The colors on the screen rise and fall, nearly bursting from the borders of the geometric shapes. Walter Ruttmann’s 1921 short film “Lichtspiel Opus I” is oil paint on glass, but tonight in The Rockwell, the film is also sound and touch on sight. There is the seesaw of violin and song. Voices slip in and out of harmony. Triangles stab downward, and the voices become gasps and whistles. The dancer moves in front of the screen. Her arms roll over her body, which is enveloped in lime green. Aural crescendos match the swelling of shape and color.
With Nathan Halbur and Angela Yam acting as the artistic directors, DREAMGLOW is, in simplest terms, a band.
“It technically started when Angela Yam and I were living together in Sacramento, California,” Halbur explains. “We made kind of a DIY Christmas album and we called the artist for that project DREAMGLOW.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, music became an essential way for Yam and Halbur to wile away the extra time.
“For about a month, we made a brand new arrangement or composition every single day, and that was, I feel, really the true beginning of DREAMGLOW,” Halbur said. “About a year ago is when we started doing live shows. … We got our favorite singers and musicians together, and our ethos is just all about making art with our friends.”
Tonight, The Rockwell’s cozy black box theater is made even more intimate by the set up for DREAMGLOW’s show. The musicians’ chairs are arranged in a semicircle and draped with white sheets. Throw pillows are scattered around the floor, and the lighting is a dim mix of blue and purple. Given these bedroom characteristics, the performance space has a sleepy, dream-like quality. And, like a dream, the show itself is not easily decipherable.
“Photoplay” is DREAMGLOW’s newest offering to audiences, and it is boldly avant-garde. Halbur details the origins of the project: “A few years ago, I was in an opera by the composer Wayne Shorter, and that opera consisted of a lot of improvisation.”
Halbur continued, “I hadn’t done much improvisation, but I was really inspired by that experience, and so wanted to do more. … A little bit after that, I produced an album for Nightingale Vocal Ensemble called ‘Composition Sped Up,’ and that’s a 100% fully improvised album of acapella vocal ensemble music.”
The result of these musical endeavors is “Photoplay.” “I thought it would be fun to apply that improvisational approach to films, to use the films as like prompts, and for us to create live soundtracks for those films through improvisation,” Halbur explained. “And so we did a project with that last year, and then this is sort of the continued iteration of that project.”
The pieces that compose “Photoplay” are broad in scope. Poetry is both recited and sung. The songs produced by the musicians and their instruments are both arranged and improvised to be in tandem with the films played. Among the on-screen offerings are spinning animated circles, Taiwan cypresses, bleeding colors, emperor penguins in Antarctica, migrating snow geese and a pop-art-esque distortion of a Danish short film. The movements of dancer Cassie Wang bring a tangible third dimension to the films. Her body becomes a canvas upon which the music and visuals of “Photoplay” are projected.
“Brine Pool” is a piece from the mind of Halbur. Ocean footage sourced from YouTube depicts fish and other aquatic creatures in suspended animation. The sight is so strange that it seems extraterrestrial.
“That was very inspired by my experience doing Wayne Shorter’s music,” Halbur said. “The original YouTube has this voiceover commentary, basically by a group of researchers, and they were just so excited about what they were looking at and what they were describing, and their enthusiasm really inspired me to be creative.”
DREAMGLOW preserves the commentary, but twists it into something musical. The drumming is soft and muffled, as if underwater. The singing is haunting yet amusing. In addition to the words sung, there is heavy breathing and high-pitched wailing.
The music that DREAMGLOW creates is singular — a mesh of opera and low-fi, played with keyboard, drums, violin and even melodica. Pairing this music with the film and dance of “Photoplay” makes for a highly stimulating experiment. The improvisational element, in particular, breathes life into the show. There is an immediacy and a rawness inherent to improvisation, and DREAMGLOW embraces it fully. The live crossing of all these artistic media — music, film and dance — is thrilling to watch. The eyes and ears are almost never sure where to focus in “Photoplay.”
Halbur reflects on the intentions behind “Photoplay” as a project. “I think the most important thing we want people to experience is just a sense of community in gathering together to experience radical art,” he said. To Halbur, DREAMGLOW at its core is about “being excited about life and creation and art and trying to inspire each other through that.”
Keeping with this philosophy, the end of “Photoplay” is a singalong. The audience, lulled now by their own voice, watches as The Rockwell’s bed is hastily unmade.