GARDEN
Garden is a series of music-driven intermedia performance/installations developed over 3 years that use linear-immersive media (live music, installation, transparent screens and projected video) to explore expressive, atmospheric, metaphoric, psychological and cross-cultural realms of place, night time, environment and the looming human threat to what is left of the natural world.

The first Garden Chapter is a collaboration between Chris Jonas and the Del Sol String Quartet (San Francisco). Created over ten months, this chapter will be created by a collaborative ensemble working on the project’s projected video, a set of transparent screens (enveloping the audience), costumes, spoken text, movement and music. The resulting installation and linked 75 minute intermedia composition takes place in front of a live audience seated on two sides of the live string quartet within the layers of video screens, mixing live music with projected video of night time landscapes and human figures.
This chapter of Garden utilizes the full range of musical capacities of the Del Sol String Quartet, one of today’s most adventurous and accomplished musical ensembles. The project also employs a team of artists that include choreographer, Echo Gustafson, stage director, Acushla Bastible, a performing artist, a lighting/set designer, and a costume designer.

Garden’s text and imagery, both in video and performative/experiential aspects explore culturally loaded psychological landscapes. These metaphoric compositional landscapes combine the abstract and the representational, the real and imagined, civilization and “wilderness”, the transitory beauty of the natural world and the progression of its loss.  Musically, Garden works between textural/melodic soundscapes, virtuosic instrumentalism, extended string techniques and inter-ensemble cueing in a mixture of strategic improvisation and through-composition. 

Distinct from other models of the immersive in which the audience “loses” itself, the environments of Garden engage a kind of self-conscious rapture, creating worlds and demystifying those worlds at the same time.  As a consequence of the bilateral set up of the audience/stage in which the split audience can see through the performance space and into the eyes of their fellow members, Garden’s repositions the viewer into the performance environment.

In order to facilitate easy touring by The Del Sol String Quartet, the physical elements of the first Garden Chapter will be designed to break down into 2 crates and easily be set up for performance in visual art spaces, theaters, lofts and other non-traditional performance venues.

Stage Set-up


Collaborators


Del Sol String Quartet

The Del Sol String Quartet, Kate Stenberg, Rick Shinozaki, Charlton Lee, Hannah Addario-Berry, two-time national winners of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP First Place Award for Adventurous Programming, stands out as a group of pure invention, exploring new ways for a string quartet to interact with audiences, composers and other artists.

In 2008 Del Sol collaborated in premiering “StringWreck,” choreographed and directed by Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton, and “Divide Light,” a multi-media opera by visual artist Lesley Dill, based on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In 2007 Del Sol performed Tan Dun's “Ghost Opera” at Santa Fe Opera with Wu Man, pipa soloist. In each, the Quartet members integrated their string playing with additional vocal, percussion and movement roles onstage.

In 2007 Del Sol premiered “Spiral X: In Memoriam" by Grawemeyer Award-winning composer, Chinary Ung, co-commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation. Performed at the Library of Congress on Stradivarius instruments from the Library's collection, the program included works by Kui Dong and Gabriela Lena Frank, as well as Peter Sculthorpe's Quartet No.16 for string quartet and didjeridu. The Quartet partnered with composers Duo Huang, Kui Dong and Melody of China, to perform works written for the combination of traditional Chinese instruments and string quartet, and has collaborated with Hyo-shin Na and five other women composers from Korea, premiering their new work in Seoul and San Francisco.

In 2009/10 Del Sol will perform world premieres of four commissioned works: Tania León's first string quartet, the piano/quartet version of Michael Harrison's “Revelations,” and new works by Linda Catlin Smith and Ronald Bruce Smith. In addition to its own Home Season concert series, Del Sol is featured annually at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco.

Related Links
www.delsolquartet.com
www.ccasantafe.org
www.tiltbrass.org

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