Perfect Lives (Private Parts): Conversation with John Howell

PERFECT LIVES (PRIVATE PARTS) Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts) deals with "life in the corn belt." Are you from the Midwest? I think where I grew up, Ann Arbor, Michi- 1e gan, is considered to be right on the edge of done the Midwest. The slides and map showed covera Galesberg, Illinois, which is on the far eastern therefo edge of the corn belt. When I first drove across the country about ten years ago, I'd never really seen that geography and how it There will I changed, and I started thinking about that each one wi image of flatness. I was also reading a lot nels are set u about Egypt and geometry, the measurement door landsc of the earth and architecture, and all those piano player ideas about how the earth is divided up. I hands. And thought about the Midwest flatness being various laye something like other flat places on the earth. I and video i really got interested in it because it was flat filled out by rather than because I was there. Everything I has its own know about the place is so imaginary, I don't will be like really know anything about the Midwest. taken apart Since the DTW performances were "in pro- Gene at the gress," what else will we see at this Fal's per- each have o formance and broadcast? that. Jill an iece resembles most the way live performances are when they're done really well, such as baseball ge where there are huge numbers of cameras and re a huge number of choices of what to show. )e six channels of imagery and th a different subject. The chanp in pairs. For instance, the outapes will be compared to the s' landscapes-the keyboard, his there are templates for all of the rs of the parts, the musical layers nagery, and those templates are pictures of real things. Each song template. The staging this Fall that at DTW but expanded and . The separate areas, like Blue keyboard, who is one subject, will ne camera devoted exclusively to d David are another study, and one camera will be focused exclusively to that area, and so on. What we learned at DTW is that we need more room, so that those subjects can be more separated. What I expect the audience to see is us working on the television . For the Fall, I'm not thinking of it so much as the presentation of a theatre piece, but as a presentation of the way somebody from the Kitchen would (o television. And all of these different subjects will go into a master feed for broadcast? Exactly. The master video will be made as a selection from six different channels, three pre-taped channels and three live camera 3 feeds. Each of those six tracks will be complete in itself for each of the seven songs, so that it becomes a kind of virtuoso mixing piece. As a television technique, it goes away from the narrative style of camera work that you mostly see on commercial television. This piece resembles most the way live performances are done when they're done really well, such as baseball coverage where there are huge numbers of cameras and therefore a huge number of choices of whr to show. So the technical model for the piece is baseball rather than a movie. It's definitely not a film style. How are your six channels going to relate to each other? The video material is being designed to relate those different channels in a geometrical way which is what I call templates. For instance, in The Park, the template is simply the low horizon, which means the bottom half of the screen. The screen is divided into two horizontal areas, and the bottom half is smaller than the top half so that the camera that's studying the keyboard will design that shot so that all of the shots in The Parkhave a low horizon template. The same for the cameras on the narrator and on Jill and David. Those shots will have a geometrical interchangeability. They'll be interchangeable because of the geometry...