Omnicircus
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OmniCircus Theatre was founded in 1988 by artist Frank Garvey. OmniCircus is a gallery and performance art space located in the heart of San Francisco’s SoMa district and home to Garvey’s performance ensemble, (also called OmniCircus), as well a permanent installation of his films, paintings, sculptures, music, photos, and robots. The OmniCircus shows integrate live acting, music, and dance with sophisticated mechanical actors and midi-controlled, computer animated (VIRpt) performers.
In 1988 Garvey and collaborators Carl Pisaturo, Jeff Weber and Aaron Edsinger initiated the construction of a series of performance robots, starting with Goboy, the inexorable robotic panhandler. The Robotic Ensemble of the OmniCircus became a surreal red-light district, a troupe of mechanical beggars, hookers, junkies and street-preachers who appear in OmniCircus shows and engage in mysterious cyborg guerilla theater on the city streets.
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[edit] Paintings
Some of Garvey's most striking works to date are his controversial paintings, created in the mid-1980s. An example of this is Garvey’s 1984 series, “WALL of ASHES.” The series consists of eight large panels filled with fiery scenes, echoing past centuries' depictions of hell and the endless abominations therein, plus 24 smaller paintings, six static sculptures and 9 life-sized performing robots.
Garvey tweaks the idea by including a smoky carnival atmosphere, part modern midway, part ribald medieval festival, with strange skeletal creatures looming over jugglers, tightrope-walkers, skateboarders, and punks. A mushroom cloud anchors Hell on Earth, with pod people hunkered down among clownish, club-wielding men beating each other senseless. Scrawled at the top are the words "When preachers talk apocalypse they lie... the poor see Hell on Earth before they die."
[edit] Robots
Believing that his art should not only move, but also speak, Garvey began working with a stellar group of collaborators to build a robotic red-light district ensemble with mechanical beggars, prostitutes, streetpreachers and thugs, representing some of our deformed epoch's deepest contradictions and fears.
Garvey's main robotic collaborators include Carl Pisaturo, Aaron Edsinger, and Jeff Weber. Together, the four are a lexicon of counter-cultural kinetic art. Pisaturo works includes robotic sculpture, intelligent lighting, structures, and 3-D photography and is a Leonardesque figure in San Francisco robotic sculpture. Edsinger’s research interests at MIT include developmental and behavior based cognitive architectures for humanoid robots, bimanual robot manipulation, compliant manipulator and hand design, and sensorimotor learning for manipulation. Webber heads up an MIT machine shop while building an array of fantastical robot artworks.
All are all involved in cutting edge robotics projects, but for much of the 1990s, they worked with Garvey to help build his robot army of the unconscious.
[edit] Film, Digital Work and Installation
The OmniCircus work titled WALL of ASHES is an installation including a painting cycle, 7 robots and a feature-length movie. The WALL of ASHES film is a hallucinatory musico-dramatic diptych about a bus driver, played by Jim Burkhart, who journeys to Hell to find his lost love.
The cast of the WALL of ASHES movie includes Jim Burkhart, Ted Levine (Monk, Silence of the Lambs); Jack Wallace (Death Wish, The Bear); Ric Peake, Vivian Davis, Warren Leming, Tony Lincoln, Simone, Lorenza Bottner and Tom Erhart.
[edit] Music
DeusMachina is OmniCircus’ musical ensemble and has ongoing compositional and performance collaborations with noted avant-progressive virtuosos such as Diana Rosa, Daniel Berkman and Dwayne Calizo. Catorgorized by Garvey as a world-confusion, heavy-mental, uneasy-listening, neo-crassical, science-friction, prangsta-rap surrealist music ensemble, it features feature robotics, dancers, actors, and digital performers during theatrical dance rituals. OmniCircus is also home base for the avant-fusion group Thousand Faces Ball.
Strongly influenced musically by Harry Partch and his love of homemade instruments, Garvey said he would do for metal what Partch did for wood.
[edit] Quotes
San Francisco Metropolitan
“The amazing OMNICIRCUS! On the stage of the OmniCircus, surrounded by robots, oil paintings and sculptures of contorted, tortured bodies, an old woman in a plaid shirt is playing a saw with a violin bow while using a foot pedal to make a wooden cat in a tutu dance.”[cite this quote]
CHURN - An Art Magazine
“Along patchwork buildings and criss-crossed horizons, some hungry souls are encountering the work of a true genius. When I first met Frank Garvey, I wasn't sure if I was a mere blip in the panorama of his very intriguing studio called 'OmniCircus' or whether I was being transported back in time to an age when art was taken seriously.”[cite this quote]
Film Threat Magazine
“ (At OmniCircus) I found work depicting amorphous mutated bodies and writhing sack people in the carnivalesque nightmares of working class America. Frank Garvey is a very serious and attractive young/old man who, along with other members of OmniCircus, has taken it upon himself to call for revolution in America. Mr. Garvey is indeed noble and talented and either too charismatic, crazy, or correct to be called arrogant, at least by me. These people may turn out to be one of those obsessive, paranoid, radical groups that just happens to be right.”[cite this quote]
[edit] External links
- Electric Word, Wired Magazine, Alan Rapp, Oct 1994
- Circus Roboticus, Salon.com, Mark Gimein, Sep 27, 1999
- Mr. Roboto: Frank Garvey commands a troupe of radical robots, Andrew Druckenbrod, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mar 4, 2001
- World's End, SF Weekly, Michael Leaverton, Oct 26, 2005
- The Center for Robotic and Synthetic Performance, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
- Samples of DeusMachina music, MP3.com
- OmniCircus website
