Momentum120, Offering #1: “Gumbans”

This is Momentum120′s inaugural offering, titled “Gumbans.” This is actually more of a Momentum75, since we had just over an hour of rehearsal time left when we started putting this together.

For those of you not from Western Pennsylvania, the term “Gumbands” refers to rubber bands. When spoken in a Pittsburgh accent, the d sound often gets dropped, leading to the word sounding like “Gumbans”.

The inspiration for this piece comes from the computer game World of Goo (which is also where the music comes from). In World of Goo, you build towers and bridges out of adorable little goo-balls with eyes, traversing intense puzzles to get to the exit pipe. Different colors of goo-balls have different properties – some are flammable, some float, etcetera. The green goo-balls, though, are special, because they are re-positionable. You can pull them off the tower and place them somewhere else. This re-useable quality allows green goo-balls to do something no other goo-balls can – make a single strand.

In this piece, I took the sequence of steps necessary to make a single strand of green goo-balls and translated it into dance. Then we riffed off of the musical texture and the elastic quality of the goo-balls, and added some short semi-improvised sections.