ACCOMPANIMENT: PRELUDE AND INTERMEZZO (2014)
written and created by Patrick Blenkarn
additional works (excerpts and full pieces) by Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin, Lang Lang, Glenn Gould, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Krzysztof Kieslowski, James Whale, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Tom Twyker, and Margarethe von Trotta
additional help and performances contributed by Laura Holtebrinck, Alvaro Ortiz, Dylan Tate-Howarth, Ben Stone, Jasmine Hare, and Lily Ross-Millard
Accompaniment is a play over email, and over four months. The structure of the experience is very much like accidentally being BCC’d in a greater email thread. Through real time exchanges of emails, the play tells the story of a former child prodigy piano teacher and her student, a middle-aged German elementary school teacher working in Ottawa.
The ‘Text’ and formatting serve both a dialogic and imagistic function and the email platform enables a kind of theatrical experience far beyond the usual time and pace restraints of traditional theatre. The play incorporates full-length films, YouTube links, attachments, full sonatas, and Google Translate required texts.
performed live over the internet || continuously from September 5 to December 21, 2014