Outre by Darren Johnston featuring Cristian Vogel original music

[CV]

Perfomed 6 times only at this years Edinburgh festival, and now a possible tour, Outre ( pronounced Ou-tray ) , features a 13 minute piece of original electronic music composed especially for the piece.

The music I composed builds on a Burroughs-esque cutup of JFK's Cuban missile speech, multiple re-sequenced and convolved impulses culled from rhumba rhythms and songs to create a heady mutation of history, spirit and rhythm.



A review of the piece from metro.co.uk ...

In a half-lit haze on a monochrome set, five performers in outlandish outfits move in an ambient dance. This is the introduction to experimental choreographer Darren Johnston's Outré, a performance combining physical theatre, multimedia and the musical science of artists from Warp records to mesmerising effect.

Johnston has conceived and realised a twisted cyber music hall that shows the influence of Chris Cunningham and David Lynch. Freakish performers are introduced by a terrifying projected MC, his face and voice warped and distorted. The atmosphere is pure ghost train, all set within the frame of an old-fashioned, roughly scrawled cartoon projection of a proscenium arch.

To the spooked pulse of thudding, grinding industrial noise interspersed with off-kilter fairground music, Johnston's five dancers appear in turn, alienated within their dimly lit black and white world. A chanteuse sings a fragmented version of The Thrill Is Gone; when she turns, she reveals an identical conjoined twin. The creature in a hooped frock has a mannequin's featureless face. A headless creature in a tuxedo weaves before a mirror to a pulse of white noise. A salsa dancer twitches to radio static with her back to the audience. When she faces forward, there's a disfigured monster's head beneath her long, lush curls. Most haunting of all, an Oriental ghost-girl gyrates in falling rain that turns into leaves in a forest glade. All their movements are dislocated, as if half-remembered. At the end, each collapses like a broken puppet to the floor, without any sense of unity beyond their strangeness.

Johnston's dance of shadows is a cabaret for a nightmarish world. It has its own logic and a haunting, disturbing and quite extraordinary beauty.

read more about Darren at http://www.arrayuk.com/phase2/default.asp

[CV]