SPIEL - an in-situ performance for prepared mouth - 2018
​Michael Montanaro | Peter van Haaften   -

While absorbed in conversation you notice a stranger approaching. With a curious instrument affixed to their face the visitor leans in, and listens. The mouth opens, patterns of rhythm and sound emanate from within: voices recognizable as your own.Spun out of focus, words reveal their ingrained subtleties as the collector of conversation captures the sentence but not the sentiment. Vocal exchanges are recalled and reflected. Voices are transformed by physical formant inflections, while acoustic hallucinations seem to reference what might have been said. An étude on hearing lips and seeing voices, the performer’s mechanically augmented vocal tract reshapes and filters conversational spectra into new modes of mis-communication. Spiel physically unravels the tenuous synesthetic relationship between what is seen, heard and understood.                      

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Frankenstein's Ghosts  - Interactive performance piece - 2011

Frankenstein’s Ghosts is a collaborative creation-research project. The aim of the project is to generate a hybrid performance work based on the substantive issues raised in Mary Shelley’s novel. In June 2007, several of the project collaborators received SSHRC funding to bring together an interdisciplinary team of academics and artists to share in a deconstruction, analysis and exploration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This came from a desire among academic scholars to explore artistic transformations of their discourse as a way of pushing their thinking even deeper into the subject matter - working with artists who will transform their research into another “language.” For the artists, the impulse came from a desire for deep understanding of the many substantive themes emerging from the novel before embarking on artistic creation.
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Practices of Everyday Life - Cooking 
Montreal New Music International Festival - February 2015

A performance choreographed around a chef and sonified objects: fruit, vegetables, meat, knives, pots and pans, cutting board and table. Cooking*, the most ancient art of transmutation, has become over a quarter of a million years an unremarkable, domestic practice. But in this everyday practice, things perish, transform, nourish other things. Enchanting the fibers, meats, wood and metal with sound and painterly light, we stage a performance made from the moves(gestures) of cooking, scripted from the recipes of cuisine both high and humble. Panning features virtuosic chefs who are also movement artists, such as Tony Chong.Panning is the first part in a series of performances exploring how everyday gestures/events could become charged with symbolic intensity. We use responsive media to poetically charge everyday actions and objects in ways that combine sound and visual composition with the participant's contingent nuance. As the participants grow accustomed to the instrument’s responsive quality, everyday gestures may become aesthetically invested or charged with emotion or social meaning. Participant’s gestures not only lead to unexpected musicality but to narratives about shaping relationships with the world.  
                                                                                                                         
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Varekai  - Cirque du Soleil - World Tour - 2002 - 2017

Deep within a forest, at the summit of a volcano, exists an extraordinary world - a world where something else is possible. A world called Varekai. From the sky falls a solitary young man, and the story of Varekaibegins. Parachuted into the shadows of a magical forest, a kaleidoscopic world populated by fantastical creatures, this young man sets off on an adventure both absurd and extraordinary. On this day at the edge of time, in this place of all possibilities, begins an inspired incantation to life rediscovered. 

The word Varekai means "wherever" in the Romany language of the gypsies the universal wanderers. This production pays tribute to the nomadic soul, to the spirit and art of the circus tradition, and to the infinite passion of those whose quest takes them along the path that leads to Varekai.         

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Litany - 1997

A work structured around Arvo Pärt's work entitled Litany. A duet woven tradition from  the physical encounters of bodies suspended in time in the negative space between here and there, then and now.

Suspended and held in Part's music, cradled in the space that exists within the construct of the work's vocals and instrumentation.
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Unplugged - 1995

A series of four studies that re-examined the body and movement's capacity to inspire. The work was a striping away of technology in an effort to recontextualize the physical world within Montanaro's body of work. An examination of dynamic structures and the way in which they are propelled forward by the human bodies capacity to adapt to, as well as change our relationship to space and time.

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Time In the Eye of The Needle  
Interactive performance piece  University of Arizona - 1995

Time in the Eye of the Needle is a work which deals, on a personal level, with the experiences generally associated with the migration of peoples and cultures. The performance takes place within a virtual stage environment where lights, music, video, graphics, and robots are controlled through video cameras. Video is input into a computer and processed to sense the positions and motions of the dancers within certain locations in the video field. The number, location, and types of sensors within the video field are different at any given time in the performance are choreographed to provide responses to dancers actions within particular time frames. Information is extracted from the space and represented as impulses which are manipulated and communicated to media controllers on other computers. Media controllers act as agents for the sensing system and operate according to a set of instructions which tell them how to behave when controlling particular media (lights, sound, video, etc.). These behaviors are seen by the viewer as mediated responses, from lightingchanges, to computer graphics interactions, to complex interacting musical scores

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Not Angles but Angels - performance piece - 1994

Not Angels but Angels was a full evening work that dealt with an abstracted and non-linear history of the world and the internal working of inspiration and imagination.

This multi media was designed to play with time and the western view that  history is something that happens rather than made. 

NASA toured both nationally and Internationally  with its final performance taking place in 1995 at the Singapore International Festival. 


Zman Doe   - performance piece - 1993

Created in 1989, Zman Doe was a large scale multi-media production produced and performed in an abandoned hangar in the old port of Montreal. With a performing space measuring 300 feet by 90 feet, the work was a seamless blend of dance, film, film animation, slide projections, and music. It was a work that at the time helped define the relationship between the performing and electronic arts.

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The Theory of Everything - 1991



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East of Egypt - 1986

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Under the Rose / Spectrum Theatre - 1985

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