Video Design for Performance
I have created media content and systems with the following companies and creators; Brian Lipson (King Lear, VCA), James Saunders (Harry Harlow, Full Tilt), Tasdance (Ten Days On The Island), Stuck Pigs Squealing (Apocalypse Bear, Melbourne Festival), Arena Theatre Company (House of Dreaming), Is Theatre (Passport to Happiness, Ten Days on the Island), Kelly Ryall (Disappearing Acts, Storeroom Theatre), Luke George (LIFE SIZE, Dancehouse and PICA), Dancehouse (24 HOURS). I was the recipient of Green Room award for my video design on The Harry Harlow Project in 2009, a work which carried out a national Mobile States tour in 2011.
I am interested in how video can break the bounds of the rectangle of projection to create integrated, immersive experiences that cannot be removed from the performance without destroying the whole. I prefer to work on projects from the beginning of the conception to enable this meshing to occur in a deep and considered way.
Harry Harlow
Martyn Coutts’ video design is unobtrusive yet breathtakingly effective, conjuring heartrending phantom monkeys and parallel versions of Harlow himself; ARTSHUB
Martyn Coutts’ live video art is the show’s highlight. Saunders’ performance is ghosted in black-and-white projection, the images warped to create a sense of disorienting isolation. They also suggest that, in Harlow’s lab, the observer and the observed are linked in a destructive dance. Cameron Woodhead, The Age
But while Harlow’s lot is to be eternally caged with his own demons, Saunders has ensured that the production itself is not the result of a single vision—rather, much of the work’s shape is defined by his collaborators. Martyn Coutts and Kelly Ryall provided live video and aural components to Saunders’ solo performance, where projected monkey footage and fascinating sequences wherein Harlow engages with ghostly doubles of himself or his shadow offered some of the most striking moments. John Bailey Realtime 95
Apocalypse Bear
Video designer Martyn Coutts’ backdrop – a projected suburban kitchen subtly micro-shifting in its viewpoint and slowly drifting to our left, is used to great effect. First presaging then showing a tragic delivery using a simple figure silhouette in a doorway in-filled with crackling pre-digital television static-screen patterns that eventually consume the tableau. Arts Hub
If David Lynch is the predominant influence in the writing, then Brian Eno rules the rest. The settings in the first two plays recall Eno’s “video paintings” of the 1980s, most famously Thursday Afternoon. Martyn Coutts slow-moving, phase shifting projections are of a domestic kitchen (Fag From Zagreb) and a school cafeteria in the second play. Chris Boyd The Australian
LIFE SIZE
