Omnicircus: House of the Deafman
The stage action takes place in a magical, endless night during which Goya gets drunk and contemplates suicide. His nightmarish Black Paintings come to life in the play in the form of Omnicircus robots and virpets (virtual digital puppets), and the painter is visited by the ghost of his great love, the Duchess of Alba. This multi-media CD-ROM includes MPEG video of the extraordinary robot performers, the entire script for the staged work, and the equally-transporting music from the staged production.
The visionary genius behind it all, Frank Garvey, writes: “I compose world-confusion psycho-surrealist junkyard ritual music, something like an industrial-psychedelic taiko ensemble made from old tractor parts somebody set on fire to destroy the evidence. Out of this vortex luminous voices unexpectedly ascend, creating beauty and poetry out of anguish and chaos…” Garvey’s OmniCircus is an interactive installation and performance space in San Francisco with a secondary home at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The resident music group at the OmniCircus is DeusMachina, whose ranks include some of the most powerful performers in the Bay Area and beyond. This recording includes three amazing singers – vox artists Diana Trimble, Shafqat Ali Khan, and Dwayne Calizo – and the multi-instrumental talents of Daniel Berkman, here featured on the beautiful West African harp, the Kora. In 1999 Frank Garvey established the Center for Robotic and Synthetic Performance (CRSP) in Pittsburgh, Pa. The CRSP is a vehicle for the creation of new technologies, performance languages and engineering visions which interface science and tool-making with the primal effort to understand (and change) the human condition through the arts.
