Tag Archives: handbells

New music for a contortionist – an evening of Inexplicable Acts

Posted by in Gigs | Sounds | 1 comment
Spacedog

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Delia duSol - contortionist

Delia duSol - contortionist

Contortionist Delia DuSol will be bending her body into some extraordinary poses and squeezing herself into a tiny perspex box at Richard Wiseman‘s first night of Inexplicable Acts, Thursday 12 Feb. This season of shows at the Wellcome Trust will explore the psychology and physiology of circus performers’ bodies, including the sword swallower, the juggler and the exceptionally flexible Delia.

Music

The new piece

On request from Richard, I’ve created some music for Delia’s act. It’s a 7 minute piece, weaving fragments of a conversation with Delia, along with handbells, theremin and other noises. I find Delia’s act simultaneously beautiful and unsettling – and I’ve tried to create a simple, cabaret-style dance piece that reflected those feelings. It’s very tense watching Delia in some of her poses – like a gymnast on the beam, she seems to be concentrating hard, making continual, minuscule adjustments to her body as she maintains some terrifying balances. I hope the slight detuning of the bells and the natural (ahem) wobbles on the theremin give the piece a sense of these  continual adjustments – a detail that adds a charming, human quality to her act.

For those of you who don’t know Richard’s work already, he’s an experimental psychologist and author with a great eye for scientific experiments that are likely to capture the public imagination. Here, he talks about the history of contortion and explores what was discovered when Delia’s contorting body was examined in an MRI scanner. His blog is always a good read as he updates it every day or so with conundrums and scientific oddities, gleaned from just about everywhere.

Before and after

Actually, this isn’t the first time I’ve written music for Delia. Around five years ago, I made a first attempt, using a voice recording that Richard had made very hastily in a rehearsal space (where the acoustics weren’t great). I didn’t get a chance to see her act before I wrote this early version – and that’s probably why the later piece seems a better match. This earlier piece was used at various events, including Wiseman and Singh’s Theatre of Science (where I made an appearance on theremin and saw). Here it is anyway, for the sake of comparison.

The new and old pieces

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Swinging London (South Bank automaton show)

Posted by in Exhibits | Robots | Sounds | 1 comment
Spacedog

This mini, automatic puppet show was created on a shoestring for the South Bank Centre, summer 2007. The brief was to come up with something novel inside a garden shed that would celebrate the area and appeal to families. It features dancing puppets and a carillon (robotic bell player).

The puppet show, Swinging London, features London luminaries, past and present, dressed in go-go style. I wanted the puppets to look like a dance group on TV, in the early days of colour television. Reflecting the throw-away nature of celebrity culture, the faces are velcroed on so they can easily be swapped for new ones, according to public demand. Some of the faces are personal favourites (e.g. Kenneth Williams) and a few were chosen by the public (e.g. Lady Penelope and Charlie Drake). Jarvis Cocker also makes an appearance -- he was curating the Meltdown Festival that was taking place at the time.

Swinging London was one of seven sheds that made up this outdoor exhibition, curated by Clare Patey. The shed was put together over just a few weeks on a tight budget. I was grateful to Vivien Angliss, Helen Burtt, Jenny Cotterill, Amanda Hellberg, Emmet Spier and Colin Uttley for their invaluable help in getting it together. Thanks also to Paul and Rachel Attmere for dressing up like the puppets and animating the sheds throughout the opening weekend. The puppets were adapted from 1960s Pelham puppets, scooped up from eBay.

Ragged puppets

I was inspired to make Swinging London after seeing the very dilapidated 1960s puppet show playing on Teignmouth Pier, Devon. I was really struck by how mesmerising the Teignmouth puppets were -- and how convincingly they moved to the music -- even though they were doing nothing more than jiggling up and down. The puppets also had a slightly unsettling look, because of their worn-out clothes and expressionless faces -- this also appealed to me. So this dolly waggling (bad puppetry) is inspired by the 1960s end-of-the-pier classic. The video footage was taken at the end of a busy eight-week run and you can see that the strings have gone saggy and paint has rubbed off the puppets’ shoes, onto the stage, helping them to look suitably ragged.

Slide show images by Emmet Spier

Carillon

The carillon played two and a half octaves of handbells polyphonically, striking them with servo-driven, sprung beaters.

This was my first attempt at building a polyphonic bell playing machine. In 2009, I attempted to build a version of the instrument that put each bell in a separate box, so the instrument could be distributed widely around a space. This Mk II carillon was given its first outing at the Sonic Arts Expo 2009. When this proved too troublesome to take out on the road, I built the Mk III, which clusters all the bells on a single metal frame. The frame , an old shop fitting, is on wheels and is compact enough to fit in the boot of a large car.

See the Mk III carillon in action.

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