BAT SONG REHEARSALS FOR AN AUDIO PLAY: APF LAB
Press Release
Adrian Williams’ audio play, Bat Song Rehearsals for an Audio Play comprises one of a number of works the artist conceives within the space, time, and activity of a story performed live.
Williams, who was born in Portland, Orgeon, studied at Cooper Union in New York and Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Expressing a desire to “conceive of the short story as a studio space in which she crafts work,” Williams radically reinvents the criteria for what can be considered an object of contemporary art.
What we know about Bat Song is the following scenario: “a distraught vocalist seeking remedy for her chronically unreliable voice visits a specialist who prescribes hanging upside-down while singing as a technique to improve vocal strength.”
The public is invited to APF LAB, 15 Wooster Street, in New York, for a series of live rehearsals featuring Bat Song’s sound engineer, narrator, vocalist, and gymnast. The varieties of sounds these players produce comprise narrative action and character development, but meaning remains subjective and cumulative throughout.
Conducting while narrating, reacting while being directed, Adrian Williams inserts herself, her collaborators, and her audience into a storyboard hall of auditory mirrors. Afforded the potential to be grand and gruesome, eloquently operatic or horrifically carnivalesque, sound may assume unexpected guises. In Bat Song: Rehearsals for an Audio Play, even the answering machine can play a leading role.
Bat Song rehearsals are scheduled afternoons, (1 to 3) and evenings, (7 to 9) on alternating dates from March 7 to March 17. Please refer to www.artproductionfund.org for precise dates and times.
Additionally on March 21, at 7 pm, to conclude her APF LAB residence, Adrian Williams will install ALBATROSS ADO a 10 minute 16 mm color film with accompanying music composed by Theodore Koehler that is always performed live.
Adrian Williams’ solo projects, Bat Song Rehearsals for an Audio Play and ALBATROSS ADO have been organized by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz for APF LAB.
