Phyllis Chen 'rewonders' Alice in Wonderland At Vorhees Theater

Toy pianist and multi-media artist Phyllis Chen is set to launch her latest project entitled Looking-Glass ReWondered. It's an ambitious project comprised of two multi-media works -- The Memoirist and Down the Rabbit Hole -- involving five toy pianos, live electronics, home-made puppets, video and props.

In 2007, Chen and videographer Robert Dietz created The Memoirist, a three-part piece starring Chen's oldest childhood friend, Bunny Bun Bun, who discovers a curious family of eggs. The inspiration for the work came from a Humpty Dumpty music box with a moving paper-egg figurine sitting on a wall. It wasn't until a couple years later that Chen discovered that there were unconscious elements in the work that were related to Alice in Wonderland.

Down The Rabbit Hole is Chen's most recent multi-media work and directly incorporates objects from the Carroll novels. The four shows running April 14-16 at NYC College of Technology in Brooklyn mark the full culmination of the project and her residency, involving the students for set, lighting and sound design.

Phyllis Chen
Praised by the New York Times for her "delightful quirkiness matched with interpretive sensitivity," Phyllis is a pianist, toy pianist and multimedia artist that performs original multimedia compositions and works by contemporary composers. The Oregonian states "her captivating performance was animated by unbridled inventiveness, the kind of joyous creativity that playing with toys is meant to inspire." Phyllis' artistic pursuits take her in numerous directions as a toy pianist, pianist, and composer, leading to her selection as a New Music/New Places Fellow at the 2007 Concert Artist Guild International Competition.

Playing an instrument that has no set boundaries or genre, Phyllis has been invited to perform at a large variety of festivals and concerts, including the Chicago World Music Festival, Lotus World Music Festival as well as several distinguished keyboard festivals including the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Portland Piano International. In 2009, Phyllis was the featured solo musician in Stephin Merritt's Off-Broadway musical Coraline.

Phyllis is one of the founding members of ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), a Chicago and New York-based collective dedicated to the performance and promotion of new works. This year, Phyllis has been selected as one of the composer/artist of the inaugural ICElab Series, ICE's newest model for commissioning, developing and performing new music by nurturing the essential composer-performer collaboration.

Phyllis founded the UnCaged Toy Piano, a composition competition to further expand the repertoire for toy piano and electronics. The competition has received works from composers all around the world and these compositions become an integral part of her repertoire. A strong interest in interdisciplinary work led her to collaborations with video artist and electronic musician Rob Dietz with whom she created multimedia works such as The Memoirist, Pearlessence, Chroma and Carousel. The two of them are interested in co-creating new works that rethink the idea of live art and performance using music and visuals. Upcoming projects for the duo include a micro-media toy piano opera commissioned by Opera Cabal, scheduled to be premiered in Chicago 2012.

Phyllis attended Oberlin Conservatory as a recipient of the Dean's Talent Award Scholarship and received a Masters Degree from Northwestern University as an Eckstein Merit Scholar. She is continuing to pursue her DMA in piano performance at Indiana University where she studied with André Watts.

Down the Rabbit Hole
Down the Rabbit Hole was commissioned for Phyllis Chen by Concert Artists Guild with funding from New York State Council on the Arts. Additional production support and residency provided by EMPAC and CUNY City Tech College, Brooklyn.

Down The Rabbit-Hole is a multimedia work for toy pianos, music boxes, live-electronics, live and edited video, and amplified objects. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, this work is not a re-telling of a beloved fairy tale but a new work using objects and themes from the novels. The peculiar objects and sets themselves are so rich in symbolism, that I believe another narrative can be told through sound and visuals alone. Aside from toy pianos and a music box, there are many elements taken from the novels that are used sonically and visually such as the ticking of a pocket watch, the shuffling of a deck of cards, or the clattering of a tea set. With the use of microphones/amplification and a magnifying glass/live video camera, commonplace objects are brought to life and the audience is invited into this strange world.

Found objects have a kind of special aura in fairy tales throughout the years. Whether it be the matchbox from Little Matchgirl or the pea from Princess and the Pea, unassuming objects become potent with magical powers to transform every day life into a much more imaginative world. Down the Rabbit-Hole focuses on such mysterious objects that become musical through unexpected manipulations.

The piece is a rich mix of scored and open-scored audio and visual components. With an over-arching plan in mind, some sections are still defined by chance-based operations that happen during the performance. With the idiosyncratic visual and musical language, we hope that Down the Rabbit-Hole is a playful experience that crosses between what we see and hear in real life and in our imagination.

The Memoirist
PART I: The Tale for toy piano, music box, frying pan, egg
PART II: The Memoirist for toy piano, sampling keyboard, video
PART III: The Dream for toy piano, bowls, video, pillow

The Memoirist is a three-part multimedia piece using toy pianos, sampling keyboard, bowls,props and video projections. This piece captures the child-like nature of the toy piano through a bizarre tale featuring an old childhood friend that comes in the form of a stuffed bunny. A memoirist is like an archivist, a being that is responsible for preserving memories from someone else's life.

The piece begins with a music box playing a familiar Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme while a small figurine of Humpty dances along with the music. This miniature puppet-like character inspired the toy theater aesthetic I created in the following movements. In The Tale, I decided to personify Humpty Dumpty in a more 3-dimensional manner as an egg.

The miniature set design and puppetry in the second portion of this work is constructed from cardboard, felt, and found objects as a toy theater set.The sampling keyboard is made entirely of recorded kitchen utensil sounds such as tea-balls, forks and bowls to create a tinkling percussive part that goes along with the toy piano.

The Dream is a continuation of the story by projecting the rabbit's dream on a pillow above her bed. The bed is placed on the toy piano as I perform it with three gong-like mixing bowls.