collaborative – Seth Nehil

Bandage a Knife (with Linda Austin Dance)

This dance performance, created and co-directed with Linda Austin, was based on a strategic “forgetting” of Seijun Suzuki’s 1967 cult yakuza film, Branded to Kill. Themes, images and language emerged in our thinking through , writing through, dancing through the freewheeling surrealism of the film. Against the back wall, projected fragments of video narrative and noir imagery flashed amidst the dancers.

Choreography, including long “non-sequitur” movement sequences, interspersed with moments of dialogue, abstracted violence and shards of action. Along both sides of the stage, dancers silently mimicked and responded to movements behind semi-transparent black curtains. Mounted on the ceiling, a television monitor played a continuous hour-long action by Kaj-Anne Pepper (coming slowly unraveled in an all white “weatherbox”). An ambiguous narrative included slow-motion mock battles, chanted syllables and swung lightbulbs.

Much of my original score can be heard on the album Knives.

Co-written and directed by Linda Austin & Seth Nehil

Choreography: Linda Austin
Sound and video: Seth Nehil
Dancers: Anne Furfey, Kaj-Anne Pepper, Linda Austin, Lucy Yim, Bonnie Green, Rebecca Harrison.

Performance Works NW, Portland OR, November, 2009

Albums, collaborative

Ecllipses (with Matt Marble)

CD, 48 min.
And/OAR and/30
Composed 2002 – 2005, released 2008

Rustling and jumbled textures, rhythmic rolling, ideophones, free exchange, blind layering, room tone, micro-envelopes, “creatureality”, re-recording, auditory fatigue. Sources include fabric, pebbles, various drums and rattles, upright bass, a down comforter, grass, tin foil, radio static, glass spheres, bowed wires, scraped autoharp, voice, moose call, recorder, tuning fork, feedback, oscillator, cello, hammer dulcimer, field recordings of graveyards and parks in Portland OR.

Aprupture is where holes find their way into a sound-material, lurching along, burrowing in. If jumping, stomping or skipping through, an incessant regulation is destroyed. The pulse is a rocking wooden boat with heavy ropes that creak and sway. An “outside force” – the rise and fall of waves, determines it. The creation of aprupture leaves a series of places where multiple transparencies do not entirely obscure a ground. In placing them together in time, there is a control of layers but not of correspondences. Tonality is a byproduct of production. Rhythm is an accident and correspondence is circumstantial. The ecllipses as a dotted pattern clues the mothod of intermesh. Woven into a sheet, the sheet being torn and rumpled, then becoming large enough to include a landscape. Materials resting one upon another. Or particulate, taking up form. Density as measured – the spaces between this suspension. Or woven as a process of length, taken over with treatment time, manually applied. The fabric resulting, with texture determined by scale, opening up with proximity. A composition curdles in the ear.
{from the liner notes by S.N.}

sound

Linda Austin Dance – Circus Me Around

My original score for this dance piece featured 4-channel sound, spread throughout a reclaimed warehouse. Audiences were seated in one of three performance areas while simultaneous dances could be glimpsed through gaps. Three times, audiences switched areas and the repeating dance was witnessed from a new perspective and with new music.