IDEAS Performance: Tacoma Narrows Monochord from the Puget Sound by Aiyun Huang

• published: 02 Dec 2014
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The Tacoma Narrows Monochord from Puget Sound is by UCSD alumni Sean Griffin (Ph.D. Composition '03) and Aiyun Huang (MA '98, DMA '04) and the performance closes out the Qualcomm Institute's 2014 IDEAS performance season. In the Puget Sound’s Deception Pass is a small island known as Ben Ure Island. Ben Ure and his partner Lawrence Kelly would smuggle Chinese laborers into the Puget Sound, hiding them in burlap bags on their ship. When the US Customs Department would catch them, they would dump the bagged-up people into the water to avoid fines. Because of the currents, the bodies would collect around San Juan Island in a cove that is still called Dead Man’s Bay. In Griffin’s narrative, The Puget Sound, from which this work originates, Chang’e, the Chinese moon goddess with her rabbit, embodied by Huang, tears down the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (collapsed in 1940) after saving the souls of the drowned people and returning them to their lives in an parallel reality. The drumming of fingers represents an impatient gesture for justice and the monochord instrument represents the suspension bridge collapsed into a box. Tacoma Narrows Monochord from The Puget Sound is a new percussion theater and media performance work that instrumentalizes archival footage and historical narratives related to the Puget Sound in Washington State. This multi-movement “pocket media-opera” features 20 video, sound and movement interactions. The video consists of archival footage from the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse and of Aiyun Huang in 8 separate costumes designed for the piece. Vivid juxtapositions are spun into an imaginary theater work of poetic quotation construed of intimate home-movies, civil engineering disasters, American-Chinese labor histories, poetry and a moon goddess with a rabbit. At the center of the work is Huang playing a new sculptural soundbox instrument. Wired with tense strings and electronics, it emits shifts in highly-refined finger percussion techniques and exploits the strings’ resonant properties through extended, electronically enhanced drones. Conceived by long-time collaborator, composer/director Sean Griffin, the work was commissioned by Huang and emerged through collaborative, interdisciplinary development with sound designer Chris Warren, cognitive neuroscientist John Iversen and artist Joe Yorty. Tacoma Narrows Monochord is an interactive, research-based musical-and-video landscape that compiles fiction, history, and musical feats into a suite of seemingly unrelated but surprising, historically entwined realities. After the performance, audience members are welcome to try to prevent the bridge collapse by interacting with the gaming element of the piece. The performance in the Calit2 Theater will take place on the final day of the team's five-day residency in the Qualcomm Institute.