Wet Gate Plays Berkeley Art Museum L@TE





Wet Gate, the 3 person projector band I play in, was invited to perform as part of the Berkeley Art Museum's L@TE Friday series, which featured Terry Riley and Ellen Fullman on the 2 previous occasions and has upcoming or just occurred events with William Wynant and Fred Frith, as well as Carl Stone among others. So we had to accept the honor of the appointment. We were scheduled for January 29th, with friends Anne McGuire and Jon Leidecker (aka wobbly), who do a bizarre nightclub song set.

We had several months to prepare our material, which was fortunate given that Wet Gate had not played together for almost 3 years and that I now live in Los Angeles, which makes rehearsing a challenge. Those months allowed us to go through olde material and choose what we still liked from it as well as check our equipment for functionality. 16mm projectors can tend to keep on chugging, thankfully, but they do require some minor standards of upkeep and storage. We also looked into updating our various methods of image alteration, more or less the mirrors we use to bounce images up onto the screen. Because Wet Gate, as a band, plays projectors at the front of the house, before the audience, not hidden in the booth at the back.

Wet Gate enjoyed some good years in the Bay Area, in some ways leading a wave of artists working in fields of expanded cinema. (I know that sounds pretentious but I believe true.) The group silt had been doing something else quite rare and otherly, with super8 mostly but by diverse means, and Wet Gate's appearance came as silt seemed to dissolve, then working more as individual artists and out of town. (Our approach was also uniquely sound-centric, whereas experimental film culture tends heavily towards the imago-centric. We identified more with the music scene, as a band.) There was overlap to the activities of these 2 groups, silt and Wet Gate, and as friends we encouraged each other. What I'm trying to say is that the late 90's and early 00's were the years when Wet Gate really developed as a group and innovated a very clear approach to film performance. (While it may be frustrating at times that the film and music worlds seem so separate, these fences between genres or mediums became the scaffolding we could walk upon and build something almost new... San Francisco is also a uniquely open-minded town.)

Anyway. After an initial get together around Thanksgiving, when we visited the Berkeley Museum and saw the strange orange blob-like landscape seating which we would be sharing the space with, we began to conceive a show. A usual Wet Gate show runs about 40 minutes and involves alternating sequences of pictoral and abstract film loop projections. We looked at some material we each proposed to bring into the show. Peter (Conheim) showed Steve (Dye) and me a great Margaret Mead film of Indonesian trance theater. We enjoyed our usual brown dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Alameda.

The Winter went by. Our rehearsal time turned out to be only the day prior to our Friday show, although we exchanged volumes of e-mail discussing the museum space and our use of it. This procrastinative approach is historical with Wet Gate; we have often created set lists at restaurants just prior to show. There is a fine line with Wet Gate work, wherein repeated rehearsals of a show contents can lead to exhaustion of interest in that material. The machines also slowly destroy the film material. While we have a written set, improvisational aspects add just enough room to give the performance a flexibility that makes it exciting. We took notes from several "jam sessions" that Thursday. I sat with notebook and tried to piece together a set from what we were looking at, with Steve and Peter's corrections and comments. We ran through some of the material and Steve and Peter made more suggestions. We shuffled the order and re-wrote the set.

We met Friday morning and again worked on some of the transitions and sections of the show, did some tweaks to the set, but really we had time now only to load out to the museum and see if we could work there for a few hours. We were blessed by wonderful weather, cloudy with a chance of meatballs, right? (It did rain that evening, but only after we were well set up inside the gallery.) I had major concerns that we would have trouble getting good vantage on the screen as it hung over the orange landscape blobs in the gallery, but as we turned on the projectors and started to toss some light around it appeared that we had a great spot. Set up went smoothly and easily with very good support from many hands on deck at the museum. Steve and Peter spent a lot of effort maximizing placement of the Mackie loudspeakers in the orange waves of grain. We had all afternoon to get comfortable in the space, and Anne and Jon showed up much later and seemed ready to go in minutes. We decamped to a Korean restaurant and chatted with Gibbs (Chapman) and Keith (Evans) while also considering any changes needed to be made to the set.

It seems that over 400 people came out in rainy weather to see the show, it seems a great thing that museums are opening their doors to the public at night and hosting performance events. Ever increasing disposability of culture must demand that museums seek some spontaneity in their hallways. Art is expensive; kids want cheap MP3's. Where is the meeting point? In experiences, perhaps.

Wobbly and Anne (Freddy) did a very fun set of twisted lounge singing, she curled into the orange turf under the screen which projected, Peter Campus style, herself in closed circuit video feedback. (The screen projects.) Jon selected from a series of arch pop music samples to create the vertebrae for her singing, and his rig sounded great considering the space. (The best vantage point was directly in front of what was the stage and then moving out from there sound became echous.) It was very funny at times, perhaps a little grandiose a venue for receiving the messages of some of her ruminations, but some great moments, including when viewed from high up in one of the museum balconies. The party atmosphere of the event had a lot of background chatter all through the night. In the middle of one song, Anne good-naturedly commented: "Go ahead and talk among yourselves. Get a drink at the bar." She had also threatened to strip at the show's start but didn't carry through with that, understandably.

We then came on and did our 40 minutes of chaos, which started a little stiffly but relaxed into a groove in which we listened and played well, if not absolutely inspiredly. Our show seemed to fit the room well. We somehow fell back into the conversation we had learned to have with this equipment and each other. At one point early in the show, Peter, fed up with the audience chatter and innattentiveness, suggested we ramp up the energy and fight back, which we did and it added a needed jolt of steam to the show. I tend to prefer the less formal performance, and this situation was something between a formal performance and a more relaxed workout, a nice balance in a pretty unique situation.

While it's uncertain what future remains for Wet Gate, this event was definitely a good one. I'm trying to fold my performance energy towards a solo sound and image show and continue to see Wet Gate as an incubator that could lead each of us to new things. It was nice to be back together again and we had many encouraging comments, as well as a nice anonymous timelapse youTube document you can see here (sound coming some day soon):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2toVwJV2MDc

(Images above both from this youTube clip.)

See also BAM/PFA site for L@TE schedule:

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/late