Emilie Conrad Interview

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Dance-movement pioneer, Emilie Conrad describes Wilson as a rare “seed man” and demonstrates his influence on her development of “microtonal movement.”

Emilie Conrad Speaks About the Need for a Film About Erv Wilson

EMILIE CONRAD: The only difference I think between a lunatic and a visionary is relevance. To not recognize the neurological in terms of all the things he was orienting himself around, really needed a broader understanding, but it stays in that genre of so-called music. But it’s way beyond music. In other words, it has to do with human functioning it seems to me.

I’m Emilie Conrad and I am the founder of continuum which is a movement process that has been around for 42 years. And I met Erv Wilson many years ago. Going inside his house is kind of like going inside his body in a way. You walk in and its very dark and all this musical, microtonal instruments are all over kind of layered everywhere. So you are entering into a kind of realm of subterranean machinations.

Erv fertilized these students and what grew from that would be fascinating. He’s a seed man, yeah, yeah. I just don’t think he’s gotten his due.

We are never going to see this again. We’re never going to see this person again–this constellation of textures again, this kind of thought, this kind of kind of history again. We’ll never see it.

The uniqueness of the way he perceived reality and the way he dreamed up his existence was so…. rare.

It is very interesting because there is some movement sequences that we do that I would call microtonal movement. It’s quarter tone movement. It’s not, not like movement all at once. It’s where the movement keeps arriving.

If I were moving in a four-dimensional way and I wanted to turn my hand, I would turn it like that. And that’s very conventional. There’s a lot of density in this movement meaning everything is moving all at once. Okay? But if I go into a quarter tone movement, my entire nervous system is orchestrated differently. So it would be like this where I turn and I stop and I feel. And then I turn my hand again. And I stop and I feel. And I can already feel a kind of sensory something going on. And then I’m turning here. Can you see it? And I just stop and feel. I can sense that I’m and I start to feel this movement in my fingers. See it? Huh? See it?

Okay, so that movement wouldn’t mean anything to a conventional brain. It’s not a movement that fetches wood and carries water. It is a different communication link within my system itself. So as this is going, the shaping that it starts to make.

See if I were a dancer in a ballet company this movement would never exist cause you can’t see it from the third balcony. If I was in time in a certain way this movement would never exist so I would never know about this world.

Now it sort of grows. And I don’t know where this is going. But what is interesting here is that millions of new neurons are being stimulated in a very elegant way. That goes beyond the survival circuitry of fetching wood and carry water. It’s a different communication link in my system. So one of the… this could keep shifting and changing. Like now it’s radiating more into my arm.

I can tell you this. If you met somebody from another dimension, they wouldn’t like this. There’s absolutely no question in my mind. That the orchestration of their brain and their capacity to encompass, would be so completely different than what we, how we organize or time space that in their whole movement orientation they would shift would be just completely different. That’s what this is.

Directed and Scored by Stephen James Taylor.

For more information on Wilson and those whom he influenced please continue to explore our site.

Erv Wilson on Emilie Conrad

ERV WILSON: I saw her dancing and I could not believe how beautifully she danced.

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Stephen James Taylor

Stephen James Taylor has had a full time career for the last 30 years writing music for film and TV as well as the concert hall. His style is an eclectic blend of many elements. He has been helping introduce Transcendent Tonality, (via the application of much of Ervin Wilson's material), into the lexicon of film music since the early 90's. He is just now getting around to releasing his first solo album in 2013.