o sleep

After bumping around in a few temporary spaces over the last several years, in 2009 Southern Exposure finally settled into its handsome new Potrero digs at the corner of 20th Street and Alabama, and I got a chance to visit Saturday night to see a performance of Theresa Wong and Ellen Fullman's opera O Sleep.  Developed from work the women did while they were residents at the Headlands Center last year, O Sleep is less a focused narrative than a sequence of linked music-driven vignettes as open to interpretation as its subject matter, sleep and dreams.  The musicians/performers were separated from the audience by a thin scrim upon which snippets of text and portraits of brain wave patterns were projected, obscuring but not completely blocking out the action behind the curtain.  The music, a mix of composition and improvisation, moved from representing the frenetic activity of a wakeful mind to the more meditative states of deep sleep, and it was particularly interesting to watch Fullman play her Long String Instrument as it stretched the entire length of the gallery.  To generate sound on it she slowly walked backward along its length, dragging her fingers on its strings and creating some amazingly deep, resonant tones.  Though O Sleep was at the gallery for one weekend only, it was only the first in SoEx's new Extended Play series which features weekly live performances and workshops through the end of June from the likes of Nate Boyce, Suzy Poling, Lucky Dragons, and 0th.  I can't wait to see and hear more in the weeks to come.