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.
