Imagine a shimmery-costumed couple whirling gently around on a giant metallic flower, while ethereal music vibrates like the wind through a glass tower. Or two people dressed like Tin Men, banging on their chests, elbows and heads like a percussion section gone crazy. Or a circle of glass spheres, playing plaintive music all by itself.
That’s Lelavision, the Vashon-based physical music duo who’ll come to Tacoma’s Museum of Glass today for their eighth annual performance. Ela Lamblin and Leah Mann collaborate in sculpture, sound and movement to produce performances that are completely captivating to adults and kids alike when they tour the country and the world for festivals. Today they’ll fill the cavernous museum lobby with new instrument-sculptures, including one made of glass at the museum last year.
“(The show) is a combination of last year’s work with the glass instrument, and older pieces we’ve never done there,” says Lamblin, the sculptor and musician of the duo.
Working in their Vashon home studio, Lamblin tinkers with bits of metal and reused objects (pipes, bowls, sheet metal) to create large sculptures that not only move but resonate in musical ways, and can often be ridden, climbed or danced upon. He and his partner, Mann, a dancer and choreographer, both play and play with the sculptures, creating a homogenized visual and aural landscape that’s as magical as their imaginations.
Last year, those imaginations got to work with the museum’s Hot Shop crew to create what Lamblin calls a Glass Resonating Chamber: glass spheres of varying sizes that each attach to an aluminum tube. When Lamblin and Mann struck the tubes with mallets, the glass resonated at different pitches through a chromatic two-octave scale with an eerie, otherworldly sound. It’s the kind of marriage of physics and music that Lamblin delights in, and the project was actually co-conceived with a scientist working on epigenetics as a way to visually demonstrate how cells evolve.
This year, the instrument’s a little different. After showing it in downtown Atlanta this fall and sampling it for the score to Guy Maddin’s new film “Keyhole” (the soundtrack has just been released), Lamblin has replaced the metal tubes with speakers that play the original sound created by the tube all by itself.
In other words, he’s now acoustically amplifying an electronic sound – the opposite of what usually happens in music.
“It’s kind of ironic,” admits Lamblin. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.” Arranged in a circle, as the instrument will be at the museum, it makes “a really neat surround-sound experience,” he says.
A big project requiring two trips in a mini-van, hours to set up, and plenty of very careful packing, the Glass Resonating Chamber will stay on view in the museum through Sunday.
Other creations Lelavision will be bringing to today’s shows are the Rumi-tone, a spiral of tubular bells arranged like a flower which can whirl like the dervish it’s named after, with Lamblin and Mann curled up in the middle. The sound is “introspective and meditative, like Sufi music,” Lamblin says.
The duo also will strap on their Tin Man outfits: percussion suits with stainless steel bowls fastened in strategic places and struck with mallets.
“It sounds like a calypso band from the junkyard,” Lamblin says
Does it hurt, hitting yourself with mallets to play percussion?
“Only in a good way,” he jokes.
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568, rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
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