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Piano, Plush Toys, and the Performance Nobody Expected

There’s this guy Luciano Chessa, Italian, classically trained at Bologna’s conservatory, PhD from UC Davis, teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory, and he’s here at the Performance Studies International conference making a goddamn piano sing like it’s possessed by the ghost of Luigi Russolo himself.

This atmospheric black and white photograph captures a pianist, Luciano Chessa, mid-performance, dressed formally in a crisp white dress shirt with dark suspenders and dark trousers. The musician, sporting a beard and slicked-back hair, is shown in profile at the keyboard, his hands poised over the piano keys with focused concentration.

He’s performing Variazioni su un Oggetto di Scena, Variations on a Prop, and the prop in question is stuffed animals. Stuffed fucking animals. Alongside a Steinway. And somehow this isn’t precious art school bullshit, it’s visceral and strange and necessary. Because Luciano gets it. He understands that noise isn’t just sound pollution, it’s the raw material of modern consciousness. He wrote the book on Russolo, literally, the first English monograph on the guy who invented the intonarumori, those beautiful noise machines that tried to capture the sound of the twentieth century being born.

This striking theatrical photograph captures Luciano Chessa in dramatic chiaroscuro lighting against a pitch-black background. A bearded man in formal dark attire is illuminated from below by multiple small LED lights or illuminated objects he holds and wears, creating an eerie, otherworldly effect. His face is lit from beneath, casting dramatic shadows and creating an unsettling, almost supernatural appearance with an intense, focused gaze directed at the camera.

At Stanford, at Franconia, at YBCA, wherever I’ve pointed my lens at this maniac, there’s this sense that you’re documenting someone who refuses the false choice between scholar and shaman. He’s both. He plays the Vietnamese đàn bầu, the musical saw, conducts orchestras of reconstructed Futurist noise intoners featuring composers like Mike Patton and Pauline Oliveros. He stages operas with Gertrude Stein librettos and puts them in museums.

This surreal and striking theatrical photograph captures an avant-garde performance piece featuring a pianist, Luciano Chessa, in formal attire seated at a piano, accompanied by an oversized anthropomorphic rabbit figure. The bearded performer, dressed in a white shirt with dark vest or jacket, plays the piano while the large white rabbit costume character with prominent upright ears and distinctive red markings leans dramatically over him from behind. The rabbit's exaggerated form, with its smooth white surface and theatrical presence, creates an absurdist, dreamlike quality. Sheet music is visible on the piano's music stand, illuminated against the otherwise pitch-black background.

The thing about documenting Luciano is that you’re not just photographing a performance. You’re catching the moment when academic rigor and pure creative chaos decide to fuck and make something beautiful and weird and completely unpredictable. He’s digging through archives in Bologna, uncovering occult connections between Leonardo da Vinci and early twentieth-century noise art, then turning that research into performances that make your spine tingle.

This dramatically lit performance photograph by Jamie Lyons captures a surreal theatrical moment featuring a formally dressed pianist, Luciano Chessa, and an oversized anthropomorphic rabbit figure. The bearded performer, wearing a white dress shirt and dark vest, is seated at a weathered piano with aged sheet music visible on the stand. Behind and beside him looms a large white rabbit costume or puppet with distinctive black markings, its smooth sculptural form creating a striking contrast against the absolute black void of the background.

This PSI conference moment, it isn’t about the university or the institutional frame. It was about witnessing someone who’s spent his life understanding how the avant-garde works, then choosing to live inside that understanding, to embody it rather than just analyze it. To make it matter agai

This atmospheric stage photograph captures a dramatically lit performance space in near-total darkness, with a single pool of light illuminating an intimate scene. Within the lit area, a grand piano sits prominently on the right, its glossy black surface catching the light with sheet music visible on the stand. A small vintage couch or settee occupies the left side, where a solitary figure is seated, their form only partially visible in the dimness. Between them, a brightly glowing screen or light box on a stand provides the primary illumination, creating a warm rectangular glow that defines the performance space.

Luciano Chessa
Variazioni su un Oggetto di Scenaand Lo

Variazioni su un oggetto di scena (Variations on a Prop, 2002/05/07), for piano and stuffed toys. Var. XXII (Valsugana) Var. XI (Maridemi mi) Var. I (Reposare) Louganis (2007), for piano and TV/VCR combo (video by Terry Berlier)

Posted on Monday, July 1st, 2013 at . Filed under: Industries Tags: , RSS 2.0 feed.

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