Employing five movements and 11 musicians, Erin Hollins’ Senior TIMARA recital last Sunday began with an improvised cacophony of sound in which six musicians scampered about the square room, playing instruments and shouting rancorously.
Surrounded by live musicians, video cameras and a hotwired computer system, the small crowd who witnessed the recital last Sunday never had the chance to sit comfortably for long.
Swaying this way and that in an effort to hear and see the music, the audience was in constant flux during Hollins’ hour-long multimedia emersion piece titled “Iceland and Other Dreams II.”
As the first movement wore on, the frenzy settled. A few minutes in, the performance became more stationary. The musicians began holding their notes for longer stretches and weaning away from the short staccato that had dominated the music from the start.
But there was a structure to the madness. “I gave players a list for the improvisation,” Hollins said. On the sheet included such performance tactics as “disjunctive” and “louder volumes” for the beginning to “increased durations” and “more breadth” toward the end.
The second movement combined video and dance in an ethereal dialogue between nature and dancer. Onscreen, the dancer, junior Julia Smith, appeared in serene sylvan scenes: around picturesque lakes, on a dirt road running between trees and hidden behind bushes and undergrowth. As the video rolled during the performance, Smith appeared before the audience and pranced slowly about the room, forcing the crowd turn around in circles to follow her every movement. The video footage was accompanied by appropriately organic, natural-sounding music composed by Hollins.
Hollins said that the intent was to transport the audience to a far-off place. “I like images of women in alternative spaces,” she said, adding that Smith’s onstage performance was included to give the dancer more interaction with the audience.
The next movement, also in video format, used the imagery of a subway car traveling between stations to simulate the connection between often-random components that make up dreams. In this filmed dream sequence, a woman travels out of her bedroom into the rustic countryside and grabs the knot on an old-fashioned farming rope. The rope suddenly becomes taut, and lifts her off the ground, carrying her up the side of an old cobblestone building.
Traveling upward, the woman rises past window after window, where families and children and young men poke their necks out to look at her. When she makes it to the top, and climbs over the gutter, she suddenly finds herself back on the open prairie again. The scene quickly fades back into the subway car, rumbling through the tunnel into another station.
The next number was a diversion from the surreal video footage back into the world of acoustic music and voice. The text, sung by Hollins, was titled “The Minimalist,” by Exra Buchla. As melodious as a modern madrigal at the beginning, the composition unraveled somewhat in structure during the development, but returned strikingly to form just before the end.
Following the musicians was another video, which, with grounded lyrics and realistic settings, began the ascent from dreams back into reality. Featuring shots of the Mojave Desert in the southwest, this movement was accompanied by a quasi-folk/pop song titled “Love is Simple.” The song’s composition represented a familiar genre to Hollins, who wrote in the folk and pop genres before enrolling at Oberlin.
“I am a folk and pop musician who went to a Conservatory,” Hollins said. “I don’t have any real classical training; this is my training.”
Afterwards, the audience was brought back to life in a final segment that was almost an absolute reversal of the first movement. By the end, the improvised music included slamming doors and playing loudly behind back walls and in the hallway.
The entire eclectic program received a hearty ovation by the disorganized crowd. For Hollins, “Iceland and other Dreams II” is the type of work she dreams about composing.
“I don’t like recitals where performers stand up front on a stage and people see piece number one, piece number two,” she said.