THis is about ENTER / EXIT - a show of John's for Hardrubber Orchestra that I did some visuals for and got a mention in the Straight... yay :)


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Enter/Exit

By alexander varty

Publish Date: 10-Mar-2005

A Hard Rubber New Music production. At the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Saturday, March 5

Money changes everything, al?though sometimes its effect can be more subtle than not. John Korsrud, for instance, has a decade-long history of organizing large-scale multimedia works based on his strong, sinewy compositions, and being the 2004 winner of the $60,000 Alcan Performing Arts Award hasn’t altered the way he operates. But what the Alcan prize did buy Korsrud was time: time to think about how his latest interdisciplinary tour de force, Enter/Exit, should look, and time to rehearse it properly. The result is a triumph.

Full credit has to go to the Hard Rubber Orchestra bandleader for con?ceptualizing the show, for assem?bling an impeccable band, and for writing the bulk of the music, including an extraordinary “Prelude/Overture” that set the pace for the rest of the evening with the graceful way it moved in and out of tonality while morphing between tightly organized structures and looser, more atmospheric passages. But Enter/Exit was also a true collaboration between a large cast of technicians and creators, and they must be recognized, too.

Guest composers Giorgio Magna?nensi and Brad Turner were particularly welcome additions to the team, and both contributed intriguing music. Magnanensi’s “Insidie Cromatiche” was the show’s sonic highlight, a truly hallucinogenic soundscape that defied the ear to tell where acoustic virtuosity left off and computer-driven synthesis began. Turner’s “50TB” and “Happy Fun Ball” were less adventurous, at least on a technical level, but staked out some new terrain of their own in the way that they combined modern club grooves, ’70s-style hyperspeed fusion riffs, and Afro-Cuban percussion.

With such exceptional material to work with, the Hard Rubber musicians were so uniformly inspired that there’s not room to list all the standouts, but Peggy Lee contributed an improvised cello solo that was unusually well-crafted, even by her high standards, and percussionist Sal Ferreras amazed with his is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex triangle-playing on Korsrud’s house-inspired “Groove I”.

And then there was the visual com?ponent, which included Andreas Kahre’s creepy-warehouse set design and Riel Roussopoulos’s whimsical film loops in the lobby and entranceway. In addition, Jamie Griffiths, Brian Johnson, and Rena del Pieve Gobbi contributed interactive video elements, in some cases guiding the actions of the musicians, elsewhere being altered by their musical input. For example, the dreamy, solarized images that Griffiths provided for “Improv Quartet” waxed and waned according to the musicians’ actions, whereas del Pieve Gobbi’s blue-and-green abstract landscapes were the source material Turner, guitarist Ron Samworth, bassist André Lachance, and drummer Bernie Arai worked to during “Improv Quartet III”. Aesthetically, both delighted, with the latter offering an especially worthwhile variation on the graphic-notation concept.

Only dancers Amber Funk Barton, Lina Fitzner, Katy Harris-McLeod, and Jennifer McLeish-Lewis seemed underutilized; choreographer Martha Carter’s repertoire of shrugging gestures, frugging motions, and sideways glances didn’t seem all that far removed from go-go–dancer cliché. Still, when the four dragged Korsrud and saxophonist Bill Runge on to the floor it was clear that none of this was intended to be taken too seriously. My only regret is that the audience didn’t get a chance to dance too.