I thought this performance was very well put together, but throughout the performance I felt largely uneducated. I had never heard of the idea of hysteria, so much of the performance went way above my head. It was a very awkward experience for me. As an audience member at the countless concerts I've been to at Krannert during my student career I have felt much more adapt to understanding what was going on. Included in those are several multi-media performances, often with a combination of electroacoustic music, film, and live performance.
Maybe this was my problem with this performance. Its use of multimedia was different than my other experiences with multimedia performances because the focus was on the combination of the words, images and sounds -- with the core of the performance being the text. In my other experiences with multimedia performances the core has always been the music, at least in my perception. It's not that I thought the music part of Hysterical wasn't used well; perhaps I had too high of expectations for more development in that realm.
My unfamiliarity with the text is probably the main reason I had difficulty understanding the performance. I felt bad, because I knew that these people had put forth a lot of effort to perform, but my confusion almost led me to ask, "What's the point?" I believe that the performance was very intriguing; I just wish that a more detailed history of hysteria were spelled out in a program.
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