The Music (and Media) Man

Two innovative new works showcase the vision of composer MIKEL ROUSE, who utilizes dance and film in extraordinary ways

As a composer, filmmaker, performer, director and visual artist, Mikel Rouse has built an incredible career blending genres and inventing new forms of expression. A fascination with digital technology has informed much of his work, most notably in his trilogy of modern operas: Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland and the third installment, The End of Cinematics, which completed a five-city tour in the fall. Prior to the show's performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Rouse talked with Playback about his vision for the work, as well as a second project performed at the Joyce Theatre in Manhattan: a collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in which Rouse's musical score, International Cloud Atlas, was uniquely experienced on iPod shuffles brought in to the venue by members of the audience.

How did the Merce Cunningham project come about?
I got a call from Cunningham that they wanted to commission a new piece, and they wanted to utilize iPods. Since so much of my work concerns technology, I was really excited about it. I immediately decided that I wanted to work with the iPod shuffle as a compositional tool. So I structured the piece in ten sections, and then each member of the audience would come with their own iPod shuffle preloaded with the score or be given one at the venue. Basically, they would then turn on their iPods at the moment the dance starts and each person would have a different variation of the show's score. It was a perfect device for a Cage/Cunningham aesthetic, in which the music and the dance are always separate.

Can you describe the style of the music for the Cunningham piece?
It continues my interest in combining song structures and vernacular sounds, i.e. pop music structures, with much more complicated compositional methods. So how this differs from a lot of pieces is that you can view this almost as a soundscape. What will happen is you'll have these very complex polymetric rhythms of piano and guitar, and out of this mist of sound, a song will appear, and it might only be 30 seconds or two minutes, sometimes it's a Brazilian bossa nova, or a traditional sounding pop song. And that drifts in as sort of a song appears out of a cloud, and then that will disintegrate into another soundscape. Then the tracks themselves sort of fade into each other, so that you don't quite realize when a track has ended or begun. If you're familiar with Beck or Radiohead, it would sound familiar. Perhaps, much more complicated, but similar ideas. This is something I've been doing for twenty years.

Let's talk about your other recent work, The End of Cinematics. How did it originate?
I worked with a scientist in Urbana, Illinois, from the National Supercomputing Lab, on an idea about how to make a three-dimensional film. They showed me a lot of interesting things, including stereo television, and things I could never afford. But we figured out a way to sort of fake stereo television. We devised a front and rear scrim projection system that emulates a three-dimensional magic box. And the peformers perform within that box.

They are filmed live with five different cameras and one robotic camera and that is combined with pre-recorded footage.The rear projection screens are backdrops. So, if there is a scene of someone dancing on the streets of Paris, through CGI, we took that person out so all you see is an empty street. That's now a video backdrop for a live performer. You get this hyper-real environment where you truly can't at times judge the depth of the stage, who is performing, or who is photographed, and who has been pre-recorded. Plus, it is combined with a dynamite score. It's a music-driven piece so all the video edits are structured around the musical material, so it is really a composed film.

What has been the response been to this innovative format?
Everyone is using video now in performance. Everyone is using multimedia. But I think nobody really thought that something would be done that could expand what the use of film could be. Some people think that could be a new way of looking at film, especially given that we have these technologies now. Because people can post their own music on the internet and can make their own films, the next step is that since they can do all these things without a record label or a film studio, why do what a label or a studio would expect me to do? I can do something completely different with video that doesn't have to be viewed only on the Internet or at a film festival. This isn't the answer, but it is one answer. The End of Cinematics is a real barometer of how creative film and video can be used in a non-tradional, non-narrative way that still satisfies the need to be in a theatre with a group of people experiencing cinema.

How did you get so involved in combining both music and media in your work?
I was lucky to have gone to a conservatory where across the street was an art institute where I studied painting and filmmaking. But when I came to New York I wanted to really excel at one thing, so I focused only on music. It wasn't until I started doing the modern operas, Failing Kansas and Dennis Cleveland, that I got back into video, directing the pieces myself and I found a way to bring that visual vocabulary into the musical vocabulary. But I'm glad it happened the way it did. My ace in the hole is that I really understand the structure of the music and I understand how to use visuals in a very complicated way. Not in an MTV, fast-cutting to the beat kind of way, but in ways in which the cuts can correspond to large, moving metric sections. It is very subliminal. Everyone gets it. They come out and they don't understand why they've just seen something that wasn't a narrative, but somehow they that there was an arc to follow. Maybe if had gone the other way and I had pursued the video first, that wouldn't have happened. So, for me, I guess it was dumb luck.

— Erik Philbrook


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