conversation
Efficiency Experts The decommissioned old Georgetown Steam Plant becomes a performance venue, as the artists explain.
BY MARA SILVERS
D
ancer/choreographers Tia Kramer and Tamin Totzke have created a site-specific performance series, called connect/reposition , in the historic 1906 Georgetown Steam Plant, part of a broader project titled “The Study of Time and Motion.” This notion is inspired by the early-20th-century engineers and management consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who identified 18 gestures of efficiency and inefficiency. Following a long-form staging last month in the dormant city-owned plant, Kramer and Totzke will be joined by five other performers in this weekend’s concluding performances.
body moves us forward”?
SW: What’s the significance of the Gilbreths’ 18 gestures? And how do they relate to the steam plant?
What’s the meaning of your motto “How the
Bryan John Appleby The timing couldn’t have worked out better for
Appleby’s re-emergence. The scene’s transition mirrored his own as he started putting aside sparse, folky arrangements in favor of pop guitar hooks and sweeping orchestral suites. “I have a hard time knowing if I happened to be going through changes and the city independently and simultaneously did [too],” he says, questioning whether he was just projecting his own evolution onto the city. Within the scene 18 itself, there’s been a precedent for moves like
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What have you and your team learned during the creative process?
Totzke: The site becomes a collaborator. We couldn’t make material outside of the steam plant—all the movement material, text, and imagery had to be created during the limited time we had inside the steam plant. [We kept] listening to the work, and to the plant, and it came together.
Totzke: In a world that pushes technical advancement, let’s not lose sight that the body, human beings, move us forward. The human body with its innate intuition, the need to connect to others, gut instinct, and organic intelligence, are really how we move forward. It’s through connecting, conversing, and What exactly are we going working together that the world to see this progresses. The credit is misplaced weekend? 6605 13th Ave. S., to only praise technology in its Kramer: A small studytimeandmotion. advancement. group of audience memcom. $15–$20. 7 p.m. Kramer: We do so much work bers will be led through Fri., 4 & 7 p.m. Sat., that is intellectual, but inherently the plant on a tour. There 1 & 4 p.m. Sun. we’re all bodies. That makes [Frank will be a number of stops and Lillian’s research] very timeless. along the way, describing the history of the plant. The The steam plant closed in the ’70s, performance will be integrated into after 20 years of limited use, though it’s still the tour. open for public tours. How did that bear upon your thinking?
Totzke: The steam plant . . . is where we learned about the nature of task-oriented gestures. We also researched thoughts regarding “body as machine, machine as body,” relating the structural anatomy of the plant to the structural anatomy of the human skeleton. The body also became the translator to converse with the palpable historical presence alive in the plant. Appleby’s. Eric Anderson bolstered Cataldo’s sound from somber finger-picking to big drums and clunky, vibrant piano chords. Campfire OK made a clean break from their folk past, changing their name to The Weather and trading their banjos and hand claps for Telecasters and synthesizers. The Head and the Heart even started implementing electric guitars on its sophomore album, Let’s Be Still. Perhaps most telling of the shift in tone were the icons of Seattle folk themselves: Fleet Foxes. Since they announced an indefinite hiatus in 2012, the band’s members have split in polarizing directions. Bassist Christian Wargo and keyboardist Casey Wescott stayed in their folk ways with Poor Moon. Drummer Josh Tillman, meanwhile, reinvented himself as snarky crooner Father John Misty—rarely performing with an acoustic guitar and instead evoking Tom Jones on stage. Frontman Robin Pecknold has remained fairly quiet over the years, yet in a rare public appearance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon in 2013, he re-emerged (sans beard) to cover Pearl Jam’s “Corduroy” on a Gibson Les Paul. All this makes Appleby’s own shift seem not like a fluke, but like another piece of evidence for an overall evolution in the Seattle scene. Each act had its own reasons for splitting from the sound that originally got it attention, but often, it came down to the artists’ desires to be truer to their influences and whims. With a multitude of examples to pull from, Appleby singles out Jurado as a particular inspiration for his own evolution. Jurado, who has been performing and releasing music as a solo act since the late ’90s, was a harbinger of this movement-
Have you previously worked in such a big old historical structure?
Totzke: I’ve always been drawn to site-specific work, creating work in warehouse spaces, alleyways, and galleries, but never have had such an amazing opportunity to make work in an epic industrial site, rich with a palpable history. E
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from-the-movement. Appleby says he’s been taking cues from Jurado’s career, in particular drawing comparisons to Jurado’s sonic leap from 2010’s Saint Bartlett to 2012’s psych-odyssey Maraqopa. During Jurado’s press tour for the latter record, Appleby recalls hearing his frustrations over being lumped in with contemporary singer/songwriters when he identified more ‘60s garage rockers. “Hearing him say that several years ago was kind of like, ‘Oh, follow the thing you’re curious about, not the thing you happen to be associated with.’ If you try and follow the trend that you’re aligned with, it’ll get really boring really quick,” Appleby recalls. But it wasn’t just the scene and the limitations of fixing to a genre that prompted Appleby to take a turn with his music. Aside from having a wealth of influences to draw on, like Brian Wilson’s landmark SMiLE and Disney’s early cinematic aesthetics, he also needed to take a step away from the brooding tone of Fire on the Vine. While he’s still proud of the songs on that record, playing them every night became a bit emotionally taxing. “I mean, that’s my record where I’m breaking up with the idea of God,” he says. “It’s just a really intense place to be. It’s one thing to say it once and then walk away, and it’s another thing to try and conjure that for years. So I do think I did have a little bit of a, like, ‘Man, it’d be such a relief to do something that was playful and light and fun. A little less brooding.’ ” Appleby started to work on demos in this direction, which have never been in line with the typically sparse solo recordings many artists use to flesh out songs. Most of his work begins on his computer as he builds out arrangements for strings and pianos. For Appleby, it’s all about
Aaron Swartzman performing in connect/reposition.
establishing a larger sonic vision. While relistening to one of the songs from a batch of demos, it struck Appleby as sounding like an earthquake, which inspired the concept of The Narrow Valley. “The whole thing opens up with this earthquake running through a small, coastal California town,” he says. “A small, kind of isolated town and a few different characters that happened to be living in that town and what happened to them. It kind of rewinds, and the bulk of the record after that [are] little episodes before that earthquake hit.” On paper, an earthquake splitting through a small town may not sound any less harrowing than his previous work, but on the record it flourishes brightly and enthusiastically. Producer Sam Anderson, who also plays cello in Hey Marseilles, helped flesh out Appleby’s sketches with horns and strings. The record plays out like a movie, nodding to classics like East of Eden. It’s tonally opposite from the darker Fire on the Vine, and hopeful despite the underlying mass destruction. Acoustic guitars do show up, but they sound nothing like what would’ve been echoing down Ballard Avenue a few years ago. It’s ambitious and imbued with pop revelry; Appleby jokingly refers to it as “Jacuzzi pop.” Though fan response has been mostly positive, Appleby says he was writing the record with only a few friends in mind. Those friends like the album, and so does he. “It’s no longer trying to appease the masses, no matter how supportive they may be,” Appleby says. “In other words, I feel OK if other people hate it because my audience for this was so narrow.” E
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BRUCE CLAYTON TOM
Kramer: The plant was designed by Frank Gilbreth and built between 1906–1907. The Gilbreths . . . broke down all human motion to 18 gestures. The work that Frank and Lillian did was about the human body. Those gestures are inherently bound—they cannot be taken away from one another. For example, reach and grasp. [All of this] originated with Frank and Lillian—what role does the human body have to efficiency?
Kramer: You sense an emptiness at the plant. It’s a monument to a really fleeting moment in time and in history.