Transitions

I have come to a moment where it is time to share some big updates with Loren Robertson Productions!

To give a little back story, when I was attending the American Dance Festival at age 22 as a dancer, I took several bodywork classes that impacted me deeply.  I recognized that hands-on bodywork and healing was something that resonated with my spirit and I considered following one of the teachers to Florida to study with her. However, I had already begun my path of video production in the dance field and I felt torn between the two paths. I decided then that I could and would have multiple careers and that I would attend to my impetus for film and performance first, considering that bodywork would make a good second career as I aged.

This year, I turned 40. And this year, I will be starting massage school (part-time) and returning to the beginning of this seed that has been in many ways dormant and waiting inside me.

What this means for LRP is that starting July 2024, LRP will transition from providing start to finish video production and documentation services and shift to just me, Loren, being a solo freelance film editor. This is a long thought out plan (since 2021) that holds the intention to give myself the mental and emotional space to attend school while also supporting my beautiful family.

Importantly, my small, mighty and amazing team of videographers are NOT GOING ANYWHERE and will continue to be available to capture the beautiful work and events being so thoughtfully produced!  You can find their information on my referral page. And again, I will be available for at least the next two years or more for any editing needs you may have. It would be a continued honor to witness and help artfully frame your work on film, as it has become at this point completely second nature for me to do so.

I have been experiencing a lot of personal grief around this transition because the impact of the Bay Area performing arts community on my personhood is absolutely immeasurable. Thankfully there will be a somewhat gradual transition, however I will be holding a reception/gathering/party in San Francisco at Counterpulse on November 4, 2024 6:30-9pm to share gratitude, mark a moment and be and dance together! Please save the date (details and invite to come). All who are moved to attend are welcome. It will be a free event but will also be a benefit for one of my long time clients Skywatchers.

I hold SO much appreciation for my clients, colleagues and friends that have been on this ride with me at different points and some throughout. Thanks to all who have touched this 15 year journey!


with love and respect,

Loren



The Vigil: Annual Homeless Person's Memorial 2019

274 people, on average between the ages 30 and 50, died in the streets of San Francisco in 2019. This is a crisis.

Watch this short video we made of Skywatchers' Annual Homeless Persons' Vigil, with a “people’s choir” led by the inspiring Melanie DeMore. The powerful voices in it will remind you why we need to come together to support, resist, and remember.

The Vigil: Annual Homeless Persons' Memorial 2019 was presented by:

ABD Productions / Skywatchers, San Francisco Interfaith Council, SF Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco Night Ministry, and Faithful Fools

Camera: Jenny Chu

Bridge Project 2019: Signals of the West with Bay Area artists + Cunningham!

Bridge Project 2019 has more thoughtful curating for you with Signals of the West: Bay Area artists in conversation with Merce Cunningham at 100, part of the many happenings in celebration of Merce's centennial moment.

In a bi-coastal collaboration between the Bridge Project, the Merce Cunningham Trust, ODC Theater and SFMOMA's Open Space Hope Mohr Dance commissions 10 Bay Area artists from different disciplines. Through an intensive workshop with the brilliant Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, former Cunningham dancers, they then will create a work in their own discipline in response. See how Merce's systems speak to artists of various backgrounds and then see the performances this November!

music: Lost Ghosts; Julie Moon

photo credit: Hillary Goidell

camera: Jenny Chu

Loren at the Vail Dance Festival with NSP!

This was Loren's sixth year on the Nel Shelby Productions team at the Vail Dance Festival. At Vail, under Nel's direction, we capture all the shows with 4 cameras that are mixed live for audience on the lawn in the amazing outdoor amphitheater to provide a more intimate viewing of the shows - it's really fun!

Then we edit our days away delivering beautiful sizzles of the performances and interesting short films for the festival to use to share and promote on social media during the festival and throughout the year.

It's a jam-packed couple of weeks, but we still find time to enjoy a little of the beautiful mountains where this festival is located. The views and the river are just spectacular!

Here's a little sample of this year's Ballet Hispanico performance Loren helped shoot and edited:

Zahra Noorbakhsh, On Behalf of all Muslims

"Even when I say I'm not speaking on behalf of all Muslims, I'm still doing that in service of all Muslims. No matter what you can't escape this framing"

Female, Iranian, bisexual comedienne and founder of the podcast “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” Zahra Noorbakhsh (produced and presented by Golden Thread Productions) took the stage at Brava Theater in San Francisco with an AMAZING evening of comedy!

Here’s the pre-show promotional video we put together for the show:

Golden Thread Productions

Performed by: Zahra Noorbakhsh

Director: Lisa Marie Rollins

Music: Enedo

Camera: Jenny Chu/LRP

Embodiment Project's "X-Rated Planet" Promo

Ever devoted to social justice and blowing your mind with beauty, Embodiment Project has a new work on the way and we collaborated with them on the fundraising video. We went with a different approach this year and made it more like a music video. What do you think?

Artistic Director/Founder: Nicole Klaymoon

Dancers: Amber Julian, Dre, "Poco" Soul Devis, Johnny Nguyen, Terrance Paschal, Keisha Turner, Nicole Klaymoon, Rama Mahesh Hall, Sammay Dizon

Music: Ain't Nothing Like this Feeling Slope feat Ovasoul7

Sound Engineering: Makana M. Grant

Video Produced by Loren Robertson Productions

Camera: Cyrus Tabar

Edit: Loren Robertson

Medicine Mandala Women's Gathering

LRP had the honor of making this promo video for Medicine Mandala produced by Active Culture Family, a year-long women's initiatory journey with sacred plant medicines, the elements, and various healing modalities, held at Elder Farm in Descanso, CA.

Featuring: Lunita Valeria Velasquez, Nazdira Cuevas, Carrie Lou Arnold, Yaya Erin Rivera Merriman, Damiana Calvario

Music: Elementos by Regeneratrix, Inspired by Elementals by Aloka

Photos: Erin Lee

Camera: Loren R. Robertson

Circo Zero's Queer Migrants

Check out this edit we made of Circo Zero's Queer Migrants, a site specific performance using movement, storytelling, and ritual to talk about queer migration to the Bay Area. Told through intimate, chilling and fun first hand experience by both its writers and performers, Keith Hennessy and J Jha.

Written and Performed by: J Jha and Keith Hennessy

Costumes: Laura Hazlett

Production Management: Alley Wilde

Stage Management: Grisel "GG" Torres

Camera: Jenny Chu

Your best neighbors!

Watch this video we shot and edited for Good Neighbor gardens to learn about the symbiotic relationship between owls and gardening and to familiarize yourself with this awesome "urban sharecrop" organization.

in collaboration with Stephen Cantu’s and Miss Clabaugh’s third grade class-Hawking Carter School

LRP in 2018!

Another solid year of art/community-making that LRP had the privilege of capturing - THANK YOU to our amazing team - Jenny Chu, Jacob Marks, Rachel Marks and Rebecca Chun - for helping make this happen!

Begin with empathy

Check out this short video LRP edited on Empathy Lab, a workshop with Krista DeNio and Lochlann Jain. Using a horizontal process, it guides participants through sharing perspectives by responding to environments and the self, providing makers with tools for developing curriculum and performance. All starting with empathy.

Director of Photography: Eric Koziol eye.lasher media

Editing: Loren Robertson

Cameras: Mark Whelan and Eric Koziol

Music: McMillenium, Jack Winn, Dexter Britain

Empathy Lab was designed and taught by Krista DeNio and Lochlann Jain

Golden threaded Fairy Tale Players share their heritage

LRP loves Golden Thread Productions, the First American theater company focused on the Middle East! If you have the opportunity, make sure to bring all the young people you know to their Fairy Tale Players productions to watch stage works based on beloved folk tales. 

Youth not yet familiar with the Middle East will gain a sense of familiarity with other cultures. Young immigrants and people of the diaspora can feel a sense of pride in sharing their heritage. All will enjoy the creative storytelling of these wonderful artists!

Directed by Torange Yeghiazarian

Stage Manager: Sarah Al-Kassab

Cast: Danya Al-Kurd and Simone Bloch

Music: Ya Hajal Sanneen

Photo Credit: David Allen

Camera: LRP/Jenny Chu

EchoTheaterSuitcase

LRP had the privilege of working with artist and director Krista DeNio to produce a short film about her project EchoTheaterSuitcase (formerly the CONTACT project) which brings together mixed ensembles of veterans of war and military service with non-veteran civilians in various communities/cities, to co-create audience-interactive performance installations.

This film captures what the project is about and the positive impact it has had on veterans and non-veterans involved in the project alike. As Krista herself says at the end of the film,

"rather than being passive as we often are in feeling like the war is over there [somewhere else] - the military is not part of us (if we're not participating in it directly) - that actually we DO have a responsibility, we ARE directly involved. And what IS our responsibility in the process in healing our society?"

Very powerful and important work - please have a look and share!

DeNio and her collaborators are continuing to refine the project working model, with contributions from each community/ensemble. They will continue serving multiple communities, nationally. For more information: kristadenio.com/echotheatersuitcase/

Venue and Event Production Credits:

Canal Gallery, Holyoke Massachusets

CounterPulse as part of the ARC Program

Deirdre Visser / Arts @ CIIS

Department of Theater and Dance, UC Davis

VIDEO TIP: Two-Camera Video Documentation

We encourage clients producing full evening-length shows that include one's investment into set, light and costume design and of course many many many hours of rehearsal with the cast in the performance creation, produced in any theater venue to also invest in solid multi-camera video documentation. Usually, good clear documentation of said productions can be accomplished with 2 cameras, one Wide Camera (usually located in the back, centered) that captures the full scene of the show/event and one Medium/Close Camera (usually located in the front row on the far left or right side) that captures more of the intimacy of the performance/performers and provides an angle that allows the viewer to feel close to the show. Having both angles allows this intimacy (that mimics the live experience) as well as the full scale and full coverage of one's production. Then we can make an edit of the full show utilizing both angles for ample documentation of the work.

There is always a balance between ideal camera location/s and keeping the disturbance of the cameras to a live audience at a minimum.

Things to consider when choosing camera locations: 1. staging of the show/set If symmetry of staging and large set and/or lighting design is a major component of the work, getting a solid centered wide angle shot is important. If there is a 2nd camera in the front row at an angle, the staging can really dictate which side would be best for capturing closer angle. We want to make sure nothing will be majorly upstaged from a sharper angle for the majority of the show. 2. exit signs in the venue This may seem like a minor detail, but exit signs are actually quite bright, legally cannot be turned off or covered during a show, and are really annoying to look at when constantly in the frame of your documentation. Often venues, especially when curtains are taken down for a show, have exposed exit signs. Sometimes this completely dictates the angle of the Close Camera in order to avoid the exit sign in the frame. 3. curtain wings Sometimes camera locations have to take sharper angles on either side of an audience in order not to block anyone else's view of the show. However, we have to be careful that if there are wings/curtains and performers waiting in the wings during the show, that we try and avoid the camera capturing those performers "off stage". 4. audience heads This one is really really important. Even though we do care about the experience of the live audience (especially when they are one's regular paying patrons), we also cannot compromise the documentation by placing a camera behind an audience member too low so that the heads are in the frame and blocking the camera's view of the performers. This is why we usually place the Wide camera in the back of an audience where it is high enough to stand to get a shot over heads without blocking any audience's view. Then we usually place the 2nd camera in line with the front row (usually sitting in one of the chairs alongside audience) so that the camera is just as high as another head, blending in with the audience and completely free of any audience heads in the way (and also usually at a similar level as the performers, aiding in a more intimate document).

LRP is also very familiar with adapting camera locations and documentation plans for site-specific and/or moving performances or when the artists have re-arranged the typical audience/staging relationship in a venue. We also have lots of experience in figuring out best camera locations in many specific venues in the Bay Area - like Z Space, ODC Theater, Joe Goode Performance Annex, CounterPulse, Fort Mason, YBCA, etc. - so feel free to reach out to us if you ever have questions or ideas on this topic or are interested in getting a quote for a 2-camera shoot of your upcoming show/event!

foolsFURY on diaspora

Deborah Eliezer wrote and performed (dis)Place[d] as a reflection about the complexities of identity as a creation of foolsFURY Theater Company. Here's a snipped of her words to contextualize this video: Who has the right to tell stories? In 2008, my father was invited to give his oral history to the National Holocaust Organization. There are two hours of video of my father’s story, one he never spoke about with us kids. It took me 8 years to finally sit down and watch it, because some part of me understood that once I heard the stories, I would be responsible for asking more questions. (dis)Place[d] is my way of grappling with those questions about my own identity through an artistic conversation with my (recently deceased) father.

I grew up thinking I would never be allowed to visit the place my father’s birthplace. Aba never taught me Arabic, and we didn’t speak Hebrew together until I went to live in Israel during college. When he finally sent me a letter while I was on kibbutz in answer to some questions about his kibbutz life, he wrote it in Hebrew which my Hebrew teacher translated for me.

What is the price of forgetting? The Jewish people and the land of Iraq no longer exist, save in the hearts of the diaspora. What was once a thriving culture within a culture is now no longer. We can say that of many peoples. When you displace a people from a place, the voices vanish, too. Iraqi Jews spoke their own Arabic dialect that included Iraqi Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, and Turkish words. They had their own style of liturgical chanting—a beautiful, soulful style which was passed on from one generation to another.

Today, one language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear. Yet many peoples continue to survive without living on the land that binds their identity. The diasporic heart is united by memory, ideas, food, stories and history, the aspirations of our ancestors. The present, while recognized or not, is moving forward only in reference to it. And the land keeps calling.

Iraq was home to the largest and oldest Jewish diaspora, dating back 2500 years. Jews were highly educated, and integrated in Iraqi society. In the early 20th century, 130,000 Jews lived in Iraq, 50% of them in Baghdad. Most left for Israel in a mass exodus forced by the Iraqi government and largely motivated by growing growing anti-semitism in WWII, and the mounting support for the creation of the state of Israel, which came into being in 1948. My father fled Baghdad in 1949, was caught on the Iran-Iraq border and lived in a concentration camp for 2 years, before finally reaching Israel. Today there are fewer than 10 Jews that now live in Iraq.

What are the politics of language and place? A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, right? The predominant perception of Jews in America is that they are from Eastern Europe however there are actually 3 major diasporas (or “dispersions”) of Jews that left ancient Israel based on their migratory tie to the land: Ashkenazis in Eastern Europe who speak a mix of Hebrew and German called Yiddish, Sephardis in Spain and North Africa who speak a mix of Hebrew and Spanish called Ladino, and Mizrahi (or Middle Eastern,) who speak Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi and many other Jewish dialects specific to each country. Iraqi Jews spoke a dialect that was written in Hebrew but spoken Arabic.

What do I claim? This play is a reflection of the complexity of identity in today’s world. It is a journey of map-finding, heart searching and claiming both the light and shadow of who I am.

It is my hope that this play will spark conversations and inspire others to share their stories. I welcome hearing about what you received from the piece and what it sparked in you.

written and performed by Deborah Eliezer

directed by Ben Yalom

camera: Rachel Marks and Jacob Marks