composer
by DaEun Jung, with Melody Shim
A dance quartet combining traditional Korean dance with chance operations and contemporary dance.
The music combines Lou Harrison’s National Resophonic Guitar with electronics and the powerful pansori voice of Melody Shim.
LA Dance Chronicle: “…mesmerizing… wonderful…”
Stage and Cinema: “… a mind fuck.”
Sound Design for a Center Theater Group Production
Directed by Juliette Carillo
Written by Benjamin Benne
Starring Cheryl Umaña and Sabrina Fest
What would happen if the conventional flow of Korean dance is disrupted Prompted by this question, dancer-choreographer DaEun Jung has built a compositional system inspired by Merce Cunningham’s “chance operation” and the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Assigning the segmented moves of classical Korean dance to each morpho-syllabic block of the alphabet, Byoul Part 1: 246 at 40—consisting of 246 syllables, moves, and beats at 40 bpm—finds Jung, pansori singer Melody Shim, and sound composer Daniel Corral exploring concurrences of rigor upon arbitrary, spontaneity upon rules, flow upon interruption, dependency upon idiosyncrasy, and the conditional upon the absolute.
Choreographed and Performed by DaEun Jung
Vocals: Melody H. Sim (Shim)
Composer/Sound Design/Video Design: Daniel Corral
Costume Design: Alice Park
Scenic Concept: Haeshin Park
Director of Photography: Chantal Cherry
Video Editor: Scarlett Kim
Associate Video Editor: Anthony Storniolo
Sound Recording: Sung Ryeol Kim
Special thanks to Alexander Gedeon, Tom Byun, and Rosanna Gamson for your generous support, time, and space
A collaboration with performer/director Alexander Gedeon, Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage combines live music and theatrical performance to reframe the cultural significance of the “worst album in rock and roll history.”
“Having Fun with Elvis on Stage” is a 1973 album collaged entirely from Elvis speaking on stage between songs at live concerts – no music. AllMusic’s Mark Deming declared “hearing it is like witnessing a car wreck, leaving onlookers too horrified and too baffled to turn away.” Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage reimagines this vilified recording as the libretto for a sort of ghost opera, combining pop art nostalgia with new technology and classical instruments to create a memetic hologram of the endless purgatory of celebrity afterlife.
My live musical score is performed along with the original LP as if they were the pit orchestra for opera or musical theater – sometimes harmonizing with the words, painting emotions in the spaces between, or reacting theatrically. Meanwhile, Gedeon’s “Elvis” persona becomes a vehicle to explore all things banal and absurd in pop idolatry, as well as the performative aspects of ‘stage presence.’
Sequenza 21: “…carried off with exemplary production values and extraordinary performances, making the case that new music concerts can be experienced online at a high level.”
LA Times Cultural Pick: “Theater artist Alexander Gedeon and composer Daniel Corral deconstruct the myth of pop stardom in this musical fable with live accompaniment by the Now Hear Ensemble.”
LA Weekly: Arts Calendar Highlight
Pastoral works to revise the stories I grew up with: American tropes of manifest destiny, untroubled and unlimited resources, and selective invisibilities. I am making this dance to replace those stories, with new and necessary ones. Monuments decay, inhabitable land shrinks, walls become flesh, and we consider what it means to run (away). The spatial frame of the dance shifts from iconic American landscapes to unencumbered, unbounded spaces in which dancers are unmoored and adrift. Mortal time is brief. There is only time to tell new stories and cherish fleeting moments. – VIC
Choreographic Direction by Victoria Marks
Visuals by Isla Hansen
Lighting by Arsenio Apillanes
Sound by Daniel Corral
Choreographic Assistance by Sarah Jacobs
Featuring: Dezaré Foster, DaEun Jung, Aaron Mason, Alexx Shilling, Willy Souly, Tom Tsai
LA Dance Chronicle: “Pastoral takes the early 20th century concept of Americana worship and shatters it — rightfully so. Though things have never fully been fair, the once tangible idea of ‘making it’ has become almost entirely fantastical, as we struggle to find out place in this land.”
Created by Christine Marie.
Music by Daniel Corral, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Laaraji.
Features excerpt from my pieces Polytope, Diamond Pulses, and One Line
Variety: “The vivid choreography and score leave a lasting impression within one’s psyche…”
NBC: Sundance Film Festival ASCAP 21st Anniversary Lineup
Cool Hunting: “Marie’s work reminds all visitors of the power in exploring all manners of reality modification.”
Commissioned by REDCAT and premiered on March 27, 2014, COLLAPSE is a post-ecological Requiem – a unique performance with interactive visuals about the environmental catastrophes caused by humans, composed by Daniel Corral. Performed by Timur and the Dime Museum and produced by Beth Morrison Projects, COLLAPSE is envisioned as a sardonically theatrical mass service, where different stories are refracted through the hauntingly eclectic sound of the band and the post-punk voice of TIMUR. Re-imagining the traditional Requiem form into a band-driven song cycle for the 21st century, COLLAPSE will also feature live-mixed projections by the award-winning video artist Jesse Gilbert (World Technology Network fellow). Costumes of the progressive LA fashion designer Victor Wilde of the Bohemian Society (Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week 2014), will further create a raucous portrait of the human-made impact on the planet.
Vanity Fair: Can the Mississippi River dead zone ever be alluring? … the “multimedia glam-rock meets classical baroque concert” seeks to start a bold conversation about our effect on the environment
Blouin ArtInfo: Glam Rock Environmentalism
Brooklyn Rail: The Rocky Horry Picture Show for the coming Apocalypse?
Gothamist: …Dark and satirical performance…
Exeunt: When writing about the genre-defying sound of LA band Timur and the Dime Museum, you might run out of hyphens—their charming glam-rock-cabaret-punk-opera-mischievous magpie-style requires experiencing first-hand to fully appreciate the influences embedded in their eclectic approach to music.
Neat Beet: On the vanguard of both drama and rock music is Timur and the Dime Museum, an experimental rock band out of LA that aims to fuse the two together into an explosive combination.
arts.meme: an art-rock tour of the daily dump of ecological disasters, with songs composed by band member Daniel Corral
LA Times: “nastily seductive… popsy, preachy, beat, grungy or ferociously apocalyptic, with texts to match.”
Fusion TV: “Think: revival tent-type screamer about the perils of Atlantic salmon. Think: a New Wave-style dance number about algae clumps brought together by rising oceans. Think: The kind of environmental message you can seriously not forget.”
Miami Herald: “Collapse” is so full of dark intensity and black humor that you’ll feel fine for experiencing it – but maybe a bit pensive as well.”
Miami New Times: “Intelligent, binary breaking, issue-driven entertainment that breaks binaries and reforms them into a multi-verse of music.”
Artillery Magazine: “It’s a coherent, even cogent, but stylistically unwieldy sequence of songs. It takes a special talent to impart that cogency, that urgency.”
NewMusicBox: “Daniel Corral, the Dime Museum’s accordionist and composer-in-residence, takes an inspired, unexpected approach, turning the whole thing into a psychedelic rock opera of sorts, with catchy hooks, doo-wop harmonies, and a pantheon of stylistic references. This spoonful-of-sugar tactic works wonders for the show, which is more likely to generate delight than despair. I almost feel guilty for enjoying it.”
Artificialist: ” I am well aware that ‘organic unity’ is not the sole criterion by which the quality of musical works ought to be judged, but when it is aimed for and achieved so impeccably, it’s hard not to ooh and ah.”
LA Downtown News: “Collapse has all the elements of high opera with elements of a twisted cabaret and rock and roll”
Stage Rows: “Stage Rows was among Thursday’s opening night’s audience and can testify that everything about Timur’s stage presence and Corral’s new tunes positively reeked of coolness.”
The Constance Gradual: “That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.”
Stage and Cinema: “the sort of music you would love to dance to if not for the guilt-trip inducing lyrics about bee colony collapse, radioactivity, flooding, nuclear disaster, atmospheric hypoxia, and the gradual trash plasticization of our oceans.”
DISLIKE is a 21st century operatic documentation of a unique repository for the darker emotions swirling around the Internet. The sinister side of online anonymity and open-forum communication is examined by deconstructing 24-hours worth of comments on the most “disliked” video on YouTube. Taken as a singular libretto, the result is a surreal text full of anger, naivety, homophobia, desperation, and mischief. Meanwhile, eight accordions create a lush, post-ambient sonic environment inspired by a time-stretched interpretation of that video’s song. The resulting dichotomy depicts the Jungian shadow of the digital collective unconscious.
Dislike was premiered at REDCAT’s 2013 NOW Festival after a workshop at the Electric Lodge’s High Voltage Series! It featured Free Reed Conspiracy and The Peoples Microphony Camerata.
Read my article on LA Stage Times about Dislike
Performed by Dog Star Ochestra on June 17, 2017
Living Out Loud Los Angeles: “This was truly a treat for all, from our soft spoken dreamers to our extroverted realists, we all went home with a true image of how ugly we can be and how much help we all owe each other.”
Musings by a Dancing Poetess: “By the end of the piece, I hated YouTube; I hated the Internet, and I would have given anything to make it stop. But, my experience of discomfort was what created the power in the Corral’s social commentary.”
Local Looking Glass: “Its music was Baby’s chords played in discordant waves of sound a la Koyaanisqatsi.”
LA Weekly: “Composer Daniel Corral, whose work probes the weirdness of 21st-century living, has written a libretto called Dislike, about the most disliked YouTube video of all time.”
LA Stage Times: “Full of anger, naivete, homophobia, desperation, and mischief, these comments portray a Burroughsian narrative seemingly cut straight from the cloth of the collective unconscious.”
The adventurous puppet theater company Tandem and groundbreaking glam opera band Timur and the Dime Museum joined forces in Daniel Corral’s new puppet-opera, Zoophilic Follies. With comedic relish, Zoophilic Follies, explores the lesser-known stories about the famed inventor Daedalus and illuminates how technology can give flight to our wildest dreams and grusesome failures.
Zoophilic Follies premiered at REDCAT in September, 2011.
Music by Daniel Corral
Directed by Caitlin Lainoff
Libretto by Sibyl O’Malley
Times Quotidian: “That he is comfortable drawing from the whole world of music is no surprise given his musical pursuits, nor that the results are entertaining, beautiful, and interesting.”
LA Stage Times: “We relish the comedy involved, and also pause to consider the transcendent power of hopes so large.
Out West Arts: “It is hard to ignore the musical energy of the piece… Zoophilic Follies cries out for further development and performances.”
Times Quotidian: “This thrilling, precious project was as entertaining as it was unique, driven by ever-engaging songs, instrumental solos, and tight ensemble playing.”
Lolo and Lola is a puppetry piece about my grandparents’ experiences during WWII in the Philippines. It premiered in 2010 at the Boulder Fringe Festival.
A WWII-era puppet show based on a true story tells the haunting tale of the romance between a Filipino guerrilla fighter and a young schoolteacher.
Set to an original score, puppets travel through unfolding landscapes, transforming the lives of two young people struggling to survive in the war-torn Philippines.
In 1942, Mauro returns home after a grueling stint in a Japanese POW camp. Half dead from disease and scarred by the cruelties of war, he discovers solace through the letters of Olga, who lights a candle in her window as a signal to her love. Caught between the island’s volcano, the explosions of war, and sustaining power of love amid struggle, LOLO AND LOLA is an inspiring tale told in a theatrical, visually evocative style.
LOLO AND LOLA is the second puppet epic created by Caitlin Lainoff and Daniel Corral. Their previous show starring Catherine Strecker premiered at the Great Small Works International Toy Theater Festival and played at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Directed by Bo Sul Kim
Choreographed by Nick Bruder
Dance by Robin Wilson
Music by Daniel Corral
“Shadow, My Shadow” is a multimedia performance that follows a girl on her path to self-discovery with choreography, video and drawn animation. Lost beneath layers of worldly masks she seeks to find her true self and plunges deep into the fathoms of her mind, the consciousness of her soul. At the bottom of this ocean she encounters a mysterious creature: her own shadow.
A devised, participatory, site-specific show staged in a new Condominium tower show floor that included an original civic planning multi-phase board game based on a community engagement research process.
Project Core Question: Where will we live?
By Alison Heimstead and Sibyl O’Malley
Music composed by Daniel Corral and performed by Daniel Corral and Andrew Tholl
Premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall’s 2008 Toy Theatre Festival on June 14 and 15, 2008
Inspired by “Le Grand Macabre” by György Ligeti
Premiered at The Great Small Works Toy Theater Festival, Saint Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn NY, May 2008
Puppeteers: Catherine Strecker, Danielle Ash, BeomSik Shim, Jesse Ayala
Video Design: Roz Fulton
Singing: Harmony Jiroudek
Voice of Venus: Kari Rae Seekins
Conceived and directed by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Designed and Drawn by Cristina Paulos
This is a toy theater adaptation of a contemporary fairy tale with the same title by Seattle playwright and writer Bret Fetzer.
This production was invited to PQ06 (Prague Quadrennial 2006).
