PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 6, Sept. 15, 2005

‘End of Cinematics’ features Krannert Center as producing partner

By Melissa Mitchell, News Bureau Staff Writer
217-333-5491; melissa@illinois.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by Susan San Giovani Mikel Rouse

The UI’s Krannert Center for the Performing Arts has assembled an impressive track record for commissioning new creative work; over the past 20-plus years, it has been sole or part commissioner of some 35 musical, dance and theatrical productions. But in 2001, the center ratcheted things up a notch when it took on the role of “producing partner” for New York-based multimedia artist Mikel Rouse’s adaptation of talk-show opera “Dennis Cleveland.”

The production – the second part of an opera verité trilogy that began with “Failing Kansas” – was adapted from its original “black box” theater format for performance on a proscenium stage, with the help and support of UI students, and faculty and staff members.

By all accounts, the union between Rouse and his production company and Krannert Center director Mike Ross and the production assistance he assembled – from within the center as well as from other campus units – proved to be a perfect match. Four years later, the honeymoon shows no signs of ending, with Rouse and company back in residence at the Krannert Center preparing for the Sept. 17 world premiere of the trilogy’s final production – “The End of Cinematics.”

“The collaboration with Mike Ross and the Krannert Center – as a major producing partner – and having access to new technologies made available through the National Center for Supercomputing Applications by Donna Cox and Rob Patterson and others at NCSA allowed us to do things we couldn’t do anywhere else,” Rouse said. “This is not happening on the east and west coasts.”

A multifaceted production such as “End of Cinematics” – which incorporates music, film, dance and theater, all of which is wrapped around a highly technocentric backbone – “needs time to develop and nurture,” he added. “It’s critical to the project to have time to think.”

And the financial support made possible by the involvement of a producing partner – as well as by a number of other co-commissioning institutions and foundations – is “a luxury,” he said, noting that he’s had to finance past productions by charging everything on personal credit cards.

The luxury afforded to Rouse, his performers and production crew at the UI has been made possible through a variety of campus channels, including the Swanlund Initiative for the Performing Arts in the College of Fine and Applied Arts; the Office of the Provost; and through its designation as a project of the Seedbed Initiative for Transdomain Creativity. The initiative promotes creative explorations among university staff members and units that have not always traditionally been partnered. The alliance of performing arts and technology at the heart of Rouse’s production made it a natural Seedbed project.

“Krannert Center’s support for the creation of boundary-pushing new work of potential breakthrough significance at the national and international levels is equivalent to seminal exploratory research in the sciences,” Ross said. “We believe that providing major financial, technological, facility and human resources support to projects illustrative of breakthrough-potential creativity such as Mikel Rouse’s “The End of Cinematics” is of enormous importance.”

Rouse describes the final installment of his trilogy – which he conceived, wrote and directed – as “a meditation on corporate entertainment.” Inspired by critical essays by Susan Sontag published in the New York Times, the 80-minute multimedia performance delivers its own potent critique of today’s entertainment industry, which Rouse maintains is increasingly devoid of artistic motivations and focused almost exclusively on profit margins.

“The simplest explanation of ‘End of Cinematics’ is that it reflects on how corporate culture is its own religion,” Rouse said. And that reference, he noted, is linked thematically to a thread that runs throughout the trilogy. ‘Failing Kansas’ was about the dichotomy between people of faith and people with no faith; ‘Dennis Cleveland’ was about how TV, for so many people, has become a repetitive ritual that resembles religion.”

Rouse’s “conscious comment” on corporate culture is literally beat into the heads of the audience through a loud, pulsating surround-sound presentation of original tunes, first recorded and released in 1999 as “The American Dream: Songs From ‘The End of Cinematics.’ ” The music – which reflects Rouse’s boyhood love of rock, his later interest in jazz and in New York School artists such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and even his exposure more recent years to hip-hop in New York and Delta blues in Louisiana – alternates between pop melodies, techno and hip-hop beats and more complexly layered tunes that evoke a trippy, Beatles-esque feel.

Meanwhile, the stage show is presented in what Rouse refers to as “hyperreal” fashion. With scenic design by architecture professor Thomas Kamm and computer visualizations, animations and a virtual treasure chest of video effects supplied by NCSA affiliates Cox, Patterson, Jeff Carpenter and others, the visual presentation creates a 3-D, almost holographic appearance. On stage, Rouse and the five other members of his company perform live behind a translucent scrim on which enlarged, ghostly images of the performers are periodically projected. The cast moves, sings and signs before fragmented, rear-projected scenes from a film Rouse shot in Paris featuring himself and his wife, Lisa Boudreau. The black-and-white French New Wave-style movie purposely evokes imagery from the film industry’s more artful past.

Following the Sept. 17 premiere at Krannert Center, the production will be reproduced next, in October, at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at the University of California at Davis. After that it will travel to venues throughout the United States and will be featured at a festival in Liverpool, England, in 2008.

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