Kali

The New York winter of '93-'94 had an all-time record number of storms. When Leslie Mohn and Lee Breuer invited me to come to Phoenix, Arizona to work on their new project, I eagerly accepted the offer. Kali, a brilliant comedy about a Phoenix housewife who is transformed into the Hindu goddess, was a theatrical presentation involving live performers interacting with live and canned video.

Lee and Leslie had used the Arizona sun as a lure so they were loathe to tell me my first assignment would be a video shoot in snow-covered Sedona. I didn't even bring gloves as I expected Sagauro cacti and heat.

I used the ASU West Media Lab's resources for creating the computer animation. Having had terrible experience with consumer-level multimedia computers in the early '80's, I was appalled to discover ASU didn't have any SGI's or "professional" software. Instead, I used their MAC's - and discovered how dramatically the gap between professional and personal computing had narrowed in the past decade.

The show debuted at The Theater for the New City in New York. The press loved and hated it.