ON STAGE
Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby's Surface Tension
When: Saturday, 8 p.m.
Where: Phillip T. Young Recital Hall
Tickets: $25 at tickets.uvic.ca and 250-721-8480.
David Rokeby is a fixture in Toronto's media-art world, but when a new commission landed at his feet three years ago, he was wary: It meant his creative partner would be his wife.
Eve Egoyan, born and raised in Victoria, is a contemporary pianist and composer. "I've always been hesitant to collaborate with Eve on the musical side," said Rokeby, who pioneered interactive media art with a piece called Very Nervous System, which translated physical movement into interactive sound environments in the 1980s.
"I've always felt like the technology is a bit like a 400-foot-tall baby that would stomp around and make a big mess," he said. "There's an incredible amount of nuance to what Eve does. And I try to give that level of nuance to what I do, but it's hard to rein technology in."
They will present the results of their work, a piece called Surface Tension, at the University of Victoria Saturday. That night, Egoyan will also perform solo works for piano by Erik Satie, Per N脙赂rg脙楼rd and Alvin Curran.
Egoyan and Rokeby have collaborated before. In 2002, they represented sa国际传媒 at the Venice Biennale in Architecture with an installation they created alongside photographer Michael Awad. Rokeby has also edited some of Egoyan's CDs. But they've never split creative control down the middle like this - apart from their biggest project, raising eight-year-old daughter Viva.
They began the project with an unusual instrument: the disklavier.
"Disklaviers have been machines in search of a reason to exist for a long time," said the Governor General's Award winner. The professional-quality, acoustic piano has sensors under each key, allowing it to learn how each key is played, as well as a motor mechanism that repeats it. The result is similar to a player piano - wealthy people can buy one for their homes and pretend Chinese pianist Lang Lang is playing in their parlour.
"That's how it's conventionally used. We didn't use it that way," Rokeby said. "I had always imagined that if I ever did anything with a disklavier, I would be interested in looking at the character of the playing of the person performing."
A screen connected to the piano shows images that respond in real time to the pitch, note duration and other parameters of sound. With Egoyan, Rokeby wanted to represent her subtle touch.
"I've always been affected by the quality of Eve's touch - the particular way she plays the piano," he said.
Each time Egoyan performs Surface Tension is different. As she plays softly, drops fall into a pool of water, rippling out slowly. As she plays deeper notes, they resonate heavily from the edges of the screen, breaking the reflection in rich texture. The projections change throughout the composition, and part of Rokeby's goal was for the visualizations to inspire Egoyan's playing.
"One of the things I was interested in was to create worlds that would draw her to play in ways that she never would imagine playing, to create such a tangible world, in a sense, that she would get a feeling from it that would cause her to play in a way she never expected," he said. One visualization is particularly architectural, like the structure of DNA that's built with each sound she plays. "She never plays the way she plays in that piece," he said.
Happily for both, the experience of putting together Surface Tension, which premi猫red at the Open Ears Festival in Kitchener, Ont., in 2009, was a challenging but positive one. Yamaha lent them the disklavier, so they kept it in a room at the University of Toronto.
"We would go and sit together in a room - I guess our daughter was five," Rokeby said. "It was like we were having our first date since our daughter was born. ... It was quite romantic."
