DREAM SEQUENCES FOR SOLO PIANO

VIDEO

Pete Drungle’s Dream Sequences for Solo Piano is a 60-minute solo piano improvisation accompanied by a video montage of 'dream sequences' extracted from the films of Luis Buñuel. Premiered at David Lynch's nightclub Silencio in Paris, this multimedia piece has since been performed in New York, Copenhagen, Paris (Georges Pompidou Centre) and Barcelona.

“Luis Buñuel, the Spanish-born filmmaker who died in 1983 in Mexico, but had mostly lived and worked in France – once said, “If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I’d like to spend them, I’d reply: ‘Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.’” Composer and pianist Pete Drungle, a longtime admirer of how deeply Buñuel’s films tapped into the unconscious, was inspired to create a compendium of sequences drawn from them to be used as the point of departure for a “total performance” unlike anything Drungle had done before. 

Performa has a long history with Drungle, beginning when he presented 24-Hour Continuous Solo Piano Improvisation at SculptureCenter, using the gallery setting to transform a piano concert into a work of durational performance art.  He improvised without pause for 24 straight hours, except for 3 short breaks (totalling 12 minutes) - and during these breaks he left a vibrator on the strings of the piano, sustaining a drone so that the mood was never broken.  By the end of the performance, his fingers were bleeding and he could no longer feel his arms or hands. Shortly after, Drungle provided live scores for a collection of rare Italian Futurist films, collaborated with video and performance artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen on her feminist architecture-inspired one-woman show, and as part of an installation by visual artist Marianne Vitale, he performed in a room full of dead fish.

Why does Drungle gravitate so frequently to the art world? It is because, despite the fact that he is an incredible craftsman—classically trained, he likes to play piano for eight hours a day—he approaches music with the conceptual rigor of a visual artist, and a constant awareness of how context shapes what we see and hear. With Dream Sequences for Solo Piano, Drungle sought to subvert the traditional mode of music accompanying a movie, and instead create a concert where it felt like the film images were accompanying him. He also, as he explained in his initial proposal to Performa, wanted to blur the line between composition and improvisation, with certain musical themes developed in advance, but the way in which they would come together not predetermined at all. “Improvisation is composition, except that the process is vastly sped up,” Drungle once said. “I find that the more I improvise, the better I can compose; and the reverse is equally true.”

It might be said that Buñuel, too, loved exploring the boundaries between the purely intuitive and the meticulously staged. As part of the larger Surrealist movement, whose members he met regularly in Parisian cafes in the late 1920s, Buñuel began making films because they were a way to explore the more irrational and intuitive forms of expression that Surrealism was interested in. His work ranged from lavish, name-cast productions skewering the lives of the bourgeoisie to low-budget quasi-documentaries exposing the realities of rural poverty—and throughout all of these were dreams. His first film, Un chien andalou (1928), resulted from comparing notes with Salvador Dali on dreams – the famous imagery of slicing an eyeball and a hand covered in ants comes directly out of their own visions one night – and many of Buñuel’s later films attempt to reconstruct other dreams of his, presenting them for audiences exactly as they were, without efforts to decode them. The dream sequences in Buñuel’s films, as a result, don’t serve a clear narrative function like they do in classical Hollywood films. Instead they are complex, ambiguous, unsettling to the core.

For Drungle, Buñuel’s dream sequences were not only a tool for deepening his own exploration of the unconscious as a musician—they also presented him with an entirely new challenge, of creating the visual accompaniment for his own concert and carefully designing the lighting and stage set-up to support it. Working with Los Angeles-based filmmaker Toby Rymkus, Drungle edited together selections from Buñuel’s dream sequences with an imaginative, kinetic eye, sometimes cutting back and forth between different dreams from different films, and at one point even creating a Ken Jacobs-like strobing effect during the climax of the forty-five minute montage. He decided to place the piano in the well-lit foreground of the stage, to visually emphasize that the images were accompanying a concert instead of the other way around. And he used saturated colors in the lighting to draw the mood of each dream sequence out into the larger space—when dark greens with spots of gold enhance a sequence set in a forest, for example, or a deep fuchsia blush rises when Catherine Deneuve wakes up in bed and slowly opens her eyes.

On the night of the performance, in the recently renovated Roulette in downtown Brooklyn, Drungle’s playing—on a stunning nine-foot Steinway grand—moved through dozens of different recognizable modes, frequently evoking the style of silent film scores. Above him, in the film, were some of the most famous images from Bunuel’s work—a bearded man prays on top of a stone column, raising his hands to the sky (Simón del desierto, 1965), a beautiful woman stands tied up in a pristine white gown while men throw mud at her (Belle de jour, 1967), and a man desperately throws objects out of an apartment window: a pine tree on fire, a stuffed giraffe, downy white feathers (L’age d’or, 1930). During one section of abstract geometric shapes Drungle played only the strings inside the body of the piano, creating an intricate, percussive composition, and during another scene of a proper young woman (whose clothes would soon disappear) playing piano on screen, Drungle cleverly riffed on the kind of song a well-heeled parlor guest might have performed in the 1920s. Drungle’s playing not only enhanced the drama and emotion of what we saw on screen—it also had the cohesive effect of weaving all of these images together into a single series of events, a meta-dream sequence that was even more dizzying than the originals.

By the time of the virtuosic finale, Drungle was pouring with sweat, his hands flying over the keys. As soon as the performance ended, Drungle, backstage, said after his exertions he had absolutely no memory of what had just unfolded. It was almost like a dream.” – Lana Wilson, filmmaker / curator

Link to Purple Magazine article