FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2011
The Chair Project
There is a gala in town this Saturday night to celebrate the re-opening of the Coeur du Village [The heart of the Village] also known as Salle André et Gérard Pelletier. For the past month, teams of people have been involved in a big renovation project. New stage and lighting, moving things around and generally making much better use of the space. It's an amazing place, music of all kinds, theater, dance, movies; their programming is terrific. Something for everyone. Which is where the Chair project comes in. They are replacing the old wooden chairs with comfortable PADDED ones and so a group of us decided to take the old chairs and find, coerce, beg, whatever, 50 artists, writers, poets, musicians to paint a chair which will be auctioned off next May to raise money for the hall. To start the project, Michael Hynes, a musician, and I collaborated on the first chair to be auctioned at Saturday nights gala. Now Michael is a composer as well as a pianist so he gave me his unfinished score of a work called Apophenia. I had to look that word up in the dictionary and it is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. My part was to take the score, which I might add was about 30 pages, not numbered, of lots of squiggles and dots, and some words, and fashion it into a chair. I must admit I was hoping to be able to make enough sense of the score to play even a part and get an idea of the music. No such luck. So I scanned and tore, glued and coloured, and generally played until the chair was Unfinished. Michael and I will do another chair for next May with his finished work Apophenia and I will Finish another chair.
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