Outré études Hunter, Hey, and Amper’s Chopin and Me BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Paula Hunter’s performance pieces have always been an amazing collage of images, both verbal and physical, spoken and danced. They engage each audience member in a process of connecting the dots: recognizing the links between Hunter’s anecdotes and snatches of thought or making the leap to follow her own internal allusions and motifs. It’s as if she establishes a personal mythology in which characters, scenes, and even reactions take on a familiar ring because they’re touched upon in different ways throughout the performance.

In her newest work, Chopin and Me, a sprawling collaborative piece with local videographer Holly Hey and Boston-based concert pianist Leslie Amper, Hunter draws on a wealth of information about Chopin’s life, his personality and, most importantly, his music, and she wraps this around her responses to the music, specifically his 24 preludes, all of which Amper performs in the show.

Hunter’s connection with Chopin had been through dance, including a production of Les Sylphides and a spoof she once set to an étude. But as her daughter pursued her piano studies, Hunter began to have conversations with Amper about making a performance around her own reactions to Chopin’s music: the feelings she had while listening to it, the ways in which she wanted to move to it, and the memory paths it led her down.

"I knew that the preludes had always been a piece of music that was commented on by Chopin’s contemporaries and by artists of all kinds all the way down to today," Hunter noted, after a rehearsal last week at the RISD Auditorium. "I wanted to see if we could theatricalize this."

She also hoped to extend the range of media involved in the project, so she asked Hey to make video responses to the music, just as she was creating text and movement segments. In the course of doing this, they decided to convey the difficulty of the process itself, the challenge of translating Chopin’s music into words, filmed images, or dance.

They incorporate Hunter’s e-mail jottings to Hey and Amper into the performance by a large projection of a computer screen while Hunter sits at a desk and types into a laptop. This technique is modified sometimes, because the typing would slow the pace too much, and the completed e-mail message is shown, with a voice-over or other narration. Sometimes the e-mail messages are projected over the top of a video segment such as a skateboarder or a ballerina’s toe-shoed feet and fluffy knee-length tutu.

And all the while, you hear the urgent runs, the insistent chords, the lively arpeggios, and the dramatic arc of the preludes as Amper plays them live. Periodically, she stops to mention information about the music, such as the "circle of fifths" the composer used as a structure for the preludes, moving along the natural order of the keys, so that a prelude in a major is followed by one in that key’s minor mode, ending up with 12 preludes in major keys and 12 in minor ones. At another point, she pauses to explicate a hemiola. Hunter quips that it sounds like a blood disease, but it is actually a restructuring of the rhythm within a musical phrase.

"Those of us who are involved in artistic pursuits have an urge to keep communicating what this music is about," Amper stressed. "It’s not as much a part of the general culture as it used to be, and it takes an effort to understand it, but we are intent on not giving up on presenting the best stuff. We’re keeping this alive, and we know this is important."

Hunter’s ruminations on the preludes demonstrate how personally they can be experienced. She feels the "violence" in the music and she mentions how fearful Chopin was, drawing an analogy to herself: "I’m relieved to meet another person over the age of five who’s afraid of elevators and dogs, even small ones." At another point, she relates that people in Chopin’s day milled about at recitals, and suddenly she’s thrust into a memory of her father, who paced at the back of the theater whenever he took Hunter and her siblings to the movies. She could hear him "trying to help out the characters," such as giving advice to Paul Newman in The Hustler.

In one of the e-mails she writes to Hey, Hunter says, "I love meeting people who can’t get along. Chopin couldn’t get along with anyone." But the humor in Hunter’s work often leads to a stop-you-in-your-tracks serious observation. This time it’s about an anti-Semitic remark by Chopin to his publisher and Hunter’s reflection on people asking her and her husband about sending their son to a Catholic high school: "Who goes there anyway — Catholics?"

Hunter talks about the relationship between novelist George Sand and Chopin and puts on a suit à la Sand, while she considers the time the lovers spent on Majorca. A video of her in the suit zooms in on a bespectacled, wide-eyed, frazzled-haired version of herself, standing among a row of seats marked "reserved."

"I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have humor in classical music," Hunter observed. "Recontextualizing it is important. Chopin himself said he never played a piece the same way twice."

Amper seems to sometimes accompany a particular video sequence, other times to set Hunter into motion, be it a frantic whirling in tattered toe shoes or a stiff-legged stride in the Sand suit. Hey has shot some dreamy video (a portion of Hunter leading small children through a dance); some frenetic video (a group of young boys in a snowball fight); some tightly-focused sequences (such as stomping feet); and some evocative images (such as the shadows of the ballerina’s tutu on the stone squares of a courtyard).

"This formalist, structuralist approach is slipping away from the public at large," Hey noted.

"And we need a critical viewing of art," Hunter added. "People need to see themselves in something."

"We’re trying to make it available and accessible," Amper reiterated.

And so they are. If you aren’t sure where the text is going as you watch Chopin and Me, wait a moment and there will be a video or a dance segment to pull you in. Or if the multimedia sensations begin to toss you in too many directions, focus on the music, and you’ll discover your own connections to Chopin. But if you concentrate on the pieces of Hunter’s puzzle, you’ll most likely find that they all fit together by the end.

Chopin and Me will premiere on Saturday, January 31 at 8 p.m. at the RISD Auditorium in Providence. Tickets are $10. Call (401) 529-4391.