Fragile

In October 2005 artist John Lawson returned to his flood damaged home in New Orleans to find the majority of his life's artistic work sitting below six feet of water. By pulling each piece of paper carefully apart he laid what was still intact onto his porch to dry in the sun. In the summer of 2007 Lawson spent over one hundred and forty hours retracing the hundreds of salvaged sketches and drawings, quite literally "connecting the dots" of his life by not only redrawing each line but by embellishing the sketches and connecting one to the other.

Jonathan Vitagliano began work on the film by sifting through Lawson's artwork and comparing the "re-traced" images to photographs he had taken over the past five years. By merging Lawson's artwork with photographs from his travels in the states and abroad, Vitagliano found an immediate interconnection. The photographs had completed the drawings and visa versa.

In order to mimick this collaborative process, composer Christopher Marianetti began layering sounds recorded from his daily life with both traditional and non-traditional (invented) instruments. As soundscape transforms into soundtrack a line from C.G. Jung's "Modern Man in Search of a Soul is set to music and repeated through-out the score.

Fragile Live

Fragile Live is a mixture of composed music (derived from the film score) and improvisation. Usually (space permitting) live projections of the film accompany the performance by the musicians. The performance is broken down into six distinct sections that interlock and act as a continuous whole. The basic musical material for the piece is fixed but the actual shape and form of the live performance is constantly mutating.

The instruments used in the live performance are as follows: