 Hey everybody. In case you don't know me, I'm Brian. I run a venue called the Chopin Factory and I work very closely as an artist with a lot of people, but then the best was in the crowd. I want to point her out to you, she contributes a lot to the work that we make. We mainly make performances that are primarily about video, but for a variety of reasons we decided to make a film. So last year, about this time last year, we shot a feature film upstate at Dan Hurlin's house, you know who Dan Hurlin is. And it's nearly finished, but I'm just going to show, we're just going to show the very first 20 minutes of a feature-length film. And you are all the first people to actually see any of this that didn't even work on it. So that'll be interesting for me. But this is sort of one part of a two-part project that will premiere at PS122. That's all I'm going to say about it. It's 20 minutes long. I'm just going to start. So if we can kill the lights, we're never here. Jim, take a look at this. Well? It's perfect. Let's have a glass of wine. To us. To us. It really is perfect. Tired from the road. I'm fine. I know. Of course not. Yeah. What about your friend? He'll wait here. Can I take your coat? That won't be necessary. This is Janine, my wife. So I gather it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. And don't you look lovely tonight. I didn't get a chance to freshen up. Jim, you've outdone yourself with this one. Thank you. I try. Join us. I will. It warms the heart. How was your drive? Fine. The roads are very smooth. Yes. We take great pride in the quality of our roads. Jim really knows how to handle himself behind the wheel. I'm sure he's useful in many situations. And how's the house so far? It's gorgeous. A little drafting, though. Not at all. Give yourselves some time to settle in and see what I mean. See? I told you. I'm sorry to intrude, but I couldn't wait to meet the new arrivals. You knew we were coming? Of course. News travels fast. It's a small town. There's little to see and even less to do. All we have here are the people. And the roads. Yes. Our very fine roads. We look forward to meeting everyone. The feeling is mutual, I'm sure. I'll drink to that. Yes. Let's. Another? No. It really must be going. I'll see you out. I know the way. Thanks for the wine. You sleep like it goes tonight. Certainly helps out. Good morning, man. Barely different. OK, so thank you, everybody, for coming to Prelude 2016. I'm Nina Segal. I'm one of the producers. And we have Brian Rogers, who's a section of Screamers you just saw. And we have Madeleine, who works with Brian very closely, and Tina Satter, who, if you were here before, we had an installation screening of cadences. So I think we've got about 10 minutes, so we'll just talk briefly. And then if anyone has any questions, please go ahead. Maybe we want to start by just talking a little bit about how the projects came to be and how you think they fit into your wider practice of live work. The piece that I screened was called Theater Company Colon Cadences. And it was two videos in this case, one that's screened there and one in the smaller screen down here, that were edited together clips from video pieces that, as half straddle, we've shot over the years that are just like a web series we made our start to make ourselves like five years ago, something I shot of Jess Barbagallo when I first met him in grad school. Then there are some records from rehearsals of various projects. And it's just this footage I've had now for eight or nine years accumulating. And it's just kind of an amazing archival thing for us, for me personally, for the company. But I also think there's just interesting when I could step back from it, seeing a group of performers next to each other, working together, saying things, and also framed within these unexpected weird contexts, because that's not the work of our shows usually. So anyways, I just decided this was an experiment of it when I was asked to do something for Prelude to really push it and edit it together and have the two videos work together and then put them in an installation setting that drew from some of the costumes and props and aesthetics of the images in the video pieces. And I mean, yeah, I don't want to take up too much time, more time about it, but I have lots of developing thoughts and where it fits into my practice, because to be looking at these people that I've looked at a million times and then look at them on video and be able to edit and repeat their gestures. I mean, it was edited in my movie in pretty dumb ways, which was so fun, but repeat their gestures slow down and they look at each other. It felt weirdly similar to being in the rehearsal room with my interests that are framing moments and these people seeing each other and seeing who's out there. So I was interested in clips where they look out. So it felt surprisingly within my theatrical interests, I felt like I was directing this thing, which I don't think is surprising to have happened. Is it something that you imagine will be ongoing to keep adding to this piece? Yeah, this was so, yes, I love doing it. And we have this footage. And to me, it's just these incredible performers, some of who are here. And I just like the aesthetics of it. I like some of the low five video in there and I don't even know if this, but yes, I want to figure out more, because I don't know other artists, I've been talking to several other artists lately about this. We have all this stuff that exists and what do you do with it and how do you create new meaning for it if you want to or, and I've been really, really interested in that question at this recent time in my career where I've busted a lot of stuff out and I'm like, what is all this behind me mean? And this way of playing around with the video has been really interesting. So I want to, but I want to be, this felt like a first step and I think there's a lot more for me to figure out about how to best contextualize and show it. Well, we've been making, for the last several years, we've been making, we've made a few big performances that were really entirely about video and we're referencing other movies, specific sort of cinematic vocabularies of different movies. And at a certain point, a couple of years ago, I think we just had this idea that we should make an actual movie of our own just to see, just to say that we had tried to do it. And I didn't really have any specific idea of what we would do. I didn't think we would make something sort of as large and scale as we wound up doing, but it just sort of happened in this weird sort of way through Karen Sherman who, are you here, Karen Sherman? Through Karen Sherman, she proposed this idea two years, two plus years ago that we take, we have this friend, Dan Hurlin, who's a really amazing artist and person who has this church upstate. It was Karen's idea that we, he was gonna go live in Italy for a year and she proposed that we take it and use it for a year. And so we wound up spending, I spent a lot of time up there by myself in this church and kind of just wound up writing a screenplay really quickly like in two or three days. And then rewrote it many, many times. And then many, many times, and then I just asked Dan if we could shoot it. And he said, yes. We wound up shooting this movie. We had 11, yeah, 11 shooting days. It was crazy and just with all of, and just with all of our friends, a lot of people that you know are in this movie, they haven't appeared, they appear later. And so we just said, yeah, I just wanted to make a movie and not to make, because I feel like the pieces that we've been making are kind of, have these kind of really high concepts, abstract references to films. I wanted to make a, I didn't want to sort of, for me the way to not cheat was to try to make a film that kind of adheres to certain film conventions, like quote unquote Hollywood film conventions, my version of them. So that's what this is trying to do. It was also, we really took our working practice and our people who we work with in a performance theater setting were like, we're just gonna make a movie. So there was a lot of learning about what that process would be, but also taking our sort of working, working relationships that we already had into this other connected, this really felt like an extension of our theatrical practice, even though it's such a different. And do you have a plan for like the full premiere of it? Do you know when that will happen? Well, so I think of this film as sort of half of a larger project as there's a performance that we're going to make that's meant to be, that's meant to sit alongside this film that will happen at PS122 next summer, I think. And that performance is, it's a performance about video that's whose subject really is the space that it happens in and sort of a wharf, I think of it as like a horror, a live horror film about a theater. And then this will screen alongside it. But then I also, I do hope that I'll find some way to screen this film as its own object somewhere, but I haven't really figured out what the right, the right avenue to take that is. Great. So the theme of this year's prelude is welcome failure. So although not everything is created in response to that, it feels worth mentioning. Do you find that you have a different relationship to failure when you're working in this medium? You mentioned editing and being able to kind of go back over things and look at things in a different way. And also with this work, it's very pristine and you really are working towards a final cut that will be set at some point. Do you think, do you have a different relationship to experimentation and failure when you're working with editing and with film? Well yes, a couple weeks ago I taught myself iMovie to edit this. So it was like extremely freeing with that book next. I had done it a couple years ago and hadn't done it. And so it was all about failure and weird mistakes. Oh, that got dropped next to that clip. So now it's doing this amazing weird wiggle there. I'm totally keeping that and now how to repeat it. So it was literally an exercise in overcoming failure inherent to my ignorance every second of it and then being very unprecious. Like kind of, it was like oh it's just a weird video I'm editing and I just taught myself. But of course I knew it was gonna screen somewhere that feels really, you know, it's gonna be seen and it's like very nice to be in prelude and I want people to come in and be intrigued and interested in it. So I wasn't just like whatever, but so there was a stake of failure to it there. And then in the meta aspect, these were all sort of, in most aspects, projects, not that they never failed but they had never gone out into the world. So they sort of were like experiments that, you know, for whatever reason hadn't ever spent out. So they were inherently not failures. Maybe some of them have been, but they were renewed. For us, you know, when we were, when we, the performances that we've made, we've tended to work in this really slow and kind of noodling and the processes are really long and we sort of afford ourselves endless opportunities to rethink and overthink everything. And so the thing that was really fascinating and really fun about this is that because for a variety of reasons, like the schedule of when we could have Dan's house and the budget that we had to work inside of and all the people that we had to bring together, we had to make, we had to shoot this thing so quickly. I mean, it was literally, you know, we were there for two weeks, we had 11 shooting days. Some of those days were like 20 hours long and it was, there was just no opportunity to really to think, overthink anything. We were, you know, at best, we were able to get two decent takes of, if we were, if we got two decent takes of any one particular shot, we felt lucky. And so we had to just make really choices really fast and just commit to them and not, and we just, there wasn't time to worry about whether they were good choices. They were just, we just made a lot, I mean, so many arbitrary choices about this and it was so fun to do that. But then in the editing, I've now had this footage for a year and we've been sitting, I've been sitting in my apartment editing this. This is the third or fourth, sort of pass through this edit that we've done. And that's to me really, there is a lot of opportunity there to rethink and remake things, but what's really exciting, what's fun for me about it is that I'm not having to negotiate with anyone else's ideas or personalities around it so much. It's just the material. The material is what it is. I can't change the material. It's all, so it's all, it's kind of really fun to be able to, there's a lot of freedom inside the idea of being able to just remake all of this stuff without having to, there's no more generation that can happen for this. It looks interesting to see the things we were shooting that happen that are so key in the way that it can happen. Great. Do we have any questions from the room? Anybody want to ask anything? Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. And we will be starting in a couple of minutes with our next set, which is going to be four readings. So do stick around. Thank you, everybody.