Our work is a process and we present the piece as a work-in-progess because for us it is never finished. During 2006 we are rehearsing on a regular basis where we exchange ideas, formulate script and rehearse music in order to develop a piece that offers a narrative truth of Baker’s life. We are interested in how a product is influenced by the form – how jazz, for example, can interrelate with theatre – and how in making performance new structures can be found that have a resonance with the original textual form. All rehearsals are filmed and made available as podcasts while each performance will be streamed online live. This ability to be open about our development and performative processes through technology is critical to our role as artist practitioners in the vanguard of researching the very notion of adaptation and the responsibilities that such a function entails.
January 3, 2006
Chet Baker, jazz singer and trumpeter, died in mysterious circumstances in an Amsterdam hotel in 1988. This project represents an investigation into Baker’s life through existing texts which include an unfinished memoir, interviews, documentary film, song lyrics, photographs and music scores. Through an examination of these ‘texts’ we – a writer, director, jazz composer and actor/musician – are seeking to create a speedball of Baker’s life: a ‘foreignised’ adaptation of these texts that reflects the endemic structures of the original in terms of memory (narrative, memoir), jazz (improvisation) and the iconic (photography). Our work, which is ongoing and documented through podcasts, represents not a simple adaptation of source material or a translation of form but a transfiguration into a performative art form.
December 23, 2005
This is the first step into Chet Baker : Speedball ,a piece about the life and mysterious death of the jazz icon Chet Baker.
