Daniel Figgis

Selected live performance and sound-installation work

CITY HALL
01 – 03  February 2013

Rotunda, City Hall, Dame St, Dublin 2

THE BATTLE oF SPEEDS
27 November 2011

The Orangery, Marlay Park, Rathfarnham

The Silence
15 October 2011

The Boathouse/The Lake/The Forest, Marlay Park

ASCENSION
17 September 2010

Pearse Museum Walled Garden, St. Enda’s Park, Rathfarnham

Daniel Figgis’ BATTERIE 1&2
8 January 2010

Peter Norton Symphony Space Broadway New York

… master of the ecstatic…
THE JOURNAL OF MUSIC

THE JABLONSKI SUITE
15 November 2009

Tranquillity Spa, Whites Hotel, Wexford

AUDITORIUM (a “Reflux” event)
16 and 17 November 2009

O’Reilly Theatre, Wexford Opera House
A WEXFORD OPERA HOUSE COMMISSION

Daniel Figgis’ PHOTO-FINISH (with shortcuts)
16/17 March 2008

An arts>World Financial Center 20th Birthday Celebration Commission

… the music harnessed the exuberance of free jazz, while exhibiting both rigorous structure and a thirst for chaos.
Randy Nordschow, THE JOURNAL OF MUSIC IN IRELAND

Daniel Figgis’ POST-PRODUCTION
15 November 2006

A World Financial Center/WNYC commission for live ensemble, live and pre-recorded video – Winter Garden @ World Financial Center, New York

Crawdaddy
November 2006

Daniel Figgis’ AWOL (A Waters Of Lethe)
26 – 28 July  2006

Underwater performance for hypnotised dancer and computer-randomised bassoon phrases – filmed 15 April 2006 at the University Of Limerick Diving Pit – screened at DIVERSIONS, Temple Bar, Dublin and as the penultimate sequence in Daniel Figgis’ THE BANQUET.

Daniel Figgis’ THE BANQUET
22 July 2006

An opera for dancers incorporating pre-recorded musical performances by an extended ensemble recorded in Ireland, England, Wales, Estonia and the US and a monumental sculptural, video and slide intervention/spatial play within the National Basketball Arena for the FUSED festival Dublin.

Mother of all Parties
(summer solstice)
24 June 2006

Live performance – drum kit with laptop manipulation/sound-grab – an accompaniment to DOPPLER sound-installation,  broadcast live by Resonance FM. Beaconsfield Gallery, London

SOUNDTRAP 1: Daniel Figgis’ DOPPLER
21 – 25 June 2006
Acoustic re-imagining of three gallery spaces for Beaconsfield Gallery, London

DOPPLER explores and develops theories of sound from an architectural perspective… a move away from the interactive or live sound installations pioneered by John Cage and the New York Happenings and Fluxus artists in the late 1960s – still being developed by artists such as (Bill) Fontana… in that it does not respond directly to the movements of the audience in the gallery building. Instead, Figgis silences the viewer… thus the building, usually treated as an inanimate viewing platform, is now presented to us as a listener… not just an exploration of sound from an architectural perspective, it offers something more, an analysis and subsequent development of a long-established scientific theory of sound: the Doppler effect… discovered by the nineteenth-century Austrian physician and mathematician, Christian Johann Doppler.

The Doppler effect is the variation in the frequency of a sound wave at any point due to the motion of the sound source. Figgis illustrates this theory by playing his recordings, each suggesting motion and movement, through a motionless speaker, in an otherwise empty gallery space. By convincing us that these sounds are coming from a distance and then disappearing, while we remain still, he successfully exploits the Doppler effect…”real” sounds… create a tonal convergence… the allowing in of “real” sounds alongside those that have been altered/created, serves to showcase Figgis’ construct, the artist now aurally in direct comparison, or competition, with the scientist.
Isobel Harbison, CIRCA

http://radio.aaschool.ac.uk/author/danielfiggis

Daniel Figgis’ THE GATES
23 January 2005

A quadrophonic tape piece for strings, woodwind, percussion and the Ottoni Ensemble brass quintet presented in the round at the People’s Park Bandstand, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin.

Daniel Figgis’ TAMPER
24/25 September 2004

This high-tech haunting posited a fictional history for Tamplins House in Marlay Park, Rathfarnham, giving voice to and bearing witness to the will to be and hypnotic egress into currency of a landmark ‘object trouve’ and presenting as a re-articulation of a highly charged and mutable public space, thereby creating a radical new environment in which to work with novel applications for familiar technologies, while shedding light on the underestimated romance of suburbia’s ‘hidden’ delights… a “landscape intervention” presented deep in the forest incorporating a derelict house, anthropomorphic “pods” housing the musicians, and an aerial percussion climax accompanied by a “hidden” live brass quintet.

… it’s a challenge to describe (Figgis’ music) adequately. Beautiful seems a tame word…
well worth checking out. Precocious, provocative, paradoxical…
VIctoria Mary Clark, SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

When is a gig not a gig? It’s a hard question to answer in relation to Daniel Figgis, the man who quite literally interrupted the flow of the elements during last month’s Kilkenny Arts Festival, and who is currently enjoying a high-profile career arc as a former art-rock enfant terrible whose time and talent has finally coalesced into something smart and highly accessible… there’s something incredibly special about TAMPER: it takes place within and consorts  with the area surrounding Tamplins House in Rathfarnham’s Marlay Park; it plays with notions of natural environment and fictional history; and it comes gorged with live music performance, surround sound, integrated video projection/lighting design – and a will to tease as much as anything else. A unique event.
Tony Clayton-Lea, THE TICKET, THE IRISH TIMES

Composer, musician and monumental installation artist Daniel Figgis may not quite disappear within a site-specific performance entitled Daniel Figgis’ TAMPER. But if his self-effacement hits a couple of innocent hiccups (such as being raised… 40 feet into the air on an enormous platform), still there is enough strange beauty billowing in azure mists and flickering across mutating projections in which to lose ourselves. With musicians surrounding the garden, isolated in translucent metallic tepees, the performance allows for a personal symphony, constructed by our unique paths between caged instrumentalists and illuminated trees…
Peter Crawley, THE IRISH TIMES

Thoroughly enjoyable…no two people will have had exactly the same account of this extravaganza.
Joanne Ahern, THE ECHO

Daniel Figgis’ MOTOR
11-14 August 2004

Video and gobo re-articulation of Kilfane Glen and Waterfall with live musicians – “tyranny’s engine rebooted” – Kilkenny Arts Festival.

…an ambitious attempt to transform the sylvan setting into a “sound sculpture” with integrated lighting design… ( the music) was clearly of high technological sophistication… the lighting of the waterfall was suitably impressive, as was the moment when the water “disappeared”… As we assembled in the gathering at dusk, it was like a cross between a druid’s conference and the Teddy Bears’ Picnic.
Arminta Wallace, THE IRISH TIMES

It is best to keep your good words for when you really need them – which is a roundabout way of coming to the point that the word “awesome” should really be reserved for experiences like Daniel Figgis at this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival. Figgis talks about the event in this issue’s instalment of his diary: GROUPHUG, but as he is unlikely to call it “awesome” himself, I’ll do it for him…
Gemma Tipton, CONTEXTS

THE HOUR HAND
2002

Sound installation, Charleville Castle, Tullamore.
At the preview of “The Twilight Hour” movie for October II Pictures, a series of loop cassette players strategically placed around the castle played with, and subverted through repetition, sounds occuring within the castle: a fire crackling, a door creaking, and the sound of a distant piano – all “location recordings” made during a previous visit to the site.

THE TYPING POOL
2001

A performance piece for video, underwater typewriter, airhorn and sampler – a pantomimic and playful critique of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto at Project Arts Centre’s “Winter” festival – a celebration of the Art of Noise.

WHEN IT’S AJAR
2000

Video installation at Triskel Arts Centre and online for Belfast Festival at Queen’s

Fetish One
2000

A CCTV “decay” piece for Arthouse, Dublin – an A/V “grab” loop from the “QUIET!” live performance, presented for two days on closed-circuit television at Arthouse and fading visually and aurally throughout … so much for “the persistence of memory”.

QUIET!
2000

Webcast and live interactive multimedia performance at Arthouse, Dublin to launch SKIPPER CD. Audience members watching the live performance over
cctv on another floor were enabled to throw prepared sounds into the live music mix for the performers to contend with – throwing eggs in the digital age… (2000)

Also: National Concert Hall, Dublin/Moving On Festival Belfast/Belfast Festival at Queen’s/Spaceland, Los Angeles/Galway Arts Festival/Garage, London.

 

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