1 April 2008
Bullfighting
A film of this evening's event can be found at the bottom of this page.
The Five Roles of Frank Morgan
Joanna
Bailie and Christophe
Ragg
A performance with video
What does it mean to work on someone else’s material? “The
Five Roles of Frank Morgan” takes as its starting point the 1939
MGM musical “The Wizard of Oz”, a film as rich in structural
beauty as it is in popular and half-remembered iconography: at
its basis the project is a more-or-less real-time “reconstruction” of
the film. The speech marks indicate the inherently problematic
nature of this idea. How much can or should one take? How
might it be possible to recreate, in the context of the theatre, the
tornado, the ensemble song and dance numbers (with only two people)
or even the switch between sepia and Technicolor? Adopting an approach
that treads a fine line between deference to the original and humour
as to their own potential failings, a Greenawayesque abstraction of
aesthetics and an indulgence in the pure kitsch of the film, Ragg and
Bailie will attempt to carefully filter and shape their chosen raw
material into a work which is at the same time a remake, a deconstruction
and a projection.
Joanna Bailie was born in London in 1973 and has been living in Brussels since 2001. Her work as a composer has been performed at festivals such as the Venice Bienale and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival by ensembles such as Musikfabrik, The Nieuw Ensemble, Orkest de Volharding and the London Sinfonietta. Her music is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Since 2003 she has been the co-artistic director of Plus-Minus, an Anglo-Belgian contemporary music group who will be be playing at the October edition of the Transit festival in Leuven. Over the past few years she has become increasingly involved in collaborative work and in May 2006 she provided the electronic soundtrack for choreographer Brice Leroux's Quantum Quintet at the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts, a production that is still touring.
Christoph Ragg, born 1970 in Rheinhausen (Germany), has been resident in Brussels since 2003. After a period as assistant at the opera house in Düsseldorf he has worked as a freelance scenographer for various choreographers and directors such as Ivo van Hove, A.T. de Keersmaeker, Kirsten Debrock en Claudio Bernardo at theatres in Amsterdam, Brussels and Nice. For three years he was the resident scenographer at "Nadine", a performing arts centre in Brussels. In 2002 he formed the collective "C&H" along with Heike Langsdorf and Christophe Meierhans. Chiefly concerned with conceptual performance, C&H's recent performances include the opening ceremony of the TNT festival in Bordeaux and at the Point d'Impact-Festival in Geneva.
Iain Sinclair and Susan Stenger 
Iain Sinclair has lived in (and written about) Hackney, East London,
since 1969. His novels include Downriver (Winner
of the James Tait Black Prize & the Encore Prize for the Year’s
Best Second Novel), Radon
Daughters, Landor’s
Tower and, most recently, Dining
on Stones (which was shortlisted for the Ondaatje prize).
Non-fiction books, exploring the myth and matter of London, include Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital and Edge of the Orison. In the ‘90s, Iain wrote and presented a number of films for BBC2’s Late Show and has, subsequently, co-directed with Chris Petit four documentaries for Channel 4; one of which, Asylum, won the short film prize at the Montreal Festival.
His most recent book, London, City of Disappearances, is published in October 2006.
Iain Sinclair will be collaborating on a presentation with sonic artist Susan Stenger. Stenger's work has bridged the rock and art music worlds throughout her career. After early classical flute studies, she moved to New York City to specialise in new music performance (Phill Niblock, John Cage, Christian Wolff). She went on to play electric guitar with Rhys Chatham's ensemble and was a founding member of seminal guitar band Band of Susans. After moving to London in 1996, Stenger formed experimental group The Brood and all-bass-band Big Bottom, made up of both visual artists and musicians. She has collaborated frequently with dancer / choreographer Michael Clark, toured as a bassist with Siouxie Sioux, John Cale and Nick Cave and recently composed a 96-day sound installation as part of Soundtrack For An Exhibition, presented at MOCA Lyon. She is currently working on a number of projects with writer Iain Sinclair, focusing on environmental sounds.
Catalogue
TAPE THAT (Christophe
Meierhans and Koen Nutters)
TAPE THAT’s work is based on sound in a broad sense, not devoted
to one specific format but instead developing different ones. Working
between installations, concerts, CD production and interventions, according
to the conditions and concerns of each project, their main concern
is sound, but as a departure point; as a perspective from which to
look at things. TAPE THAT works with sound and the rest, or rather,
with sound in the rest; seeking connections and interferences between
sound manipulation and its contingencies, between sound and everything
that is not the sound itself but comes inevitably in contact with it,
constrains it, extends it
Film of The Five Roles of Frank Morgan, Iain Sinclair / Susan Stenger and Tape That