A.M.

music theatre, for soprano, chamber ensemble, multichannel audio and video installation. composed and directed by Arnoud Noordegraaf script: Adrian Hornsby soprano: Mikae Natsuyama set design and construction: Bart Visser camera: Rick Stout dramaturgical advice: Marijn van der Jagt producers: Barooni and November Music inspired by the literature of Haruki Murakami premiere: November 13, 19:00, November Music festival, Den Bosch, NL
work in progress update::: AUGUST: composing and editing, frantically, endlessly! 67 hours of film matierial takes it's toll... JULY: baking in the oven that is my studio, loaded all the countless hours of raw material into fourthousand gigabyte of hard drive space and happily editing + composing at the same time! JUNE: film shoot in Tokyo. In ALL of Tokyo as a matter of fact. And completely Guerrilla-style film shooting as well, there's not a single street in this town that will allow free style film crews... MAY: getting ready to go: Film shoot in Tokyo will be 26 May through 15 June. Multi-monitor test setup on May 17. Let's see what works and what doesn't... APRIL: Test film shoot in Amsterdam. How do you shoot film for one hundred screens instead of just one?! We will find out next month in the test setup of a dozen monitors. :: Tokyo production unit is setting up a video-casting. In the UK Adrian is working overtime on fine-tuning dialogues for the Japanese actors. Back in the NL writing notes and very many emails... MARCH 2010: testing technical decor setup and taking CRT monitors apart. JAN / FEB '10: surrounded by about 400 pictures from nocturnal Tokyo on my studio walls, composing and scripting. DEC '09: processing hundreds of photo's, audio recordings and short film clips. Rendering the found locations into a digital map and exploring the productional possibilities. NOV '09: location scouting in Tokyo: five consecutive nights (from 9 PM to 7 AM) of wandering the streets and capturing the city at different times of night. Plus making the first sound recordings on location.
A.M. is a feature length music theatre performance for soprano, sound tracks and a large video installation. A.M. is conceived by composer and director Arnoud Noordegraaf, it explores the deep, mysterious and somewhat exotic heart of Tokyo city night life. Inspired by the writings of much appraised best selling author Haruki Murakami, Noordegraaf dove deep into the city of Tokyo, to find the heart of this immense and dense society. A.M. spans one night in Tokyo, in the ghostly hours between dusk and dawn. The storylines of two young people wandering the streets for various reasons, run parallel in a narrative style that is both hypnotizing and metaphysical. Time, space, memory and perspective are cleverly woven together in a contemplation on human nature. The dense way this city is built, and the tight social and cultural structure of it's inhabitants, make Tokyo into a great metaphor for society, be it in the East or the West. This giant ant hill represents in a way all ways in which we flock together and try to cope with one another. Apart from Tokyo itself, Murakami’s writings form a great inspiration for this theme. His combination of humour, psychology, moral and a profound understanding of the human mind, are translated by Noordegraaf in a multi disciplinary work. Combining music, text and video, he rolls them into one within his composition. This will result in a performance that is both theatre and sculpture, where décor and auditorium have merged, in a setting of multiple loudspeakers, a baroque soprano and a vast multitude video images.
The images are scattered throughout the performance space, together they seem to form a lively urban landscape around the spectator. The presence of this installation will create a sculpture that defines the physical space around the audience and in the same time represents the virtual space of images on them. The audience is immersed in Tokyo Nightlife, the narrator leads them through a story that explores all too familiar situations within this eccentric setting. Noordegraaf is exploring the very heart of society. Our own Western society in fact, the ways our culture might evolve. Now, in times of economic uncertainty and unstable social coherence, we may start to wonder where what headed for, and how it ever got this far. How is our society, our enormous ant hill formed? Is there any hope? A flickering spark of light at the end of a long dark night? A.M. sketches this situation, with the necessary flicker of light. Tokyo is the perfect metaphor for this; by regarding a slice of Japanese culture through Noordegraaf's looking glass, the Western audience can recognise their own situation mirrored in this seemingly far away world. For his composition Noordegraaf will use a broad spectrum of colours and also city sounds, to be recorded during various lengthy night time sessions wandering through the streets of Tokyo. He will score for a (Baroque) soprano who appears live, and a small ensemble of soloing players panned out over 8 loud speakers in the hall. Noordegraaf will musically shape the almost elusive magic of Murakami, the contemplation from an exotic culture, mirroring to the West and back to the East too. A.M. duration: aprox. 70 min soprano: Mikae Natsuyama score: clarinet/bass clarinet/soprano sax, trombone, viola, doublebass, piano, percussion scenario writer: Adrian Hornsby stage designer and technical supervisor: Bart Visser video production: inexcelsisvideo produced by Barooni and November Music festival production contact: Roland Spekle barooni [a] xs4all.nl
GOTO :: PUBLICITY IMAGES

HOME