Applied Silence and Screen Door

For several months now, composer-musician Stephen Lyons (Fond of Tigers, Limbs of the Stars, Cloudless) and I have been cooking something up. We’ve formed a group called Applied Silence and will be creating artworks that fuse music and narrative. There are a few different ways in which our collaboration will manifest, but the most immediate is Screen Door, a tandem narrative, a kind of spoken-word chamber opera, a work for actors and musicians that I’ve been developing for several years now in various cities with various artists. We will be performing Screen Door live, for one night only, on December 3, at Saint James Community Square (3214 W 10th Ave, Vancouver), which is a lovely old church with great acoustics and a lot of wood. Our collaborators include bassist Shanto Acharia, actors Tasha Faye Evans and Steve Hill, and, on pedal steel, Paul Rigby. Stephen will be playing drums and other things. I will direct, conduct, and probably bang on some things. Our gracious presenter is Pi Theatre. You can learn more and purchase tickets by visiting the Screen Door page on their site. You can also follow Applied Silence on our very new Instagram (@Applied_Silence) and Twitter (@SilenceApplied) feeds. I’m excited to share this, which is easily among the most satisfying realizations of my performance writing I’ve ever been so fortunate to witness. If you’re not in Vancouver, or otherwise can’t make the show, I promise there’s more to come. (Though one of the things I like about Screen Door is that, while the text is fixed, each iteration can be quite different.)

The above photo, which will serve as the project’s official cover art (and which you might recognize if you happened to have taken my Dream Reportage workshop earlier this year), is by Laura Barrón.