Simone Dinnerstein: The Eye is the First Circle
Photo by Maria Baranova
LINKS & ASSETS
The Eye is the First Circle Website
BOOKING INQUIRIES
Christina Jensen, christina@jensenartists.com
Gina Meola, gina@jensenartists.com
646.536.7864
Music by Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein,
and Robert Schumann
With projection design by Laurie Olinder
and lighting design by Davison Scandrett
With The Eye Is the First Circle, Simone Dinnerstein ventures into bold interdisciplinary artistic territory in collaboration with projection designer Laurie Olinder and lighting designer Davison Scandrett.
Conceived and directed by Simone, this dynamic production deconstructs and collages elements from two iconic works of art: her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata.
Laurie Olinder pulls visuals including animated elements of the painting and real-time video to all points of the stage, and Davison Scandrett’s lighting gives them breathtaking theatricality.
Simone's searching performance sits within this disorientingly immersive visual space.
The piece asks:
How do our origin stories mold us?
How can a sense of self come from the musical and visual fragments we remember from childhood?
The Eye is the First Circle shows us what it is to draw a new circle around the one we stand in, at the edge of what we can see.
Duration: Approx. 70 minutes without intermission
Technical Specifications: The Eye is the First Circle can be performed in a wide variety of theater venues, from black box theaters and non-traditional spaces to proscenium stages. There are two productions available to accommodate different venues. More information.
The Eye is the First Circle was commissioned by PEAK Performances at Montclair State University.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As Emerson wrote in his essay Circles, “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.”
The Eye is the First Circle is a very personal piece that, at its core, explores how my family’s world shaped my relationship to art. I devised it using my father Simon Dinnerstein’s Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. My intellectual, emotional and artistic response to each work, and to the connections I saw between them, is what formed the larger circle I drew.
I envisioned The Eye Is the First Circle as a single artwork with many kinds of expression. To craft it, I collaborated closely with the projection designer Laurie Olinder, along with lighting designer Davison Scandrett and associate video designer/engineer Simon Harding. Laurie’s rich imagination, consummate eye for composition, and artistic skill brought the visual ideas to life. The pieces of the puzzle that I wanted to interweave—such as using hidden cameras inside the piano, interspersing natural and human sounds of the world around us, and filming myself in the actual garden that was the subject of the copper plate at the center of the triptych—were discussed with the entire artistic team. A member of the Kasser Theater’s stage crew sat at the piano as a stand-in for me so that the four of us could be out in the theater, viewing the stage and constructing the work.
While creating this production, I discovered that I had an aptitude for visual composition and for directing. It was as if I discovered a sixth sense that I had never used before, and I felt the joy of generating an artistic experience that expanded beyond music, the area where I am most used to expressing myself. When I began, I did not know what the end point would be. As Emerson wrote, “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.”
-Simone Dinnerstein
PHOTOS
