finkelstein says she has grandiose dreams of someday creating an all-robot opera: "It would be the robot creation myth. I have this vision of these clouds, all this robotic foam."
Les Freres Corbusier, in turn, have learned something about robotics. "They've been so helpful," Ms. Meriwether said. "They explained the idea of singularity to me when I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the play." Singularity — the notion popularized by Mr. Kurzweil that robots will soon acquire self-awareness — now informs the play.
In the meantime, the Botmatrix women consider it their mission to improve people's attitudes toward androids. "My favorite line in the play is 'I didn't know we had robots in the area,' " Ms. Jeffers said. "Most people don't know there are robots everywhere, the ATM, the MetroCard swipey thing." Certainly, as they tinker with their bots — particularly Billy, the scrappy "junkbot" who plays George — their fondness for the androids is infectious.
"These girls think robots get a bad rap in pop culture," Mr. Timbers said. "And that caused me to reassess how we were depicting them. There was an earlier draft in which Ibsen constructed robots to help him kill young women, and during a reading I felt a little embarrassed and ashamed to look over at them" — Ms. Jeffers and Ms. Finkelstein — "and see their reactions. The robots have taken on a much more positive force in the show."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/theat ... nted=print
Have you seen this?
It sounds like an interesting and challenging stage production
Heddatron
Morning Edition, February 6, 2006 · An off-off Broadway stage company is putting on Henrik Ibsen's classic drama Hedda Gabler But this production has a twist. The play has been re-named Heddatron and some of the cast are robots.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5191227
Here is a NY TIMES article about it
Do Robots Dream of Electric Lovborgs?
By ALEXIS SOLOSKI
ISAAC ASIMOV'S First Law of Robotics, as any science fiction fan can tell you, states, "A robot may not injure a human being." Perhaps Hans, a gleaming, barrel-chested automaton, hasn't read Asimov. At a recent rehearsal for Les Freres Corbusier's coming play "Heddatron," he defies his radio-controlled commands and zips downstage, thwacking notebooks and coffee cups, as well as the director Alex Timbers and the playwright Elizabeth Meriwether.
Hans's creators, Cindy Jeffers and Meredith Finkelstein of Botmatrix, an art robotics collective, look on with a mix of worry and affectionate pride. Hans may be disobedient, even dangerous, but he's awfully cute. "He's our buddy," Ms. Jeffers explained. "When we were in the middle of making him and he would just be legs, we'd come in and say, 'What's up, Hans?' "
Ms. Jeffers, 31, and Ms. Finkelstein, 28, have spent more than a year designing the robots for "Heddatron." The work is inspired by "Hedda Gabler," Ibsen's 1890 drama about a desperately frustrated woman. (Yes, there are live actors in it, too.) But in this version, which opens at Here Arts Center on Wednesday, Strindberg and Ibsen fight over teacakes and dramaturgy while Jane, an Ypsilanti, Mich., housewife, is abducted by androids, conveyed to their rain forest lair and repeatedly forced to perform "Hedda Gabler."
"Heddatron" calls for five robots: Hedda's husband, George; his Aunt Julie; the maid, Berta; Judge Brack; and the dashing Eilert Lovborg, played by Hans. Hans and the robot Billy, who plays George, are the most sophisticated of the bunch. They not only move and speak, but also emit lights, smoke and ticker tape. Aunt Julie, who also speaks, looks like an elegant silhouette, while Berta is depicted as a bustling broom and Judge Brack as a box on wheels. "But he's dressed up," Ms. Finkelstein said. "He's got a cape. And a wig."
On a cold winter day, the Botmatrix women are dressed in jeans, engineer boots and layers of distressed T-shirts, which Ms. Jeffers accents with a sparkly gold scarf. If one were to believe the Botmatrix Web site (botmatrix.com), Ms. Finkelstein and Ms. Jeffers are robots themselves, escapees from a semiconductor plant in the Philippines and now dedicated to "the liberation and advancement of creative machines everywhere."
Their actual origins are somewhat less exotic: Ms. Jeffers is from Cincinnati and has a background in women's studies and cinematography; Ms. Finkelstein is a Manhattan native with a degree in computer science and philosophy from the University of Chicago. They met at a pretzels-and-soda social for students at New York University's masters program in Interactive Telecommunication, or ITP. As part of her studies, Ms. Finkelstein designed scurrying robots made from chunky cellphones and children's toys from the 1970's. "They looked like stuffed animals," she said. For her master's thesis, Ms. Jeffers built a moving topographical map that monitored protest of semiconductor factories around the world.
N.Y.U.'s telecommunications program once had a school club called the Robotics Society of America, "but it had disappeared," Ms. Finkelstein said. "When we graduated from ITP, we thought it would be nice to have this group again. But Cindy wanted to call it the Botmatrix." The group, which builds all manner of robots, consists of Ms. Finkelstein, Ms. Jeffers and another ITP graduate, Shelley Ann West, currently on sabbatical. Their work sometimes resembles a jollier version of the destructive robot performances pioneered by the San Francisco collective Survival Research Laboratories, and sometimes embodies theories of writers like Ray Kurzweil, who envisions a blend of humanlike consciousness and technology. Perhaps most of all, however, they want people to appreciate robots — for their design, abilities and beauty. "There's a lot of anti-robot prejudice," Ms. Jeffers said, "and we'd like to turn that round."
The women designed mechanized wristbands for activists to wear during the 2004 Republican National Convention and also organized a robotics lectures series at the Tank, a center for visual and performance art. At the Tank, a friend introduced them to Mr. Timbers. For three years, he had dreamed of a "Hedda Gabler" with robots and he floated the idea to Botmatrix. The women looked at the time frame (generous), the proposed budget (less so) and thought they could make it work.
"The process has been fantastic," Mr. Timbers said. "There aren't a lot of women who make robots." To have them build the automatons, he said, that "interact with Hedda, this great feminist hero or antihero, is much more resonant than if we were working with a bunch of 'Star Wars'-loving, potato-chip-chewing boys."
"Heddatron" presented a new challenge for Botmatrix. For starters, the women had never been involved in a theatrical venture. What's more, as Ms. Jeffers explained: "We've never made humanoid robots before. That was the hardest thing. We think robots should not be humanoid and should not be controlled." Ms. Jeffers and Ms. Finkelstein prize robots that display high levels of independence and can respond to changes in light, sound or location.
Still, they recognized that would not quite work for "Heddatron." "When you're doing a play, you don't want robots to act on their own, you want to control them," Ms. Finkelstein said. "You don't want to be innovative. You want the technology to work." And the play's director, Mr. Timbers, required that the robots be tall, humanoid and metallic.
As they all worked together, Ms. Meriwether and Mr. Timbers acquainted the robot designers with the vagaries of blocking, technical rehearsals and the Ibsen-Strindberg rivalry. Last fall, they took a field trip to see Ivo van Hove's provocative production of "Hedda Gabler" at New York Theater Workshop. Ms. Jeffers said she found the show "too emotionally violent," but Ms. Finkelstein praised the design and added that they transformed John Douglas Thompson's vicious portrayal of Judge Brack into a particularly destructive bot. Mr. Thompson's Brack repeatedly shoved Hedda into a wall; the Brack-bot zooms ominously back and forth between the stage walls.
Ms. Finkelstein says she has grandiose dreams of someday creating an all-robot opera: "It would be the robot creation myth. I have this vision of these clouds, all this robotic foam."
Les Freres Corbusier, in turn, have learned something about robotics. "They've been so helpful," Ms. Meriwether said. "They explained the idea of singularity to me when I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the play." Singularity — the notion popularized by Mr. Kurzweil that robots will soon acquire self-awareness — now informs the play.
In the meantime, the Botmatrix women consider it their mission to improve people's attitudes toward androids. "My favorite line in the play is 'I didn't know we had robots in the area,' " Ms. Jeffers said. "Most people don't know there are robots everywhere, the ATM, the MetroCard swipey thing." Certainly, as they tinker with their bots — particularly Billy, the scrappy "junkbot" who plays George — their fondness for the androids is infectious.
"These girls think robots get a bad rap in pop culture," Mr. Timbers said. "And that caused me to reassess how we were depicting them. There was an earlier draft in which Ibsen constructed robots to help him kill young women, and during a reading I felt a little embarrassed and ashamed to look over at them" — Ms. Jeffers and Ms. Finkelstein — "and see their reactions. The robots have taken on a much more positive force in the show."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/theat ... nted=print
-
Glorious Amok
- Posts: 551
- Joined: August 16th, 2004, 7:25 am
- Location: in the best of both worlds
- Contact:
http://www.dal.ca/news/index.html
if you click on that photo in the upper right corner, a brief quicktime video of the 1st opera will play. this opera is set in italy in the 1750's.
what you cannot see in this shot is that there are 4 huge ornate golden mirror frames hanging in the air, there's just no light on them in that shot. also, there is a big blue sky painting hanging over the giant doors at rear, and there is a row of seashell shaped floorlights downstage, to either side of the prompter's box, which is the very large seashell shape at downstage centre.
um, yeah. and i still don't have any pix of the big opera which followed, but i'll certainly post them as soon as i get some.
yay!
if you click on that photo in the upper right corner, a brief quicktime video of the 1st opera will play. this opera is set in italy in the 1750's.
what you cannot see in this shot is that there are 4 huge ornate golden mirror frames hanging in the air, there's just no light on them in that shot. also, there is a big blue sky painting hanging over the giant doors at rear, and there is a row of seashell shaped floorlights downstage, to either side of the prompter's box, which is the very large seashell shape at downstage centre.
um, yeah. and i still don't have any pix of the big opera which followed, but i'll certainly post them as soon as i get some.
yay!
"YOUR way is your only way." - jack kerouac
gee, this is in your home town?
you got communionity, quite a place,
halifax, out on the atlantic, gulf stream wafting there
beautious visions and ecstasies
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
magnificent little ditty i must say
it came thru loud and clear
roger that
it took a bit to get the lingo
i waz thinkin
what lingo is that?
then i read a bit from the plot and
eureka
i got it
there is a housekeeper at work
she is latina
on valentines day we looked at each other and smiled
and blushed and she looked at me and said,
"usted tambien"
an i said, "muchas gracias"
one of the pleasures at the jewel mine.
thanks for the exposure
to your little kool slice of paradise,
oh amok one
berzerking
your website is satorical!
MERCY!
why do you say that your photos sucked?
did you trash them?
no no don't do that
show me some rejects.
i wanna see your bad stuff
oh still sojurnying one,
duh, thanks for the audio
i heard of that guy ibzen
like i heard about fausty
thanks for the exposure
from the winterlands of northern mexico
south of the brazos
wildflowerz in th spring
blue bonnets coming your way
from la mancha with luv,,,,,
jimbolocorococo over and out
you got communionity, quite a place,
halifax, out on the atlantic, gulf stream wafting there
beautious visions and ecstasies
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
magnificent little ditty i must say
it came thru loud and clear
roger that
it took a bit to get the lingo
i waz thinkin
what lingo is that?
then i read a bit from the plot and
eureka
i got it
there is a housekeeper at work
she is latina
on valentines day we looked at each other and smiled
and blushed and she looked at me and said,
"usted tambien"
an i said, "muchas gracias"
one of the pleasures at the jewel mine.
thanks for the exposure
to your little kool slice of paradise,
oh amok one
berzerking
your website is satorical!
MERCY!
why do you say that your photos sucked?
did you trash them?
no no don't do that
show me some rejects.
i wanna see your bad stuff
oh still sojurnying one,
duh, thanks for the audio
i heard of that guy ibzen
like i heard about fausty
thanks for the exposure
from the winterlands of northern mexico
south of the brazos
wildflowerz in th spring
blue bonnets coming your way
from la mancha with luv,,,,,
adios amigasif the robots end up in a different place
that's funny
jimbolocorococo over and out
[color=darkcyan]i'm on a survival mission
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
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