A Few Questions with Ben Stevenson and Brian Ellis
We got together with The Choice is Yours co-creators Benjamin Stevenson and Brian Ellis to ask them a few questions in advance of the release of their choose-your-own-adventure musical performance on September 1, 2023.
Ben Stevenson
Brian Ellis
Aurel Garza-Tucker: Can you tell us a little bit about The Choice is Yours? How did you come up with the concept and what inspired you to make it a reality?
Benjamin Stevenson: The Choice is Yours was initially conceived as the ultimate blending of audience and performer, where the audience interacted with performers and dictated the direction of the narrative. Drafted before the pandemic, it was meant to be a sort of living video game experience. Once the pandemic made this impossible, we moved the project online while still aiming to keep the audience as the main driver of their own experience. Through a child-friendly series of choices, video/audio prompts, and interactive elements, the audience gets to control their experience as they grapple with themes of self-love and bodily autonomy.
AGT: What are your individual backgrounds and how did you use them to create this together?
BS: I’m a composer by trade, but I think my collaborations with dancers and digital media designers shaped the way that I thought of this project. I wanted it to be very different from a typical musical performance, mostly by making it an audience-forward experience. Crafting the text and conceptualizing the piece/characters was also very rewarding. I’m very inspired by more technical experimental poets, like e.e. Cummings, but I wanted to write a text that would be understandable by a wide range of audiences including (and especially) children. I love taking the English language as a playground for my weird experiments. When I compose music on my own text, it also gives me a great opportunity to change things and marry them as closely as possible. I love having that flexibility.
Still image from The Choice is Yours
Brian Ellis: I’m a creative coder, and a lot of my artistic practice is about finding ways to use technology to give audiences agency in their musical experiences. I’ve made website-based interactive musical performances, installation, and sound walks and when Ben and the team called asking me to be a part of making this experience come to life, I couldn’t have been more excited. I had been looking for the opportunity to make a choose-your-own-adventure style sound/art/performance experience for years, and could not have been happier to apply my skills to the area.
AGT: Were there any unexpected hurdles you came up against while getting this project ready for release?
BS: We had initially designed it to run on a platform that could not handle the massive amounts of files and pathways that the project required. Thankfully Brian found a brilliant solution! Like many other artists working during the pandemic, receiving videos from people filming themselves meant there were big differences in lighting, etc., but Rachel did a great job of highlighting the great elements from each performer.
BE: The team had a bunch of really awesome ideas when they approached me about this project, with ideas of images flying around on the screen, all sorts of cool flow mechanics, and lots of really enjoyable audience interactions. The process of bringing those features into reality on a web browser, as opposed to a fully-featured game engine like Unity, was a really rewarding exploration that helped push me in new directions I hadn’t worked on before.
AGT: What do you hope people take away from their time with The Choice is Yours?
BS: I want people to love themselves more! I want to give them a few skills to center themselves, listen to their bodies, and take healthy control of their body autonomy. The Choice is Yours is meant to blur the lines between audience and performer, and I hope to experience projects in the future that take this to even further levels.
AGT: Do you have any exciting projects lined up for the future?
BS: I’m working on a few projects with Jillian Kouzel, Assistant Professor of Oboe at Illinois State University. I’m also preparing for my upcoming move to Angola!
BE: I’m working on the next season for my group, the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble! We turn motion into music, and put on audience interactive performances using a bunch of fun web and wearable technologies! If you’re in NYC or Boston, you can check out our performances this Fall, and if not, here is a video of our last show!
