On November 3rd at Scratch Night, an in-progress showing of work hosted by the Live Arts Brewery (LAB), appeared the first iteration of Shadow Life, a 20-minute, soon to be multi-displinary work that combines recorded narrative, dance, music, and film. At Scratch Night, Josh McIlvain performed his work as a monologue/one-man show (with some audience participation) on the Painted Bride stage in Philadelphia.

The purpose of this showing was to explore the possibilities of what the recorded narrative will sound like, and to sharpen up the text before committed it to tape. The project will now progress into its next phase. Read on! Full project explanation is next!

Shadow Life is a 15-minute multi-disciplinary performing art experiment about the need to discover a fantasy world within the mundane details of everyday life. The written narrative of Shadow Life, once recorded, is given to a dancer-choreographer, a composer, and a filmmaker. Each creates a work around that vocal recording without knowing what the other artists are creating. The 4 various elements will come together for the first time when it is performed for an audience. The lone thread between the dance, music and film is that they are all timed to the recorded narrative, so that they will be technically in sync. Otherwise, each artist has total control over his/her interpretation–and yet no control of the actual outcome of the performance. Audiences will experience creation in performance!

Advancing on the audience volunteer.

The point of this work is the experiment itself, where ultimately process becomes performance. The point of the show is to witness of how varying interpretations of a narrative by different disciples and media interact when blind to each other. Will it create a rich layering, discord, or uniformity? Or perhaps varying degrees of all three? Audiences will be able to interpret and judge the relationships for themselves as the work is performed.

We will keep you updated as to when the full performance takes place. We are planning on Fall 2013, but who knows! You can see a video of the scratch night performance here.

Shadow Life from Josh McIlvain on Vimeo.