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 - Flyers - Photos - | |||
|  WELCOME TO the Anthony Bondi Productions Page.
In 1993, Doug Jablin initiated a long running series of performance-focused events, presented under the general title of the Committee for Public Safety. (Consult your history of the French Revolution for more details.) Under Doug’s vision, Doug, Jeff Morris, Greg Crosby, and I, were the founders of the group. CPS events evolved from wholly experimental local productions to polished events involving bands with a focused national reputation. In this latter category, highlights of the CPS history include presenting to Las Vegas: Boiled in Lead, Then Tingari, Idiot Flesh, and a memorable performance by Crash Worship. Our primary function was as a sort of performers’ workshop in which multi-media and audience involvement were our ongoing directions of interest. People who were accomplished performers in other venues understood that within Club Virtual, the goal was to try something new, and see what worked or did not. In between these extremes, there were a good number of comparatively straightforward productions focused on supportive presentations of local performers. Also at this time, the Vegas dance club community was moving into overdrive, the independent raves giving way to the first spectacularly successful Strip dance club, Utopia. Turf lines had not been set yet; movement was easy between the different communities. With the CPS, there were evenings and individual performances that were sweet treats, but the primary measure of what we were about was the value of the productions as learning experiences for those involved with them. From this standpoint, whether the shows were successful is a question that could only be answered individual by individual from among the many people sometimes involved in the shows. Certainly, the people who gained the most from the shows were those who worked the most on them. The six straight months of weekly events at Club Rainbow were an excellent laboratory for me to learn three-hour set design, and tear down, which was my primary contribution to the series. These quick and cheap transformations of stages and dull club spaces were my first involvement with producing three-dimensional environments. For Doug, the week after week after week of ephemeral productions was incentive to commence years of study of video production, with the result that he is today a professional producer of live and pre-mixed videos in Vegas Strip concert venues and dance clubs. This category of video production is pretty much of his design. While widely appreciated in the clubs, it is still not well understood by the general public. For both Doug and I, our CPS experiences meant that we had no learning curve to surmount when we first met the Burning Man Festival. It was absolutely more and bigger and better, but it was in no way different from what we had already been trying to do at home on a weekly or monthly basis, for the past couple of years. Greg Crosby was our nonpareil Master of Ceremonies. When he moved on to other projects, the CPS had a problem in that Jeff Morris was indispensable in his role as sound coordinator, while Doug was fully occupied all evening as general producer of the shows. I became the default MC, because I was the least otherwise-busy person dependably present at the shows. Hence the series title, “Mr. Bondi’s Soundhouse”, though these events as were all the others were almost wholly produced by Doug Jablin. Our general goal with the Soundhouse series was curiosity about the blending of performance genres, as had been our interest with Club Virtual. Fine individual bands might turn up, but our personal challenge was the overall blend of the performance elements, the collage of the show. When we stopped to try to come up with a count one day, our best guess was that there were about sixty presentations made in Las Vegas by the Committee for Public Safety between 1993 and 1996. We concluded this series of shows after an evening when perhaps only Doug and I realized that everything we had wanted to do this evening, had worked. The experiment was over. The only next step ahead for us was to turn professional, which was not our goal with these projects. These flyers were produced by various contributors to the project. | ||
All Content Copyright © 2005 Anthony Bondi All Rights Reserved This site designed and hosted by Monk Media | |||
