Multimedia Art Project: “A Visual Poem for a denatured song cycle”
Video:
• Poem 1- Phaedra Body / Escape Body
• Poem 2- Phaedra Whispers
• Poem 3- Fort / Da Hunger
• Poem 4- Fire in the Palace!
• Poem 5- Escape Tune
• Poem 7- Tongue Fish Guarding the Ocean
• Poem 8- Escape Rune
Description:
Escapes is a video work conceived of as a book of poems – in this case, poems that deliver meaning through the sound of the voice, as much as the text on the screen/page along with the interplay of restless images that are propelled by micro music-scapes.
I am the director of the project, responsible for concept, content, including all text. All of the audio is drawn from two live performances of “The Phaedra Escapes” (2012), a collaborative concert project with Chicago sound and media artist, Shawn Decker. The video editor is Brenton Richardson who also contributed some original footage.
The content of Escapes centers on the Phaedra figure who is transmuted from an ancient myth-story into a contemporary sign of escape. Here, she becomes less a character and more a divining tool used to locate voluptuous frictions between release and containment, stasis and freedom. The story of Phaedra itself is one of exile. ‘She’ has migrated through Baroque and contemporary operas, from Racine’s stage by way of Seneca and others, including conflicting fragments that Euripides wrote, lost, then wrote again in ancient Greece.* Phaedra becomes the ideal escape body for our time, resonant with multiple histories and radiant with propositions for possible futures.
Escapes officially launches with the online interdisciplinary journal Anglistica (University of Naples, Italy) in a special issue called, “Writing Exile: Women, the Arts and Technologies” edited by Wanda Balzano and Silvana Carotenuto.
From project director, Lynn Book
Lynn Book is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Associate Director of Creativity for the Program in Entrepreneurship and Liberal Arts at Wake Forest University.
Director: Lynn Book
Video Editor, Graphic Design: Brenton Richardson
Music by Lynn Book and Shawn Decker
2012
Brenton Richardson 