Virtual Band Fills Cabot Theatre

Tracy and the Plastics, a riot-grrl band fronted by critically renowned visual artist Wynne Greenwood, WHEN performed at the Cabot House Underground Theatre—but the singer’s bandmates and instruments were nowhere to be found onstage, appearing only on the video screen behind her.

Greenwood is a graduate student at Bard College, who, in addition to writing, performing and recording her own music, produces and stars in her own experimental videos.

Performing as one of a series of visiting artists brought to Harvard by the Office of Arts at Harvard (OFA), Greenwood ambitiously combines her two passions in Tracy and the Plastics, writing and producing movies that correlate in subject matter and rhythm to her songs.

Each of Greenwood’s videos contains a loose narrative centered around her two fictional bandmates, both of whom are played by Greenwood herself.

“I just set up the video camera and push ‘record’ and walk in front of it,” she says.

During live shows, the videos are projected onto a screen behind Greenwood, who sings along to her prerecorded instrumentals.

Her two fictional characters interact with each other onscreen throughout Greenwood’s performances, and in between songs she joins in their conversations, delivering her lines during carefully scripted silences. Such moments reveal how meticulously planned the seemingly spontaneous performances really are. Greenwood’s expert execution implies an exacting level of detail in editing, audiovisual synchronization and scripting, as animation, bits of television commercials, and cardboard cutouts all appear throughout the videos.

Despite the fact that such subject matter varies greatly from video to video, certain themes are continually reinforced throughout all of her work, according to Greenwood.

“It’s about learning to talk the same language as this medium of video,” she explains. “There’s deeper relationships between sound and image, and audience and performer, and media maker and media watcher that don’t get explored or talked about at all, so I’m trying to talk about that stuff. We talk about being gay, about lesbian identity and stuff like that. I’m a feminist, and everything I write comes from that community.”

Although Greenwood has released her music on CD, she feels her videos contribute an essential element to her songs.

“I feel like there’s a lot of imagery in the lyrics, but it’s kind of hard to get that if you’re just listening to it for the first time in a live setting,” she says. “The video hopefully complements it.”

Her second album, Culture For Pigeon, as well as the first Tracy and the Plastics DVD, will soon be released on Chainsaw Records.

Greenwood’s grueling tour schedule, which has kept her on the road since 2001, will only intensify. Over the years, Greenwood has performed to a number of different tapes, since she typically retires a video after each tour.

“It gets sort of boring for me,” she says. “But with every video I make I sit down and do it, and make a new mission statement. I’m in the process of starting to make the next video.”

Her performance at Cabot, which lasted approximately 25 minutes, was set to an older tape that Greenwood says she will not be performing ever again.

The piece, which Greenwood says is “a lot about the construction of media [and] the conversation about ...the audience-performer relationship,” elicited an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience, and a long line of people waiting to talk to her formed immediately after the show.

In addition to winning Greenwood fans across the country, the inventive, interdisciplinary fusion that characterizes Tracy and the Plastics has been attracting national attention from art critics and cultural institutions. The Whitney Museum of American Art, for instance, recently included Greenwood in its 2004 Biennial Exhibition.

Visual and Environmental Sciences Visiting Professor Elisabeth Subrin, who arranged for Tracy and the Plastics to play at Harvard, first saw the band perform at New York City’s Knitting Factory two years ago.

“It was the first new music I had been excited by in a really long time,” says Subrin. “It just blew my mind to see the intersection of the visual artist with a really strong feminist experimental sound.”

Subrin, who is also a video artist, asked Tracy and the Plastics to perform at Harvard because she felt that Greenwood’s talent and vision would complement the material being taught in her History of Video Art course.

“I wanted [my students] to be exposed to a really important and interesting emerging artist,” says Subrin.

She added that in a culture seduced by overly high production values, it is important and encouraging to see such a grassroots, do-it-yourself aesthetic succeed artistically.

Greenwood, however, was initially apprehensive about her performance serving such an educational purpose.

“I’ve played a lot of universities and art schools,” she said. “But it’s hard to know what the best audience situation is going to be. The academic audience setting is kind of hard, because the audience is so used to sitting.”

Over the course of her performance at Cabot, Greenwood tried to draw the crowd into the show, involving them and conversing with them on an equal plane.

Having just finished her third song of the evening, for example, she ordered the engineer to pause the tape. When the video stopped, Greenwood addressed the crowd for the first time since her introduction.

“There’s a line that ends this space, and you guys make up the space beyond that line,” she explained. “You can kind of see it. It’s invisible, but you can kind of see it. When I paused the video, I made it happen. You guys didn’t really pause it—I made it pause. That’s to force myself to interact with the audience, because a lot of the time I don’t trust my relationship with the audience. It’s a hard thing to do.”

That kind of interaction, according to Subrin, is precisely what makes Tracy and the Plastics so special.

“I hope she just continues in a really beautiful way to communicate with audiences,” she says. “I hope that her ideas make people less scared of interaction. Still when she asks people to talk, everybody’s too shy and conditioned to be silent, and have her be the authority and them be the consumers. I think she’s really trying to change that and that’s going to take a long time.”

Aside from the upcoming Tracy and the Plastics releases, Greenwood looks forward to trying new things, such as collaborating with other musicians and making videos that are not related to the band.

“The media is like a big monster,” she says. “Yeah, it can be disappointing, but that just means you have to make more information happen that’s in some way empowering.”