Daphne of the Dunes - 22 Minutes

Created and performed by Liz Casebolt and Joel Mejia Smith - casebolt and smith

Created in Collaboration with Partch Ensemble

Text: Liz Casebolt and Joel Mejia Smith

Video Art and Projection Design: Joel Mejia Smith

Costume and Mask Design: Joel Mejia Smith

​

Premiered at the Microtonal Festival, REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA

​

Supporting Materials This Review Period

Festival Link: MicroFest at REDCAT

Review: Los Angeles Times

Review: New Classic LA

Review: San Francisco Classical Voice

 

​

In Daphne of the Dunes, created in collaboration with Grammy Award winning Partch ensemble and performed as part of MicroFest (microtonal music) at REDCAT in Los Angeles, we retell the myth of Daphne and Apollo to famed 20th Century American composer Harry Partch’s 1967 composition “Daphne of the Dunes.” This score, originally created for the film “Windsong” (1958), was later imagined as a danced ballet, a retelling of the iconic love chase.  casebolt and smith was commissioned by John Schneider, director of Partch ensemble, to build a dance for Partch’s original score and to be performed for the first time with the music. Hired specifically because of our reputation for challenging woman/man dance-making conventions. Daphne was an opportunity for us to retell the myth, not as a love chase but as the rape story it is. Building the work in dialogue with the #metoo movement was central to our goals, while also offering possibility for the story to be contemporized. We opened the work with a side by side spoken introduction of the myth, using Partch’s score (which had director’s notes and staging ideas) as a launching pad for our text. I created an original piece of video art – projected images of nature, texture and light, as well as manipulated clips from films of the era the score was written - and I designed the masks and costumes. We used the musicians on stage as choreographic elements to amplify our long winded chase scene. Of the work, Pulitzer Prize finalist and head music critic of the Los Angeles Times Mark Swed said, “The dancers began portraying campy Greek myth, but once a video montage of clips from “North by Northwest” and “Psycho” were projected on a screen, the dance turned into a surprisingly effective Hitchcockian Daphne and Apollo chase scene among the Partch instruments.”

​

Work Sample: Single Shot, with opening text