| Q & A: Danny Sigelman on Brown Rocket |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Friday, July 25, 2008 at 09:58 AM | |
 Danny Sigelman, at right. Oroyan cites Bruce Lee and comic book hero The Flash among his direct influences, so it comes as no surprise that the group he assembled, with indie prog monster Terry Eason on guitar, avant-garde capable funk lover Casey O'Brien on bass, and the multi-talented Sigelman on drums, fit right into what he and his collaborator Josh Wejen had written. The piece as a whole follows a tumultuous relationship that Oroyan began with a woman he met on Craig's List. You can get a good sense of it from this Walker blog post right here. Reveille got a chance to catch up with Sigelman recently and ask him about how the project came together and how his involvement with the music expanded to cover set design as well. So tell me a little more about the music part of this. Eddie [Oroyan] and Josh [Wejen], who wrote all the music, started this project a while back and it was a much smaller piece and they did it at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. They have a group called Bean together, and what ended up happening is that when Eddie got the gig as part of this choreography series, they auditioned people on Craig's List. It was kind of a play on the theme of the play, which is a relationship that happened from Craig's List. So continuing that theme, he put the band together. And when I went to audition, Terry Eason was there and he had his guitar, and I had known Terry forever but had never played with him. And right away I thought, 'This is cool if I get to play with Terry.' So we all got the gig: myself, Terry and Casey O'Brien who plays with Eyedea in Face Candy. So we've been working on this since April/May and there's about seven songs in the piece—it's about 45 minutes—and it's all Josh and Eddie's music, but obviously we add our own flare to it. And so when I went to the audition, I just loaded him up; I had all my art stuff with me and I showed him all the stuff I do. It was around a month or so after I left the Current, and I was just looking for something to do. And that's when [Eddie] said, 'I love your artwork; would you consider doing the set? I'll pay you for that, too.' So it's pretty cool. It ended up being twenty panels that I had to paint and they're all basically original paintings—it's like 640 square feet. So it was a nice challenge, and it's come together really well and I think the art reflects the movement. The piece is—I don't want to say violent—but it's very rapturous; there's a lot going on. So it's like that visually as well.  Some of Sigelman's panels for Brown Rocket So does it hang together in a particularly nice way because it's such a small group of people working on the conception? Yeah. I think musically, particularly, we all come from the same place. It's almost inevitable that we all break out into some '70s rock tune while we were practicing. And the art is kind of very psychedelic because it's bold: really big colors. It does look very kinetic as art. So did you conceive of each panel separately? I wasn't sure how to do it, so I just jumped in. I definitely wanted them to work cohesively together, but I wasn't sure what order things would be placed in onstage, so I kind of just went for it. In fact, I wasn't even sure which side was the top or the bottom, so I tried to make everything ambiguous, which is hard for me. Usually I'm pretty direct: I want it to look this way when you look at it. But as it ended up, he just placed them all together the way that he thought. And that was kind of cool, because it made it more collaborative as far as the visuals. So it's a first for me because I've never done anything like that, and I think for all of us as far as putting on a big production. Part of my drive was that I wanted to play music again, but I didn't necessarily want to be in a band that played the same set every week at the same bars. So looking for something else, or maybe something I would start myself, I went on Craig's List and put up an ad, and I listed a bunch of bands. I listed like Can and Neu and Faust and all these strange, Krautrock-y things, because I wanted it to be very improv-y, but not jazz. More rock improv. And who answers my ad but Terry Eason? He had been kinda thinking the same way; he's had his band and done his songs for a long time and he can still do that, but then we both happened to answer [Eddie's] ad, too, and when I saw him at the audition, I said, "You sent me an e-mail," because I actually said I was new to town in the ad. I just wanted to reach out and maybe work with people I didn't necessarily know, which is another great thing about the Brown Rocket thing. Even though some of knew each other, we never had played together and it's really worked itself out pretty well. And the idea of working on one show instead of songs that you'll play all the time—I mean, we might never play these songs again. I hope we do, but we were really working on this as looking towards putting on a great event. So would you think about working with this group again in another show or something? Well it's funny because I have a band called the Self Sound Orchestra, that I've been working on for a long time and I asked Terry to play with me—because he did answer my ad—so we have a show coming up and that will be totally different, but it turns out one of Casey's bands, Dial System , is opening the bill. I suppose the [Brown Rocket] songs would work outside of the dance. It's hard for me to imagine all this working on its own. Even the paintings without the dance, I don't know that they would have the same effect. Things can work out of context, but ideally we'd like to do the show again somewhere, in some other format. I don't know anything about modern dance, and I didn't even know there was a scene of it. They put on this series every year and they pick four choreographers, so it's kind of an esteemed event and kind of an honor for me and everybody else. So when you were rehearsing the music, did you do it with the dancers?  Choreographer Eddie Oroyan I imagine that putting all that together is something of another level up from trying to conceive of a 45-minute set at a club. Oh totally: Like, where am I going to hit the gong? There's a gong? There's a gong! We were at the school and there was a gong in the room and I was like, 'We have to use that for something. We've gotta figure out where that fits.' You can't hit the gong too many times. And I think the music would inspire the dance a lot of times, based on what we would do: if I would bring out some bells or Casey would start playing some sort of thing that maybe Eddie hadn't thought of when they wrote the music. So is there a certain amount of improvisation in the dance stuff to a certain extent? I think so, yeah. I don't think there's any kind of written language that choreographers use; it's just a lot of practice. There's just a lot of doing it over and over and thinking, 'This is what I want to convey and this is how we're going to do it.' Just a lot of trial and error about how it looks and feels and pacing. It's really hard. The physical and mental energy that's required is—you gotta be in shape. That's one thing about playing music. I guess drummers need some endurance, but it's not the same kind of thing. It's pretty powerful and a lot of my art is inspired by music, too, so this is just a really cool ball of stuff. It's totally what I felt like I should have been doing, but I never would have known. So you gotta give it up to Craig's List. It's this totally torrid relationship that [Eddie] had with this woman, and then one day we were at practice and he was like, "Oh, by the way, I got back together with"—I don't even remember her name—but I was like, "Really? And you're doing this play where you're thrashing her around and you're throwing each other against the wall and things actually kind of crumble?" That's another thing: Painting a set I knew would ultimately be destroyed. You know, given all the parts that go into this, it's not exactly like thinking outside the box, but more like getting a bigger box—trying to put it all into something. It's almost like a small box and putting a lot into it and having it be that much more effective. It seems kind of old school; it seems like something they used to do in the '60s a lot more. Where you weren't just there to hear the songs. You know, the punk ethic is that you're there to watch the band and everybody just kind of stands around. This is more of an observing and you can listen to the music, you can watch the dancers, you can look at the art. I don't want to call it a musical, but it's pretty close. It's kind of multimedia in an old school way. A rock opera. In Technicolor. COMING UP: Performances of Brown Rocket on Friday, July 25 and Saturday, July 26 at 8 pm at the Southern Theater. $18/$14 for Walker and Southern members. More info here. |
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| Last Updated: Friday, July 25, 2008 at 10:01 AM |
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