The Photographer at Whidbey Island Center for the Arts

LOVE. MURDER. MADNESS.Music-drama based on the scandal-filled life of the photographer Edweard Muybridge, whose motion studies of people and animals made him famous, and whose murder of his wifes alleged lover made him notorious. The Photographer utilizes drama, dance and slides of Muybridges photographs. Act I is a 20-minute play with incidental music recounting the circumstances under which Muybridge became a murderer and his subsequent trial and aquittal. Act II is a violin solo with orchestra, accompanied by a slide show of Muybridges photographs. Act III is a dance involving all characters.Following his acquittal, Muybridge throws himself into his work, inventing the techniques for the worlds earliest experiments in motion picture photography.Muybridge's Victorian imagery and sequential motion studies depict a shadowy area among Victorian kitsch, clich, dawning modernity, and present-day ''process art''this last represented in the motion graphics of Muybridge's running, leaping figures set against Mr. Glass's modular, repetitive music.There has never been a theatrical piece like The Photographer. The production uses many mediumsmusic, drama, dance, and filmto weave a hypnotic tapestry incorporating the creative process, memory, perception, and human passion.