Always Be Closing is a bruising, physical, virtuosic solo for Montreal dancer Catherine Larocque. It takes the form of a hardcore sales seminar, putting the audience in the middle of the action.

It has a double musical accompaniment: Alec Baldwin’s testosterone-drenched monologue from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, and the virtuoso Presto movement from Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto.

At The Wrecking Ball is happening at the Lower Ossington Theatre, at 100A Ossington Ave. There are four shows: Thursday February 9th through Saturday February 11th at 8pm, and a matinee on Sunday February 12th at 4pm. Tickets are $15.

The show also features work by eight of Toronto’s leading dance artists. It should be a great night!

Traceurs: 18+, male & female

What’s the upshot?

I’m shooting a short film set to Buck 65’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who By Fire’, and I’m looking for performers. Read this, watch the video, and if you’re interested, email me and come to the open rehearsal this weekend (Oct 15 / rain date Oct 16).

What’s the concept?

Something based on this concept: http://vimeo.com/30174940 (password is ‘jacob’). There’s a fair bit more info about the concept in the video description.

When?

We’ll be shooting either Saturday Oct 29 or Sunday Oct 30.

Is this a paid gig? How much?

All performers will be paid. We’ve got a bit of support from MuchMusic’s MuchFACT (to make a ‘viral web video’, not a high-budget music video). The plan is to split the funding evenly among all performers and crew, so the exact amount depends, but performers can expect to make between $150 and $200. Like Bravo!FACT, we get the funding upon submission of the finished film, but because it’s a web video, there’s almost no editing; performers can expect to be paid within 30 days of the shoot.

What’s the time commitment?

A half-day shoot (about four hours) and two rehearsals, for a total time commitment of 8-10 hours.

I’m interested. What do I need to do?

1. Contact me at jake@jacob-n.com and tell me so. If I haven’t worked or trained with you, please tell me a bit about your training and experience, and if you can, include a link to some video of yourself performing. I’ll send out an email in the next day or two with a time & location for the open rehearsal call and any other details.
2. Come to the open rehearsal call this weekend. You’ll need to bring:
   • an iPhone / iPod touch (if you don’t have one and can’t borrow one, let me know; I may have some extras). We’ve built a custom microapp to make this concept possible.
   • earphones (that will stay in your ears if you move)
   • dark-ish clothing that you can move in (sweats are fine, please no capital-D dancewear). Make sure you’ve got a safe pocket for your phone / pod!

Peter Brook, writing about opera in The Shifting Point: “You come to Mozart and find a perfect marriage between the artificial and something that’s fully alive — here’s an example of the rigid pipe and the water flowing through it. But gradually the attention begins to go more and more to the artificial until suddenly you’re into sclerosis. Suddenly that pipe is taking all the attention and less and less water is trickling through it. Finally you get a fundamentally unwell and crazy society in which people forget that pipes were put into buildings for the purpose of letting the water through, and they now consider them to be works of art. People knock the walls down and admire the piping and totally forget its original purpose and function. This is what has happened in many art forms, and opera is the clearest example.”

The anorexic aesthetic at some ballet companies is a fabulous example of admiring the pipes.

Ego Echo Installation – beta test from Jacob Niedzwiecki on Vimeo.

Ego Echo is a responsive installation work. Inspired by classical trompe l’oeil perspective and audio samplers & loop pedals, it acts as a mirror, reflecting a room and the people in it and capturing and sequencing movement.

This video is from the work’s beta test at the end of my one-week residency at the 2011 Dance: Made in Canada festival. The construction & visuals are preliminary; the focus was on testing and experimenting with the core concepts. More than sixty people participated in the beta, putting the work through its paces and helping to refine the creative focus and technical mechanics of the piece. The video was shot using a GoPro Hero camera to show a first-person perspective of the work.

Ego Echo was coded in Processing with a Kinect, using SimpleOpenNI and GLGraphics. Music is Lou Reed’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties“ from Animal Serenade, which was pretty much on a loop as I was coding.

Thanks to all our audience members and testers; the fine gents who built the libraries above; Andrew Pimento and Niko Beaubien for their help with setup & strike; Greg Witz at Witz Education for his help; Stuart Baulch for being a great host; Jeff Morris for his excellent ideas and advice; everyone else who helped out; and Yvonne Ng and Janelle Rainville at Dance: Made in Canada for supporting the work.

Spike Solutions #3 from Jacob Niedzwiecki on Vimeo.

This is the third in an ongoing series of short, focused screen tests of generative compositing techniques. In this diptych, the left and right halves use the same video material and grid; the left crops each instance of the source to a grid square, while the right shrinks it.

In other words, the video in any given zone of the left half is sampled (from that same zone) from the video in the corresponding location on the right half. In this screen test, each clip begins almost in sync, with a slight offset, so you can see movements in the grid ripple from bottom right to top left. A stochastic (fancy word for ‘random’) process occasionally jumps individual clips forward, out of sync. The perspective slowly fractures from a hard grid to shifting shards.

Spike Solutions #2 from Jacob Niedzwiecki on Vimeo.

This is the second in an ongoing series of short, focused screen tests of generative compositing techniques. In this diptych, the left and right halves use the same video material and grid; the left crops each instance of the source to a grid square, while the right shrinks it.

In other words, the video in any given zone of the left half is sampled (from that same zone) from the video in the corresponding location on the right half. In this screen test, each clip begins almost in sync, with a slight offset, so you can see movements in the grid ripple from bottom right to top left. A stochastic (fancy word for ‘random’) process occasionally jumps individual clips forward, out of sync.

Spike Solutions #1 (Diptych) from Jacob Niedzwiecki on Vimeo.

This is the first in an ongoing series of short, focused screen tests of generative compositing techniques. In this diptych, the left and right halves use the same video material and grid; the left crops each instance of the source to a grid square, while the right shrinks it. The video in any given zone of the left half is sampled (from that same zone) from the video in the corresponding location on the right half. In this screen test, each zone of video begins at a random point partway through the source footage.