Jump Cuts explores ideas around Foley sound, cinema space and the presence and absence of the ‘live’. A single screen cuts between live video feeds of three performers jumping in various hidden parts of the building.
"More involving were the artists who engaged directly with performance space, the worlds oldest surviving 19th century music hall. Full of mysterious nooks and crannies and slightly forbidding, ghostly ambience, Bob Levene's Jump Cuts exploited the disorientating effects of disconnecting the sound from the agent of its production and the space in which it occurs by cutting randomly between video feeds of her assistants jumping noisily in various parts of the building, whilst also intermittently projecting the sound at high volume in the auditorium.
Keith Moline, The Wire, August 2009
Wearing specially built metal and wooden shoes the sound is initially heard acoustically, leaving a question as to if it is live and if so where the performers are. Intermittently the sounds are amplified into the auditorium and as the jumping becomes more and more frequent the sounds and images start to become mixed up and seemingly in and out of sync. Jump Cuts uses the Cinema and the Screen to explore what happens inside and outside the frame and the on and off screen sound, creating live action to explore the hidden spaces of the building.
Commission by Sound and Music for Cut & Splice: Living Rooms festival, with BBC Radio 3, Hear and Now, performed live from Wilton's Music Hall in London
BBC Radio 3 Interview by Rob Worby; with Alvin Lucier, Brandon LaBelle and Ruth Levene
Photographs by Alex Delfanne
Many thanks to 'the jumpers'.