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So I started skating at the age of about seven
and I think if I remember correctly I think that my sister wanted to go ice
skating and I went with her
very quickly I just kept wanting to do it and I skated from
7 to 15-16 every morning five hours before school
like, very competitive
basically after I quit I think I was able to just like step away from the
culture of it and really
return to the thing that when I was 7
was magnetic to me which about how you say all these things
without verbal language and
how your body shows you what it can do.
I'm hard of hearing and I wear hearing aids in both ears and
almost all this comes from this experience of my hearing
and my relationship to sound
my work became much more focused on like issues of sound and hearing
in my mid-twenties when I started to like really realize just the level of
I guess like frustration that I experienced and sort of
daily interactions and so I started thinking about and then exploring sound a lot
more
it's just become this entire medium
to me to work with and a I find it really
inspiring kinda and less like just the experiences I have
with it, they're daily. It's not something I just turn on or turn off
I heard this news story
about some tuba thefts in LA at a high school
and I heard another one and I was like what this is the weirdest
phenomenon and this like theft of sound seemed really resonant. I just kept
picturing these kids
in band practice with nothing to do. It's an amazing story like just that
these
huge instruments with this huge sound are missing
shhh! remember--
shhh-- the spot where we go down to a piano, clarinets are bringing it out.
Percussion, really soft. Okay,
really soft, especially the bass drums.
I think when they came they just had caps on
when they came out the head ski masks on. -Wow. Two men? -Two guys, yeah
I don't know what age. They left the cases behind what they did is they got
them,
took 'em apart and they put him in, uh, the big garbage bags, the hefty bags
they were in really good shape those horns like sure they could get at least
two thousand dollars
maybe more. You work really hard
and you do the best you can to get all the best instruments for your kids and
then
somebody thinks that they can just take. You know, it doesn't matter
we'll just take these instruments and sell them and they have no
no conscience I guess
the project I'm currently working on is called The Tuba Thieves
it is a full length narrative film and also a series of sculptures
and objects based on listening to three musical scores that a commissioned from
three different composers
I am made them lists of references to consider
and then ask them to create a score based on
the list of references so I was basically like scoring their
score. I gave Steve a list that included
a poem by David Wagner and asked him to look at the artwork of Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
I specifically asked him to look at the patterns that a zamboni makes as it
goes around and cleans the ice because it's a really specific pattern. Zamboni,
you know, it's slowly moving. I mean, it's the perfect illustration
of minimal music, you know. It's like perfect beautiful repetition
and things get like rolled over and then drawn again. To me it was like,
here's a gift. Here's some images and some text
and you can do whatever you want with it
and so I feel like because I'm inserting myself into your work
that there has to be a conversation between the two things.
I can't just take this stuff to do with it the way I would do with it.
It's more like a relationship. It's a really intuitive process. I get the music
back and I just listen
to this music for a really long time and
pay attention to scenes that play out in my head and I
start writing the screenplay based on scenes that keeps ticking
so I kinda curate this list of specific things for
the person but it's definitely stuff that I've been thinking about.
It's just like these little details come in that are real
experiences of people or things that happened and then they just become really
prominent in the
writing of the script. And so I'm constantly just like trying to
pay attention and listen to the real things that are going on. And so these
tuba thefts--
talking to like the real band directors like what their experiences are
those real details will just like manifest into this fictional film
There's this, you know, relationship between almost like documenting these real
experiences and listening to people's
sort of reflections on them and then allowing those to kind of become
pillars within the narrative.
Because I am so interested in this process of collaboration whether it be
with people are whether it's with the material or whether it's with
a musical score I'm listening to...
that element of listening is the most important part so
even if i cant hear it I can
still being listening.