Reality is debatable.
That’s the guiding principle of the performers and organizers behind the upcoming immersive I AM HALO audio/visual performance, “Silks and Spades,” coming to Rolling Bay Hall, via SoundArts Project, for a special one-night-only event at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 1.
Admission is $35 for seats, $25 for the floor, in advance, and $5 more for either option at the door on the night of.
The show merges auditory and visual stimulation with more traditional performance art — dancing, aerial choreography and martial arts — to create a unique, synesthetic experience, SoundArts Project executive director Jade Castillo explained.
“It really creates this almost four-dimensional space,” she said.
The show is arranged and produced by Audrey Lane, who handles the visuals and projection work, and Ilen Halogram, composer and lead vocalist, and features two aerialists and one martial artist throughout the almost Cirque du Soleil-type carnival, each working in tandem to carry the audience through the surreal, phantasmagoric spectacle.
“We’ve been able to create a new way of presenting music that’s also very theatrical,” Halogram said. “It’s really a new take on music concerts. My background’s in theater, I used to do shows at 5th Avenue [Theatre] and Village Theatre and [Seattle] Children’s Theatre, but it was never satisfying for me because the content wasn’t what I wanted to present.”
The show is not so dissimilar from an old-time variety show, Lane explained, though much more cohesive and built around embracing modern technology.
“We’ve curated an experience from the beginning to end that would host all these different performance elements that you’d usually see, that would pop up, and instead of being unrelated everything is one continuous story line,” she said. “With all of these different talents coming and plugging into our format and our story, we can flow through the night with everything curated, from the projection art, being it’s own character in the story, sort of breaking the fourth wall and creating a new form of cinema performance music experience.”
The duo call these interactive experiences “audio reactive visionscapes.” But, whatever you call it, the show is undeniably unique and provocative and it was the perfect candidate for SoundArts’ first big show on Bainbridge, said Castillo.
The relatively new Bainbridge-based music and performing arts promotion company, based out of Rolling Bay Hall, has hosted a few shows before, but this is definitely the “first big event,” she said.
“What I’m really trying to do here is have higher end performances in an intimate setting,” Castillo said. “I’m creating kind of a hub here for multimedia arts and education.”
To that end, the goal of SoundArts Project, Castillo said, is to collaborate with local talent to create anything from small projects to multi-faceted showcases through the art of expression and sound.
There are plans in the works now, she added, for construction of a digital recording studio and large classroom upstairs, available for group workshops and classes. All proceeds from individually sponsored events go to benefit community nonprofit organizations on Bainbridge; visit www.soundartsproject.com for more information and ticket sales.
Halogram, formerly of Seattle, recently moved to Bainbridge to launch HALOGRAPHIC Studios with Lane. She’s performed in more than 40 productions in Seattle, New York and Los Angeles.
Lane also operates Fem de Film, a Seattle-based mixed media production company specializing in performance art capture, film noir, live event videos, ceremony/ritual videos, and more, “through a feminine lens.”
“I think we’re sort of riding this cusp of new technology and what you can do with new technology in an experimental artistic application,” Lane said.
“A lot of what we do is working with technical media labs and integrating new types of motion, connects, and all sorts of different pacts of technology and different ways to utilize them in artistic ways, where you’d normally just see them in some kind of simulation that was very video game/war-like [way].”