Michael Counts

Michael Counts (born in 1970) is an American stage director and designer of theater, opera, and performance events. He is also a creator and producer of public art installations and digital platforms.

As the founding director of Counts Projects, he develops and presents his work in New York City. He has served as a consultant for Disney theme parks and other global entertainment and media companies. He co-founded GAle GAtes et al., a performance and visual art company that was initially based at various locations in Manhattan through a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), and later toured in Asia before establishing a permanent base in a Brooklyn warehouse.

Early life and education

Michael Counts was born in New York City and raised on the Upper East Side. 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. While at Skidmore, he wrote and directed The Life and Times of Lewis Carroll, a performance drawing on Alice in Wonderland and exploring the life of Lewis Carroll. He also initiated the “Failure Series,” an experimental program combining theatrical, operatic, and scenic elements across several acres of the Skidmore campus; after his graduation, the series continued under the leadership of collaborators Ian Belton and Yehuda Duenyas.

Among his mentors at Skidmore were Gautam Dasgupta and Bonnie Marranca, co-founders of PAJ: Performing Arts Journal. Counts continued to work intermittently with Dasgupta for the next twenty years.

Career

Theater and performance

In his formative years, Counts was drawn to the work of theater and visual artists who forged idiosyncratic and often fiercely independent artistic paths, including Robert Wilson, Reza Abdoh, Richard Foreman, Joseph Cornell, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, and Gertrude Stein. These artists commonly explored subconscious or non-literal dynamics generated through collisions and confluences along the intersections of visual art, literature, music, sound, and live performance.

After graduating from Skidmore, Counts founded the C & Hammermill Company and Exhibition Space in a 100-foot-long warehouse in Saratoga Springs and collaborated with company members on a series of installations, site-specific performances, and guerrilla artworks.

When he moved back to New York City, he co-founded GAle GAtes et al., a visual and performing arts theatre company.

After creating his second work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art promenade, ''The Making of a Mountain'', in 1995, Counts directed and designed a series of performances and installations from 1996 to 1997 in multiple indoor and outdoor locations in Manhattan and in touring residencies in Thailand and Japan.

Counts' installation, ''90 Degrees from an Equinox? Where are We? And Where are We Going?'', was a twelve-hour performance installation over six days in a 65,000 square foot space on the 51st floor of 55 Water Street in New York. Actors performed texts by Gertrude Stein and John Cage alongside original and found texts in an environment made of a field of wild grass harvested from Jamaica Bay. The installation, ''wine-blue-open-water'', was a walk-through performance freely adapted from Homer’s ''Odyssey'' with a pre-recorded text by Ruth Margraff, where set elements rolled in on wagons past performers stationed like statues on a vacant floor of 67 Broad Street. Counts and the company also produced ''Oh... A Fifty-Year Dart'' (a series of episodes that unfolded over three months), ''Departure'', ''Ark'', and ''TO SEA: Another Mountain'' at various locations, including Grand Central Terminal, the SoHo Arts Festival, and the Tunnel nightclub.

Internationally, a nine-member company went to Thailand to collaborate with the BoiSakti Dance Theatre of Indonesia under the auspices of the Bangkok-Bali-Berlin Festival. 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. I Mixed in Honey and Milk and Poured It Over Barley and Pine Nuts and Rice and Onion and Fruit and Blood and Stopped''. The performance was set halfway up a mountain, requiring the audience to make a difficult hike then descend at night, an experience integrated into the performance concept. Counts described the work as occupying the territory "when dance-theatre starts to bleed more into proper theater."

After completing the LMCC residency, Counts began to search for a permanent home for the company that could accommodate the cinematic perspectives that were now a constant in his work. Brooklyn Academy of Music Executive Producer Joseph V. Melillo pointed him to the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood now known as DUMBO, where David Walentas of Two Trees Management offered him a lease for a 40,000-square-foot warehouse and shopfront gallery in exchange for the company attracting a steady stream of visitors to what was then a somewhat forbidding neighborhood. Counts, Stern, and Diebes joined resident artists Michael Anderson, Tom Fruin, and Jeff Sugg to create four large-scale performance installations and mount numerous exhibitions and off-site events over the following five years. ''To SEA: Another Ocean'', a performance installation for four performers and 500 blue umbrellas, marked the official opening of the space in September 1997.

The first fully staged production Counts directed and designed in the new space was ''The Field of Mars'', inspired by Tacitus' 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." The pre-show began in the shopfront gallery as the audience milled around a bar and noticed an actor dressed in elegant evening wear suspended high above on a wire. He descended a ladder with his hands and then led the audience up a ramp decorated with a frieze of tiny flames (a reference to the Great Fire of Rome) to the warehouse space above, where they encountered a series of episodes described in ''The New York Times'' as "a fun house for the senses... a cascade of images conjured by the conscious and subconscious, and with the question of how pictures framed in the mind's eye make their way into everything, from ancient myth to abstract paintings to commercial movies." The audience was guided through multiple installations by intelligent and moving stage lights and Diebes' through-composed electronic score: a living room whose back wall disappeared to reveal a pixie in a slowly receding forest, a tryst in a public bathroom mounted on wheels and swirling around the space, a family dinner at an ornate and extravagantly long table, a tartan-skirted schoolgirl emerging from the top of a wardrobe, and more. A sequel, ''The Field of Mars – Chapter 1'', was mounted in 2006 by Counts Media.

''Tilly Losch'', produced later in 1998 and described by Counts as "a dream one might have had if falling asleep after watching Casablanca", 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 for the duration so that the 120-foot throw of the backstage area was visible through the false proscenium of an industrial passageway. The advantages of having permanent access to a warehouse space became apparent in ''Tilly Losch'': 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 over two minutes.

The title of ''1839'' (1999) refers to the year photography was invented, and 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." The landscape was a kinetic collage of multi-layered, allusive imagery with three-dimensional reproductions of artworks such as Manet's '' Olympia'', a large classical still life, and a cat from a Balthus painting interwoven with invented scenarios. A hermaphrodite appeared in different guises, at one point dressed in a sailor costume identical to the ones adorning a statue of a child and worn by the Oedipus character. An armadillo puppet stood up on its hind legs to reveal a naked young woman on whose skin a projection of an image of the Solar System appeared. The work included scenes involving a surreally distanced Oedipal coupling of two actors who recited a combination of Sophocles and invented texts. At one point, the Oedipus figure shot arrows across the entire backstage area in a circle of light as the Jocasta character looked on.

The last large-scale performance installation produced by GAle GAtes et al. in DUMBO was ''So Long Ago I Can't Remember'' (2001), a free adaptation of Dante's ''The Divine Comedy'' with a text by Kevin Oakes pre-recorded by the actors (who lip-synched their lines in the live performance) and choreography by Roht. ''So Long Ago'' marked a return to the walk-through format of previous performance installations, with audience members alternately roaming and seated as multiple performances unfolded around them. At some points, the performances occurred in their midst, depicting Dante's nine circles of hell. The audience observed the scene while walking over an elevated walkway as Manhattan's East River skyline appeared across the water through the shopfront windows of the gallery.

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.

Opera and orchestral music

In 2011, Director of New York City Opera (NYCO) George Steel invited Counts to direct and design a new production entitled ''Monodramas'' at Lincoln Center. Monodramas was an evening of works for solo soprano and orchestra: the world stage premiere of '' La Machine de l'Être'' by John Zorn, ''Erwartung'' by Arnold Schoenberg, and the US stage premiere of ''Neither'' by Morton Feldman, with a libretto by Samuel Beckett.

In 2012, the 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 presented in the round. Counts designed an immersive lighting and performance environment for works by Gabrieli, Boulez, Mozart, Stockhausen, and Ives that included living statues costumed for their subsequent performance of the Act I finale of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" which the audience encountered in a space under the bleachers upon entering, and large luminous screens installed behind each orchestra that glowed in blue, red and yellow. There were three orchestras for Stockhausen's ''Gruppen'', arranged in a circle, with audience sections in the center and between. Medici.tv featured the performance in a free worldwide webcast.

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. Through the use of an LED backdrop, Counts was able to realize cinematic pans and aerial shots on a big screen, adding new effects by contrasting the invented time on the LED screens with the real-time of the live performance, partly through the use of a revolving stage. ''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.

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.

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. 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.

After GAle GAtes et al. closed in 2003, Counts embarked on a series of interactive works situated in the public realm. In '' Yellow Arrow'' (2004), Counts collaborated with Christopher Allen, Brian House, and Jesse Shapins to create "Massively Authored Public Art", which was a forerunner of the geospatial web in its creation of a "deep map" of the world. Volunteers who submitted online requests were sent coded stickers by mail and asked to write a message, place the stickers in a location of their choice, and submit a photograph of the site by SMS. 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.

Visual art

GAle GAtes et al.'s move to a permanent home in 1995 brought with it an obligation to attract a steady flow of visitors. Initially with Stern and later with New York City gallerists including Mike Weiss, Counts co-organized a series of exhibitions from 1996 to 1999, attracting visitors to the DUMBO shopfront gallery. In 2001-2, Counts collaborated with Bob Bangiola (then at New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Anne Ellegood (now Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), on organizing the Emerging Curator Series, whose unifying principle was viewing the curator as an artist.

In 2011, Counts created a series of twelve sculptures that took key motifs from ''Monodramas'', the evening of operas for soprano and orchestra he was directing and designing at Lincoln Center. Six of the twelve sculptures in the series, entitled ''Dream Sequence 3:52:29 am–3:56:12 am'', were displayed in the lobby of the theatre during performances of ''Monodramas'' as visual elements integral to the experience of the evening, in addition to six sculptures simultaneously exhibited at John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz.

In 2016, Counts collaborated with Florida artist JEFRË and 3-Legged Dog on creating ''The Beacon and Code Wall'', a six-story hyperbolic convex-concave tower animated by dynamic video designs. The Tavistock Development Company for the planned community of Lake Nona in Florida commissioned the work.

Talks and presentations

Counts has been a featured speaker at MIT's Media Lab, Omnicom's Global Summit for the Radiate Group, and on panels hosted by City College and The Rockefeller Foundation. He has led workshops at schools and other educational institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts, Chiang Mai and Bangkok Universities, the Williamstown Theater Festival, and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Counts presented Michael's media concepts at MIT and Ericsson's Innovation Lab in Stockholm. He launched A-Plan Coaching in February 2018 and the iTunes podcast ''Producing Innovation'' in February 2019.

Style

One of Counts' inspirations is the work of the American director and designer Robert Wilson, to whom Counts is often compared and who was a conscious influence. Some of the titles and locations of Counts's early work paid direct homage to Wilson.

A constant thread in Counts's work is the experience of immersion. In his words: "My approach with all the things I've ever staged was to create a world and then immerse the audience in that world... Creating an alternate reality where the rules were different, but it held together. It might be very abstract, but it held a certain logic that the whole world operated within. It was then a compelling experience to be a voyeur in that world on the part of the audience." Counts created immersive environments in GAle GAtes et al.'s 40,000 square-foot warehouse space, which served as a laboratory in which he developed performance concepts over the company's five-year residency.

This feeling can be compared to walking through the galleries of an art museum, much as Counts wandered through the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child. In some of the sequences in ''The Field of Mars'', the experience was more like exploring different rooms in a nightclub, or, in the eyes of Peter Marks of ''The New York Times'', "a little bit like chasing a two-year-old around an apartment." Douglas Davis described the ''Field of Mars'' audience in Art and America as "dazzled witnesses to a cosmic event." In ''PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art'', Michael Rush describes the experience of a Counts production as "akin to diving into a hypertext on the internet, but he's doing all the clicking and controlling. It's also like cruising through a fun house at the carnival, but the creatures popping out of the darkness aren't just screaming, they're reciting oblique texts from classical literature, art criticism, Fellini movies, and Dada playlets."

Personal life

Counts lives in Brooklyn Heights with his wife, Sharon, and two sons.

Works

* 1992: ''AC/DC'' (co-directed with Gautam Dasgupta and Phil Soltanoff)
* 1992: ''The Life and Times of Lewis Carroll''
* 1992: ''Failure Series''
* 1993: ''Waterloo Mills and the Kings of Prussia''
* 1993: ''Kral''
* 1994: ''Frontier and the Kings of Prussia''
* 1995: ''The Making of a Mountain''
* 1995: ''90 Degrees from an Equinox? Where are We? And Where are We Going?''
* 1996: ''To SEA: Another Mountain''
* 1996: ''Departure''
* 1996: ''Ark''
* 1997: ''Oh... A Fifty-Year Dart''
* 1997: ''wine-blue-open-water''
* 1997: ''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''
* 1997: ''To SEA: Another Ocean''
* 1997: ''The Field of Mars''
* 1998: ''Tilly Losch''
* 1999: ''1839''
* 2000: ''Listen to Me''
* 2001: ''So Long Ago I Can't Remember''
* 2002: ''Looking Forward''
* 2002: ''The World: An Immersive Installation Performance''
* 2005–08: ''Yellow Arrow''
* 2006: ''The Field of Mars: Chapter 1''
* 2006: ''ICUH8ING''
* 2007–08: ''BILL: The World's First Live and Interactive Video Billboard''
* 2008: ''MOBKASTR''
* 2010–17: ''The Ride New York''
* 2011: ''Monodramas''
* 2011: ''Dream Sequence 3:52:29 am–3:56:12 am''
* 2012: ''New York Philharmonic 360''
* 2013: ''Moses In Egypt''
* 2014: ''Walking Dead Escape''
* 2014: ''Play/Date''
* 2014: ''Michael Kors – Jet Set Event''
* 2015: ''The Beacon at Lake Nona''
* 2015–16: ''The Walking Dead Experience – Chapter 1''
* 2016: ''PARADISO: Chapter I''
* 2016: ''Betty & Veronica by Rachel Antonoff''
* 2016: ''Ouroboros Trilogy''
* 2017: ''Road Trip'' – Bang on a Can
* 2017: ''The Path of Beatrice''
* 2017: ''PARADISO: Chapter 2''
* 2017: Amgen – ''The Repatha Escape''
* 2018: ''A.HUMAN'' – NY Fall Fashion Week
* 2018: ''August Moon Drive-In''
* 2019: ''Madame White Snake'' – Hong Kong Arts Festival
* 2019: ''Baltimore Orioles fan experience''
* 2019: ''HOODOO: The Legend of Creole Joe'' – Spiegelpalast Berlin
* 2019: ''Producing Innovation'' – iTunes Podcast

References

External links

* https://countsprojects.net/

{{DEFAULTSORT:Counts, Michael
American opera directors
1970 births
Living people

https://www.routledge.com/The-Immersive-Theatre-of-GAle-GAtes/Mooney/p/book/9781032034256