A series of live performances at New York City’s Lincoln Center titled You Are Here, continue through July 30, 2021, but the event launched earlier this month with a sculpture and sound installation open to the public in Hearst Plaza. Each sculpture created by award-winning scenic designer Mimi Lien houses a speaker through which audio portraits of New Yorkers are heard. Composer and sound artist Justin Hicks created an aural garden that stretches across the footprint of the plaza. Artists, ushers, security guards, educators, and other staff members nominated by Lincoln Center constituent organizations and community partners from across the city all tell a story, dance, sing, breathe, or reflect — offering a window into their experiences processing this past year. Live Design asked Lien to comment on the fanciful sculptures.
Live Design: Please explain the design of the sculptures?
Mimi Lien: The sculptures ride the line between resembling an actual human and an expressionistic idea of a human body. They are 12 distinct objects made from found clothing—shirts, pants, dresses, skirts, jackets—draped over steel rod armatures, frozen in motion, each with its own form, posture, and pattern. Their attitudes range from whimsy to joy to balance to solace; the opening of a skirt stands in for a head—another has four legs and no arms—the clothing is imbued with history and personality, yet has a feeling of hollowness, so there is a sense of presence and absence at the same time. Flowers instead of bodies fill the clothing forms and burst forth from the seams, in an expression of joy and remembrance.
LD: How were they conceived to hold the speakers?
ML: The purpose of the sculptures was always to serve as a vehicle for the audio portraits, so from the beginning we were all thinking about how best to integrate the speaker and the sculpture.
I initially felt that the sculptures should not be figurative, in order to allow space for the human to be conjured by the audio. There were several iterations of the sculpture design where the objects actually resembled speakers pretty overtly. However, in the end, I did feel that the objects needed to have a sense of movement to them—to feel like a breath of air—and to evoke a person. The decision for the sculptural material to be clothing informed the decision that the speakers should be somewhat concealed, and the sense that the sound was coming from within these layers of fabrics and folds. Each sculpture has a custom bracket welded into the steel rod armature, which the speaker sits on.The clothing was then dressed and draped onto the armature, and a fabric stiffener was applied to the fabric to 'freeze' it in motion. In most of the sculptures, the fabric is draped and shaped so that the sound has a path through the folds of fabric.
Cole Morrison, production manager adds that “the audio system for You Are Here consists of two separate sound systems—one system for the sculptures and second system for the live performance. Justin Hicks programmed all audio for both the sound installation and live performance to play back through QLab which is tied into both systems.
We worked with Audible Difference Inc (ADI) to come up with a compact high end speaker that would work in the sculptures, as well as the sound design plan for the plaza that would be low profile, yet cover the large performance and audience area. ADI is supplying the equipment for the sculpture system and QLab playback.”
Audio Inc is supplying and operating the equipment for the live performance system. Costumes for these performances are by Oana Botez, and Lien once again did the production design. You Are Here is a commissioned work by Andrea Miller to animate Lincoln Center Campus as part of the Restart Stages program.
Sculpture sound system
L'Acoustics - 5XT compact speakers with LA4x amplification
Live performance sound system
JBL VRX932LA Tops
JBL VRX918S Subs
JBL SRX712 Front fills
VRX Amps
Sennheiser SK300 G3 Wireless mics
Avid Profile Console