Dance Source Houston's executive director Christina Giannelli normally stays in the background. But she will be front and center Saturday at the Hobby Center's Zilkha Hall with Focus, a collaboration with composer Anthony Brandt, co-founder and artistic director of Musiqa, that blends film, lighting and music. Giannelli sheds some light on the intersection between seeing and sound.
Q: What came first the light, the music or the idea?
A: The idea. Anthony Brandt approached me several years ago about a collaboration. From there we launched into a year of conversations on light and music, which culminates in Focus.
Q: What do music and light have in common? Both are ethereal arts.
A: Yes, they are intangible. For centuries, people have been trying to make a correlation between light and music, trying to map colors onto tones. There were many examples in the 18th -19th century of “color organs” that produced sound and light. I have always resisted the idea that a particular note should match a color.
Q; What did you learn from collaborating with a composer?
A: It was a marvelous opportunity to step back and really think about what I do day in and day out. I came to realize what a visually oriented person I am; vision is my dominant sense and light is my overriding metaphor. I tend to respond to music through my body, I am hard pressed not to sway or bob about when I am listening to music, which may have something to do with why I am drawn to lighting dance. But to really hear the nuances of music I need to close my eyes.
Q: Will you be lighting the musicians or the space?
A: Light needs something to bounce off of in order for us to see it. Musicians tend to be concerned with shadows on their music and hate to have lights shining in their eyes when they look to the conductor for their cues, so they need to be lighted with care, I love beams of light in the air, but that takes smoke, which doesn’t work well for musicians either, I don’t want to create distractions that will affect their performances. So I have created a bit of an installation using a series of translucent scrims to catch the light.
Q: I am curious about the process of working together. A composer can easily give you a piece of music to work with but you need a theater to show your stuff.
A: True, Tony was able to give me some computer simulations of his score, but even so he needed to describe the nuances that the computer could not evoke. We worked through a series of conversations; I described what I planned to do. I have created my sort of technical score that helps me structure my ideas and will guide me when I get into the theater, that's where the rubber hits the road. I go in with my notes and pre-written cues for the crew, knowing the general shape of things but I will have to make adjustments based on the actual conditions, just as the conductor and musicians will adjust their performances to the sound of the room. I also leave room for last minute inspiration and will adjust a color or the intensity when it is all assembled.
This interview is excerpted from an article that originally appeared in DanceSource Houston.
