Lelavision in the Hot Shop: Just Do It.

Andrew, Simon and I spent Sunday at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, watching our pals Ela and Leah at work in the Hot Shop there. This incredible husband-and-wife duo are also known as Lelavision, a performance company from Vashon specializing in what they call "physical music."  Rather than attempting to describe this, I'll just give you an example:



Physical music? Musical sculpture? Instrumental dance? Whatever you call it -- it's beautiful.

We were fortunate enough to encounter these remarkable people a couple of years ago when they teamed up with my dear friend Anna, a developmental biologist, to do a collaborative piece about pollination. Anna's pollination lecture -- performed on a rainy night in Ela and Leah's Vashon barn -- described plant sex in vivid detail using passages from the Odyssey, metaphors drawn from human romance (silk stockings, perfume), and real daffodils that we dissected right there in the audience. Through it all, Leah and Ela portrayed the pollination process using Ela's specially designed instruments -- including the semi-habitable orbacles and the revolving stamenphone.  We were all enthralled.

The pollination performance was just the beginning of these science-based pieces for Lelavision. Since then they have teamed up with a whole series of research scientists, each of whom gives them a crash course in his or her area of expertise: ballistics, evolution, etc. And then they work together to create a performance that uses dance, video, storytelling, audience participation, and these amazing musical sculptures that Ela creates and he and Leah dance in, on, and with.

They are working now with Dr. Arri Eisner, a geneticist at Emory University, on a piece that plays on the idea that a gene can turn on and off "like a lightbulb," as Dr. Eisner says. As it happens, the lightbulb shape is also a terrific resonator for sound. So last week at the Museum of Glass, Ela had the Hot Shop glassblowers turning out a series of light-bulb-shaped resonators, each carefully proportioned -- using a 19th century formula developed by Hermann von Helmholtz -- to amplify a certain tone.

The mechanical instrument Ela wants to build will include 40 of these bulbs, which will light up when they are played. Some of the light bulbs will have facial features -- connecting back to the idea that each represents a gene that might give you, say, blue eyes, when it is switched on. If you're having trouble picturing exactly how this is all going to fit together, you're not alone. "I'm not sure what it's going to look like!" Ela said. "Come back in November and you'll see." (Dr. Eisner will be in town the weekend after Thanksgiving to deliver his genetics lecture, which will also be the debut performance of the 40-bulb illuminated glass harmonica -- or whatever it will be called. Mark your calendars!)

In their presentation Sunday at the Museum of Glass, Ela and Leah demonstrated a few of their existing instruments. One was simply a long aluminum rod, which Leah vibrated longitudinally just by running her gloved fingers along it -- wow! Our favorite was the metal hula skirt (sort of visible on Leah in the photo below): each of the flexible spokes has a bell at the end, and as Leah moved they chimed gently against the floor, producing music not unlike the sounds Simon and Ioan got out of the coat rack that day at the Frye, now that I think about it.

After the presentation, while the glass blowers blew and turned and pinched and shaped these colorful blobs of molten glass into anthropomorphized light bulbs, Ela set up a recording system that allowed him to play back repeating tracks of percussive sounds on top of each other, adding more and more layers to the mix as he wandered around the studio testing out the sounds made by different objects -- a metal cone used by the glassblowers to shape their pieces, the lid to the trash can, shards from a bulb that had shattered.

Simon watched, fascinated. When we finally managed to drag him away so we could go get some dinner, we asked our boy what he thought of Lelavision. "It was awesome!" was his considered assessment. "Ela doesn't just think, 'Oh, that would be cool,'" he elaborated. "He thinks, 'Oh, that would be cool' -- and then he just does it."

We got the feeling that if Simon ever decides to run away and join the circus, we'll probably find him in Ela's barn on Vashon.

Hell, we might even join him.