More than a year in the making, this genre-bending adaptation of Joshua Cotter’s critically-acclaimed graphic novel followed two young siblings through the joys and pain of their innocent, 1980s childhood in the heartland, complete with dinosaurs and giant robots. We combined layered animated videos with live-streamed action to stimulate the imagination of the young protagonist.
Jaime Meline, a.k.a. El-P, took five years to make Cancer4Cure. He spent much of that time mourning the death of his close friend Camu Tao, dissolving his record label, Definitive Jux, and coming to terms with his demons as he looked into an unpredictable future. Lucky for us, he somehow managed to put all that pain down on wax and emerge rough and ready to take on all comers. Continue reading →
I’ve long been fascinated with on demand audio programming. I even recorded a few podcasts once upon a time. It was just an experiment, and I didn’t much share them, but it was a thoroughly worthwhile learning experience. I hope to get back to it some time.
For several years, I traveled to concerts and festivals and took pictures to be paired with reviews, written by myself or others. It was a ton of fun and I treasure a lot of these photos.
F.O.O.B.A.R. stands for Females of Ohio Brutal Arm Rasslin. It was a series of fundraising events that we produced to support Freedom a la Cart and Available Light Theatre.
Remember when the story was all about her perplexing vocal sounds? Six years later and Joanna Newsom puts out a three-disc, two-hour magnum opus, and it’s the first absolutely essential release of the new decade. Continue reading →
Julius is more than a century old. He lives and dies and lives again in a happy dystopia, when everyone is online all the time, the only wealth is respect, and modern technology has eliminated work, boredom, and death.
Only Cory Doctorow, renowned digital rights activist and coeditor of Boing Boing dot net, could see so clearly into the near-future. Luckily, he’s handed his visions down to us in the form of this outrageous and unpredictable playground of ideas.
This was a really challenging novel to adapt for a live performance. We created a language of gestures to convey a lot of the digital-mental events, and shot a few short films to use as flashbacks. All the backdrops were digital, too. We tried to make the whole show feel like an attraction at The Magic Kingdom.
And, wow! Look at those costumes. That was Michelle Dranschak’s work.
Not to brag, but… I wrote and/or directed most of the productions in this video. I also shot most of the footage, wrote and recorded the music, and edited the video.
Here’s something I watch when I need to improve my mood. I shot and edited this promotional video for Available Light’s production of How We Got On by Idris Goodwin. As you can see, it was a lot of fun.
After making John Cage 101, I finally felt like I knew what I was doing in the theatre. (At that point I’d been doing it for almost 20 years, but who’s counting?) In the play, we celebrated the 101st year of the Cage era with a theatrical mixtape – just think of it as 38 Short Plays About John Cage – reflecting the renegade life and controversial ideas of the 20th century’s most influential experimental composer.
Matthew Slaybaugh 