DiGiTAL
DRAMATURGY LAB
“At the core: Firing synapses as a nerve string quartet
Brain conditioning and realtime collaborative music composition”
A project by the Digital Dramaturgy Lab
As a result of a conversation involving clowning, progressive deafness, and the notion of perceived detriment as invaluable skill, the DDL will present its process of inclusive musical composition without the need for classically trained composers. Through the queered mind of cellist Amina Holloway, DDL members will activate her bilateral synesthetic abilities to algorithmically transform real time visual information in the form of shapes and colours into music. In creating this performance-demo, the DDL investigated principles of chance operations, open-ended intent, perceptional flow, and subversive creative production. This performance-demo will play with different techniques and approaches to creation in an attempt to present the latest findings of this year-long exploration.
Collaborators
Cellist, poet, and professional nerd, Amina Holloway, has been delighting some and baffling others for the better part of fifteen years. Having recently fallen into a research hole involving the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and a shady Parisian cellist, Ms. Holloway's next project will reconstruct the movements and musical oeuvre of forgotten Portuguese baroque cellist JBA Avondano. Ms. Holloway holds multiple artistic degrees in one hand and a large cappuccino in the other.
Antje Budde is a co-founder and a queer scholar-artist of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab (DDL) and its Institute for Digital Humanities in Performance (idHIP). Since 2012 she has been involved in a multitude of works as the major creative research facilitator of this networked group of scholar artists. Since 2013 she serves as the Associate Director (graduate) of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Antje graduated from the Institute for Theatre Studies and Cultural Communication at Humboldt University, Berlin. 1990-91 and 1994-95 she studied at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing and collaborated with the Central Experimental Theatre for Spoken Drama in Beijing, co-directing the now canonical bi-lingual production of “Put down your whip - Woyzeck” together with Meng Jinghui in 1995. Since 2005 she lives and works in Canada. For (almost) three decades she has been involved in numerous experimental performance and multi-media projects in China, Germany and Canada. Her most recent publication is "Affecting the apparatus: Queer feminist re/de-codings in the works of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab (DDL), Toronto" in: Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times. Edited by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney and Candice Amich. Palgrave 2017.189-200.
Sanja Vodovnik is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her interest lies in examining various outlets of staging and performing science fiction, focusing on it's cultural history, dramaturgy, ethics, and the performance of sci-fi in fan communities. She completed her BA degree in International Relations, and got her MA in Cultural Studies and in Performance Studies. Prior to relocating to Toronto she worked as a stage manager, performer and director, collaborating with activist theatrical groups and theatres in Slovenia, Ireland and Iceland.
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