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Field of Mars, 1839, Till Losch, So Long Ago I Can't Remember, The Monodramas
Michael Counts (born 1970) is an American stage director, theater designer, opera designer, and performance events designer.[1] He is also a creator and producer of public art installations and digital platforms.
Counts served as a consultant for Disney theme parks and other global entertainment and media companies. He co-founded GAle GAtes et al.,[2] a performance and visual arts company.[3]
Early life and education
Michael Counts was born in New York City. He is the son of Carolyn Counts Fox (née Lawler) and Dr. Robert Milton Counts.
From 1988 to 1993, he studied theatre and economics at Skidmore College.
Counts installation in New York, 90 Degrees from an Equinox? Where are We? And Where are We Going?[6] was a twelve-hour performance installation over a course of six days. In a 65,000 square foot space on the 51st floor of 55 Water Street, with an environment made of a field of wild grass harvested from Jamaica Bay, actors performed texts by Gertrude Stein and John Cage alongside original and found texts. The installation, wine-blue-open-water,[7] was a walk-through performance freely adapted from Homer’s Odyssey, with a pre-recorded text by Ruth Margraff. Set elements rolled in on wagons past performers stationed like statues, on a vacant floor of 67 Broad Street. Other works, including Oh... A Fifty-Year Dart (a series of episodes that unfolded over three months), Departure, Ark, and TO SEA: Another Mountain[8] were performed at Grand Central Terminal, the SoHo Arts Festival, and the Tunnel nightclub.[citation needed]
Internationally, a nine-member company went to Thailand to collaborate with the BoiSakti Dance Theatre of Indonesia for the Bangkok-Bali-Berlin Festival.[9] Counts, Stern, and Oglevee joined composer Joseph Diebes to study Butoh at Min Tanaka's Body Weather Farm in Japan. At the Farm, Counts directed and designed I Dug a Pit a Meter Six in Either Direction and Filled it Full of Sake, and I Mixed in Honey and Milk and Poured It Over Barley and Pine Nuts and Rice and Onion and Fruit and Blood and Stopped.[10] The performance required the audience to hike halfway up a mountain. Counts described the work as "when dance-theatre starts to bleed more into proper theatre."[11]
Over the next five years, Counts, Stern, and Diebes joined resident artists Michael Anderson, Tom Fruin, and Jeff Sugg to create four large-scale performance installations in the new space. To SEA: Another Ocean, a performance installation, with four performers and 500 blue umbrellas, marked the official opening of the space in September 1997.[12]
The first fully staged production Counts directed and designed in the new space was The Field of Mars,[13] inspired by Tacitus's account of the burning of Rome. A one-line summary in the playbill read, "This performance is as a dream is, or a landscape. Its meaning is more or less what you determine."[14] A sequel, The Field of Mars – Chapter 1, was mounted in 2006 by Counts Media.[15]
Tilly Losch was produced in 1998 and described by Counts as "a dream one might have had if falling asleep after watching Casablanca".[16] It took its inspiration from the eponymous shadow box sculpture by Joseph Cornell. It was the first of two GAle GAtes et al. productions in which the audience was seated so that the 120-foot throw of the backstage area was visible through the false proscenium of an industrial passageway. The warehouse space allowed for extended preparation time: set elements could be tinkered with and refined over months, and a new mechanism operated by hand wrenches was developed that could tilt a wall imperceptibly in around two minutes.[17]
The title of 1839 (1999) refers to the year photography was invented, and the work was conceived as a dream of Daguerre, "in which a child, in the guise of Oedipus, wanders through a landscape peopled by narcissists in love with their own photographed images."[18]
The last large-scale performance installation produced by GAle GAtes et al. in DUMBO was So Long Ago I Can't Remember[19] (2001), a free adaptation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, with a text by Kevin Oakes pre-recorded by the actors (who lip-synced their lines in the live performance) and choreography by Roht.
The only theatre production Counts has directed since was Play/Date, a site-specific "immersive theatre experience" produced by 3-Legged Dog and installed in the three levels of the Fat Baby nightclub on the Lower East Side.[20]
In 2012, New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert invited Counts to direct and design New York Philharmonic 360, a staging of "spatial music" for orchestra in the Park Avenue Armory's Drill Hall.
Counts returned to New York City Opera in 2013 to direct and design Rossini's Moses in Egypt. The set design featured a backdrop of LED screens, displaying imagery created in collaboration with Ada Whitney, co-founder and creative director of Beehive. Counts interspersed animations of night skies, deserts, and the parting of the Red Sea with abstract shapes and videos of natural forms. Moses in Egypt marked the first time New York City Opera had performed in its original home, City Center, since moving to Lincoln Center in the mid-60s.[22]
In 2016, Counts staged the world premiere of the seven-hour The Ouroboros Trilogy, a production by Beth Morrison Projects presented by Arts Emerson at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston, MA. The work united three scores by Scott Wheeler (Naga), Zhou Long (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Madame White Snake), and Paola Prestini (Gilgamesh) under the umbrella of libretti written by a single author, Cerise Lim Jacobs. Counts presented Madame White Snake at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in March 2019.[23]
Immersive and interactive events and installations
The first work Counts created after 9/11 was Looking Forward, a video homage to New York City mounted in April–May 2002 in the clock faces of the DUMBO clocktower.[24] A looped series of video portraits showed the faces of volunteers who had recorded messages describing "New York moments". Radio station WFMU simulcast the audio of the voices of the interviewed New Yorkers set to an original soundtrack on May 3.[25]
In 2005, Counts and the Yellow Arrow Mobile App/Global Public Art Project created an immersive installation and exhibition for Piaget at Art Basel Miami, and in 2006, extended the scope of the project to an augmented reality game called ICUH8ING. Volunteers placed an estimated 7,535 Yellow Arrow stickers in 467 cities and 35 countries worldwide.[26]
One of Counts' inspirations is the work of the American director and designer Robert Wilson; some of the titles and locations of Counts's early work paid direct homage to Wilson.[27]
Peter Marks of The New York Times wrote The Field of Mars "a little bit like chasing a two-year-old around an apartment."[28] Douglas Davis described the Field of Mars audience in Art and America as "dazzled witnesses to a cosmic event."[29]
↑The Life and Times of Alice Liddell is a nod to Wilson's own early work The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, and I Dug a Pit a Meter Six in Either Direction and Filled it Full of Sake. I Mixed in Honey and Milk and Poured It Over Barley and Pine Nuts and Rice and Onion and Fruit and Blood and Stopped to Wilson's I Was Sitting On My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating. Like Wilson's KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: a story about a family and some people changing, I Dug a Pit was performed on an actual mountain.
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