Playbook & Living Things Dance Party

Recommended for audiences 16+

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PLAYBOOK: one or more plays in book form … or playing with books.

Playbook is an interactive, immersive experiment with improvised sound and text. 

PLAYBOOK was created by a group of local musicians and artists: Eliseo Santillan (keyboards and soundscape), Jessie Rivest (voice) and Andrew Stauffer (percussion), and premiered with Neil Cadger (text) at the Kelowna downtown library during Nuit Blanche 2023.  

The performance is structured to involve audience input: 4 sets of vintage encyclopedias are distributed around the room and spectators are invited to look through the books, select a short piece, and bring it to the reader.  The text is then deconstructed and incorporated into the sonic material produced by the musicians, to create a web of sounds, words and rhythms played through an 8-channel immersive sound system.  PLAYBOOK is an oblique exploration of what, how and why we archive knowledge – and what we do with all the data. 

PLAYBOOK artists: Andrew Stauffer (percussion), Darren Williams (saxophone), Jessie Rivest (voice), Miles Thorogood (musician/audio engineer) and Chris Anderson (musician/audio engineer), Eliseo Santillan (Piano and soundscape), and Neil Cadger (text). PLAYBOOK will be presented with an 8-channel, circular immersive sound system from the SPIRAL lab at UBC Okanagan.  Live inputs from musicians and vocalists are transformed into sonic textures, enveloping the audience in an immersive tapestry. And then we dance.

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