Pan O’Rama, an interactive senior music project by Jake Lewis ’07, provided all those adventurous enough to check out the performance with a musical and sensory experience unlike anything performed at Wesleyan this year.
The show, produced at the ’92 Theater this past weekend, started when the audience entered through the front doors to be greeted by melodic mandolin and guitar music. This served as a striking contrast to the intense, sometimes disharmonious electronic music played during the rest of the show.
Throughout the show, the audience members were free to move about as each saw fit. They danced creatively, roamed around, sat on the stage, writhed on the floor, and, at one notable point, scaled the metal piping that lined the walls, climbing all the way up to the height of the lighting booth. Internally lit colored globes placed on mobile four-foot stands were randomly placed on the floor, as was a raised platform topped with different musical and electronic equipment. The light globes particularly entranced the audience. Many audience members were seen playing with them throughout the entirety of the show.
Each of eight large speakers, hung from the ceiling, projected different sounds based on the movement of the audience. The music, which initially had a jazzy edge, changed about halfway through the show to a darker, screechier electronic sound. The audience’s movements followed the mood of the music, as several students laid down and writhed on the floor. A portable camera attached to a helmet passed around spontaneously to different audience members displaying its findings on a large projection screen that blocked off the stage.
Pan O’Rama’s atmosphere of spontaneous, creative activity made it difficult to extrapolate what Lewis meant to convey to his viewers with this performance. For Lewis, this state of uncertainty signifies success.
“I wasn’t really trying to convey anything,” Lewis said. “I was trying to make a situation where people derive their own meanings.”
The intense nature of both the auditory and visual elements of the show, however, left some audience members slightly overwhelmed.
“There was only so much of it I could handle, but it was really cool for the first couple of minutes,” said Sarice Greenstein ’10.
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