Livewire 12: Dream Prayer Observatory

UMBC’s 12th annual Livewire festival — Livewire: Flow — presents Dream Prayer Observatory, a multidisciplinary collaboration between Dan Bailey (photography and video), Linda Dusman (composer), Brian Jones (technical director), Sandra Lacy (choreography and dancer), Alan Wonneberger (recording and audio design), and Airi Yoshioka (violin).

Dan Bailey’s Observatories series renders photographs with an expanded sense of time. It attempts to slow down to observe, reflect, and record landscapes — a rhythm that is more on a geologic time scale. The images presented in Dream Prayer Observatory are from one camera view on the southern coast of Tasmania taken over a period of 3 months.

Responding to a request from violinist Airi Yoshioka for a new solo work, composer Linda Dusman integrated world lullabies into iconic music from the Western canon as a reflection on the plight of migrating children. The resulting Dream Prayer Lullaby unfolds as a dream of a peaceful integration of peoples as they are forced from one land to another, a prayer that this dream might be realized, and a lullaby to comfort the children who suffer and wait.

Alan Wonneberger recorded and spatialized Airi Yoshioka’s performance of Dream Prayer Lullaby as the audio component of Dream Prayer Observatory. Convolution reverb places the violin in the Great Pyramid, while the audio slowly “migrates” in stereo space.

In this version of Dream Prayer Observatory, choreographer and dancer Sandra Lacy integrates her work in a live performance.