World Premiere of “Brilliant Being”

Amanda Whitworth, Emily Jaworski and Charmy Wells in "Brilliant Being."

“Brilliant Being”, a new type of performance, has its world premiere this weekend at PSU’s Silver Center for the Arts. The show combines dance with digital projections, videogame technology, originally composed music and a narrative, which together create an experience that no one has ever seen before.

A team of four PSU faculty members conceived “Brilliant Being”: Matt Kizer, the designer, Amanda Whitworth, the choreographer, Paul Mroczka, the director and playwright, and Jonathan Santore, the composer. Amanda Whitworth will be performing alongside Emily Jaworski and Charmy Wells.

Originally, the idea for the performance came from a conference Kizer attended at Ohio State University. The conference showed demonstrations of motion capture, infrared, and real-time CGI technology. The equipment was expensive and complex. Kizer thought, “Is there an easier way to do this?”

He imagined a way to control technology in real time, “just like a videogame.” He worked with Liberty Basic, a simple windows program that let him control digital projections with his mouse. Joined by dancer and choreographer Amanda Whitworth, they collaborated on an informal performance called “Shaping Space: Dance and Technology”, which they presented last September.

The one-night presentation involved improvised dance by Amanda Whitworth, accompanied by examples of Kizer’s projections. The media was projected onto the ground, and Whitworth danced over it. From behind his computer, Kizer manipulated images to react to Amanda’s dance. For example, he could make a swarm of fireflies follow her around as she danced, or circles appear wherever she stepped.

That presentation also allowed for open conversation with the audience. It served as a stepping-stone towards the new performance, “Brilliant Being.”

A scene during a rehearsal for "Brilliant Being."

They did another small performance that took simplified parts of “Brilliant Being,” and performed them outdoors at Canterbury Shaker Village as part of an event on Aug. 6.

The team for “Brilliant Being” received a Research Advisory Council (RAC) grant through the University. The University was looking to fund interdisciplinary projects that aligned with the goals of clusters, and “Brilliant Being” fit the bill. They also received a Dean’s grant last May to help fund set construction.

The script has all four of the team members’ names on it. “That’s because everyone contributed to that script. Even though I wrote the words, it really came from all those talks and everything,” said Paul Mroczka, the playwright and director.

Because there are no spoken words in the show, the script takes on a different form. “We really tried to figure out what the heart of Paul’s script was so that we could pursue it,” said Kizer, “even if some of the particulars were transformed into other things to accommodate what was actually happening.” The script serves as a backbone to the production, not the strict blueprint that scripts typically are. It captures the essence, not the specifics.

The show does have a narrative. Thematically, it explores how people adapt and continue their lives after a loss. Audience members will have to see the show to discover what it’s all about for them. “We’re really interested in the audience experiencing the narrative when they come through the door,” said Jonathan Santore, the composer.

Mrocza said that in any performance, each person in the audience attaches a personal experience to the story. “I think that attachment to personal experience becomes more important in this piece than other pieces,” he said.

An effect in "Brilliant Being" using Watchout System.

Music didn’t come in at the end of the process, like it usually does, but instead was integrated throughout. Santore said that in a typical structure, the composer is in charge of the music’s timeline. In this production, everyone is in charge of time. “So I, for example, have had to create music where I don’t know where it’s going to begin and end. I’m not writing it to begin and end. I’m writing ambient state, ambient state, ambient state,” Santore said.

In the production, this often translates to music that loops indefinitely, which is true with some of the visual effects as well.

“Musically, there’s going to be very recognizable tuneful music, and there’s going to be music that some people would put in quotation marks as ‘music’,” said Santore. “It’s going to be utterly unique.”

The recorded music was created electronically, but there will also be live singing by Emily Jaworski, a vocalist and PSU voice instructor. “It’s very interesting to be creating vocal sounds that are based purely on the scene at hand, and to be singing the emotional state of my character,” she said.

Jaworski said that the show will be different every night. “I will be creating live sound that interacts with the recorded sound. It has unlimited potential.”

In terms of dance, Amanda Whitworth said there will be contemporary styles, dance that has the quality of walking, and animal movement. Whitworth and Jaworski will be performing with Charmy Wells, an active dancer and choreographer in New York. Wells is a longtime colleague of Amanda Whitworth. “It’s fun watching them work together. You can tell they’ve studied together, because they dance the same,” said Kizer.

Kizer brought in technical elements very early in the process. For this project he’s using Watchout System, a high-end presentation software that is also used for Broadway productions.

The set, which is small and geometric, is made of white fabric and white platforms. It serves as a blank canvas for the projections, which don’t simply create a “backdrop”, but create a moving, interactive fantasyscape that covers the floor, walls, and ceiling, and reacts to the dancers on the stage by creating images of lighting, red smoke, grids, ocean waves and more.

There is also a camera, which allows the performers to move on the floor and have their images projected on the angled ceiling.

This performance lays the groundwork for new types of collaboration. In the traditional structure of theater, the playwright writes the script first. Then the director comes in, and everyone follows his or her vision. Directors usually make all of the major artistic decisions. They tell the performers where to stand, and decide the gist of what they want from the set, media, and music. Music and technical elements, like projections and lights, aren’t added until the very end of the process.

“That’s a good model, but it’s not a sacred model,” said Paul Mroczka, director and playwright. “Brilliant Being” overthrows this hierarchy in favor of a collaborative process.

The team created music, choreography, dramatic action, and visual media in reaction to each other. Instead of bringing in elements one by one, everything was present from the beginning. The script evolved based off of what was happening in the dance and music, the music was affected by the technology, and there wasn’t one person or discipline that was driving the process.

Giving up the traditional performance structure has been a challenge for the group. “In letting go of that, we’ve also let go of what that provides,” said Kizer. “Meaning who's doing what. Where do we go for this answer? That’s not always there. We’ve had a lot of moments in this process where there’s just dead silence in the room.”

During these moments, the group talked it over and pushed through. “We’re all good friends and we get along well, and that has helped smooth the process,” said Santore.

A scene from "Brilliant Being" in the Studio Theatre.

Kizer said that the next time he works on a performance like this, he hopes to reach out to computer science majors and possibly offer a practicum. A support structure could be useful for technical elements of performance, for example, connecting five computers to a mini network. “It’s not an expertise that lives in this building,” he said. “We can do it, but there’s people on campus that are better than us.”

“This is a great time, with the arts and technology [cluster], to reach out to other disciplines that can be involved,” said Kizer.

Although this collaboration between disciplines worked well for this production, the team members involved are all faculty members and professionals in their fields. Although there are students running some of the effects during the show, fully integrating students would be another project in itself.

“One of the things that this relies on heavily is the professional level of all of the people involved,” said Whitworth. “Right now we’re in a dream world where everybody is really excellent inside of the discipline that they do. Making that transition, to having it be PSU cluster-based, and involve students, I think that takes us into a whole other kind of territory.”

“It scares me terribly to try to integrate students into this mix. Or to have them try to be the creators of the process,” she said. “I’m not sure how I see that happening just yet. I think it’s possible, but it’s scary.”

As an example, Whitworth said that four days before opening, the show still wasn’t finished. “I could not do that with students. At that point in their career, they need leadership there, and they need more rehearsal to be able to pull that off,” she said, “but I know that I can rely on the professionalism of the team, because we’ve been there before at this point.”

All four of the show’s creators said they would be interested in working with a process like this again.

“If given the chance to move forward, which I think we will be able to, we’d be able to do it better by being better communicators and better collaborators,” said Whitworth. “That has to do with just being sensitive to live communication, to looking at deadlines, to learning how to speak a common language.”

Kizer said he hopes the audiences will walk away thinking about new directions that live performance can go.

“This experience will be quite unlike any experience anyone coming to this will have had sitting in a hall witnessing any work of art unfolding before them,” said Santore. “I don’t think I’m pumping sunshine or gilding the lily. It’s really going to be different.”

“Brilliant Being” is playing Sept. 22-24 at 7 p.m., and Sept. 24-25 at 1 p.m. in the Studio Theater, in PSU’s Silver Center for the Arts. Call 603-535-2787 or visit https://www.plymouth.edu/silver-center for tickets.

COURTESY PHOTOS/MATT KIZER