Styrophone is a collaborative project led by Ross Karre ’05, Associate Professor of Percussion at the Oberlin Conservatory. Through a series of workshops, Karre and student collaborators from TIMARA and Cinema and Media have crafted a 60-minute event featuring homemade percussion instruments, subtle drones, energetic rhythms, live electronic music, and video projections. A collection of recycled Styrofoam fills the stage of The Birenbaum. The foam shapes serve as video projection surfaces and resonators of junk metal percussion objects. Audience members will experience a vast array of unheard, upcycled materials destined for the dump. This event is both a celebration of Oberlin College and Conservatory’s spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration and an expressive second life for objects which otherwise sit silently in a landfill for hundreds of years.

Program:

Ross Karre An Introduction to the Styrophone

Oliver Harlan Improvisation

Willa MacFarlane Improvisation

Orson Abram ... near Blockdammweg

Savino Go & WIll Judd Mirror Image

TIMARA students collaborators:

Orson Abram, Savino Go, Oliver Harlan, Will Judd, Willa MacFarlane

CINEMA 322 students and faculty collaborators:

Orson Abram, Rian Brown (Professor of Cinema and Media), Arturo Orso-Giacone, Imogen Pranger, Despina Rizopoulos