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Whew, I've finally found some time to take a deep breath and write about Jason Freeman's Flock in presentation with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. See the video here.

Franciscan Monk and I headed down south to the Black Box Theatre at MACLA in San Jose, early June. Flock was being presented in correlation with the highly lauded inaugural Zero1 Festival in downtown SJ. We exchanged our tickets at the door for baseball hats with glowing plastic half baseballs attached to the top. The room was darkened and a screen with an animation of a grid hung over the stage. Jason Freeman and Mark Godfrey were seated behind three monitors like dual Wizards of Oz.

Franciscan Monk with a glowing baseball hat upon his head.

Initially the audience was encouraged to go up front to a rectangularly taped floor space. As the flock gathered, it soon became apparent that the glowing lights moving across the grid were animations of the plastic baseballs atop our heads. Cameras hung from the ceiling tracked the locations and movements of each individual.

The Flock.

The verbal introduction of the piece was awkward...Flock is a piece that speaks for itself. I don't think one is capable of truly understanding it unless one delves into the experience firsthand. Yeah, sure, the concept sounds pretty cool: "In Flock, music notation, electronic sound, and video animation are all generated in real time based on the locations of musicians, dancers, and audience members as they move and interact with each other." But to actually get out there and move in a connected space with mindblowing musicians like the Rova Saxophone Quartet and tounderstand on an intrinsic level that you are actually shaping the creation of the music...that your body and movements are an integral part of what you are hearing...well, it's a singular experience.

AND there were dancers! As part of the intro, the dancers choreographed within a clearly defined space in correlation with the musicians to facilitate a deeper comprehension of how the piece worked on a technical level.

The second stage of the performance involved dancers inviting willing audience members to involve themselves in the unfolding alchemy of the dance with the music, enabling audience members to take turns, interact with one another anonymously in a communal setting, and giving them a chance to participate as much or as little as they pleased.

I stood back for a while and watched Freeman and Godfrey manipulate the notation sequences, listening to how the music changed, absorbing the basic communal composition. It is notable that although Freeman and Godfrey have a certain amount of control over what the computers put out, Rova, the dancers and the audience exercised equivalent influence over what was being created.

The four members of Rova have played together for over twenty years and communicate seemingly effortlessly on a musical level. I cannot imagine a better pairing with the Flock application. Each musician had an lcd screen mounted on the front of their sax - marching band style - with the notation generated from the movements of the audience and dancers streaming across. Each player occupied a different line on the grid, each translation separately affected by the movements of the individual glowing plastic balls on our heads.

By the time I decided to go up, I had conceived a dubious strategy. Instead of following the dancers through a guided choreography, I danced my own preconceived choreography through each of the musician's realm and was rewarded with a gorgeous uptempo and heightened intricacy in the musical tradeoffs between the Quartet. I discovered that when I moved across the back of the rectangle in a zig zag motion, the musicians responded by moving to the center of the rectangle, forming a circle and trading off more diverse rhythmic complexities.

It left me breathless, as one who loves music unequivocally...to be able to take an active part in the creation of new music, replete with fine musicians and a like minded community. Not to mention the plastic glowing half baseball cherry on top. Thanks, Jason Freeman, for finding and sharing the joy in being part of the Flock!