Inquirer Q&A with ... Leah Stein, Choreographer of 'Urban ECHO: Circle Told'
What was the biggest difficulty you had to resolve to get your festival piece from idea to performance?
Inquirer:
What was the biggest difficulty you had to resolve to get your festival piece from idea to performance?
Leah Stein: Urban ECHO: Circle Told includes 70 performers. By far, the biggest difficulty has been getting everyone in the same space at the same time for rehearsal.
Q: Do you expect your work to have legs - is there life after LA/Fringe, or is most of what is created for the festival destined to be seen only on the Fringe circuit?
A: Urban ECHO is the first of a two-part collaboration and commissioning project between Leah Stein Dance Company and Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, directed by Alan Harler. For Part 1, Urban ECHO, LSDC and MC commissioned composer Pauline Oliveros to facilitate the score. This work is the precursor for a second project including the same performers with a different composer.
Both works feature the intersection between movement and sound where the singers are moving in space with the dancers and the dancers "sing" or sound with the singers. For Part 2, composer David Lang has been commissioned to write a score in this same vein - with singers moving and dancers sounding. While there are no plans for Urban ECHO to be performed again, the process of working with Pauline Oliveros' "tuning scores" has been enormously instructive, rewarding and will create a strong foundation toward the upcoming collaboration in 2009.
Q: What's the primary source of your concepts - music, literature, geopolitics, personal experience, global tragedies?
A: The primary source for Urban ECHO is a siren as both an "urban echo" as well as the reference to the sirens of Greek myth . This contrast and tension between "siren" and "beautiful song" is at the core of the work. Equally important is the site. The Rotunda is an enormous domed space with acoustics not unlike a cathedral. Pauline Oliveros' instructions to the singers are to: play the space like it is your instrument.
Q: How much does funding influence your choice of subject? Do you find that fear of losing funding dampens the political choices you make in your work?
A: I would say no, for the most part.
Q: Is having an edge of political, social or community-based change important to your work, or is your sole goal the artistic outcome?
A: It is important to me who is involved in the work and that the creative process is a means by which diverse populations are able to connect and develop new understandings together that would not have been accessible otherwise.
Q: How comfortable are you in expressing your work verbally - to audiences, media, friends?
A: I enjoy talking about my work and sharing the process through dialogue.
Q: If you have performed in other Fringes festivals, tell us how Philly's compares.
A: I created a site-specific piece at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2001. The Edinburgh Festival is the "momma of all fringe festivals" - the first one that has now become a huge, city-wide, internationally renowned phenomenon after which all the other fringe festivals modeled themselves.
I have watched the Live Arts & Philly Fringe Festival grow and develop over the years and it's exciting that there is an annual opportunity for local artists to meet and share the stage (and street) with such a growing community of national and international artists.
This year marks the first year for the Mendelssohn Club Chorus to ever be part of the Live Arts or Fringe and it is causing quite a stir in the choral world. This is exciting for us and audiences alike.
Show Details:
Leah Stein Dance Company + Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia
Urban ECHO: Circle Told
2&4 p.m. Sept 6
2&4 p.m. Sept 13
The Rotunda
4014 Walnut St.
Web Links:
Festival show page: http://livearts-fringe.org/2008/details.cfm?id=3136
Artist websites: http://www.leahsteindancecompany.org & http://www.mcchorus.org