EMPAC Commissions: Sean Griffin: Cold Spring - behind the scenes

Cold Spring was an intermedia statement about how we experience information, evidence, old science and belief and how our illusory notions of scientific objectivity form our haunted personal experiences. This story is told through the re-interpretation of 3 main elements.

1. A theatrical and musical interpretation of the actual 1965 hypnosis transcripts from the 1961 alien abduction memories of Betty and Barney Hill, a young suburban, interracial couple. This is mixed with 3 of Robert Schumann's Liederkreis Op. 39 with texts by Joseph Eichendorff.

2. Reams of bizarre and deeply flawed scientific research at Cold Spring Laboratory once used to construct the now discredited "science-light" of Eugenics that was used to shape America's most unethical social policies of the 20th century. This archive is haunted by two Norse-like undergods: Ernst Haeckel who leads us through the strange intellectual and conceptual gymnastics required to understand eugenics and Else Caucasia Blankenhorn who abducts Betty Hill with her voice.

3. Truck loads of museum quality artifacts of technology landmarks and corporate portraiture from the Schenectedy Museum. Through their evocative design, these scientific objects propose themselves as cultural objects, reinforcing the notions behind the piece; that science in inextricably intertwined with our emotional imagination.

More practically, Cold Spring is an evening-length composition for an international cast of 32 performers. Composed for the full forces of the EMPAC Theater (there are four venues at EMPAC with different capabilities), it featured a 24 foot-long, 16ft high interactive forced-perspective sculpture embedded with actors, dances, 2 truck loads of museum artifacts and portraits, staged video projections, a roller derby team, flying actors, an ensemble of some of the best musicians I could find, extensive lighting plots, costumes and makeup, multiple theater companies and composite video portraits that spoke to the audience.

- Sean Griffin, March 2011

Category:

Music

Tags:

• EMPAC
• sean griffin
• behind the scenes
• cold spring
• eugenics
• opera
• betty hill
• barney hill
• alien
• hypnosis
• science fiction