Room No. 35: Labyrinth Installation Concerto

A multimedia cello odyssey for Maya Beiser written by Paola Prestini

Artist Erika Harrsch

Cellist Maya Beiser

Director Michael McQuilken

Projections Designer Brad Peterson

Producer Beth Morrison and VisionIntoArt

Project Description

An Installation Concerto illustrates the living relationship between music and visual art. By incorporating the labyrinth theme with music, visual art/film, and advanced technology, this interdisciplinary creative team tackles it’s most exciting installation concerto to date.

ROOM NO. 35 is a collaboration with Mexican visual artist Erika Harrsch written and created with the muse Maya Beiser. It takes inspiration from Anais Nin’s House of Incest. Through the cello, enhanced by LED paneling, a direct relationship of the musician and her instrument reveals itself as an intimate exposition to the audience. This duality reveals the labyrinth.

Visually, the work will combine paintings, drawings, photography, three dimensional elements, video animation and the creation of a visual living installation. The music will contain an orchestra of celli in addition to an interactive component specific to the LED cello.

Room No, 35 is a sculptural multi-media experience that unifies the virtuosic cello performance of Maya Beiser, the intricate and vivid visual worlds of Erika Harrsch, and seductively haunting and rich new works by composer Paola Prestini. Led by Anais Nin’s seminal novella, The House of Incest, this production maps hidden cravings of the heart, traverses shadowy recesses of the mind, and seeks to unify the tangential impulses of the human spirit. Room No. 35 invites its audience into a tranquil dream, a fading remembrance of a hotel room submerged in water and surrounded by gaping eyes, and over the course of approximately 30 minutes, this room folds back upon itself until tranquility blossoms into a tidal wave of bright light and ecstatic sound, and then collapses back to the mouth of a calm sea once again.

Finally, the installation concerto creates a larger labyrinth with the symbolic use of advanced technology to depict intimate human turbulence.