December 17–24, 1998

critical mass

Multi Man

The many lives of David Forlano, a man for all media.

by Deni Kasrel

		Sweetly Magnetic: Forlano (with Kawai) prepares for his show at the CEC. photo: Sandor Welsh

Dressed in black from head to toe, arm and legs crossed, David Forlano perches on the edge of a couch talking about why he's interested in meditation and the spiritual world. "It's the idea of being present and aware of a current state of livelihood," he says, his soft hazel eyes looking off into the distance. "Of being interested in the essence of things."

With his clean-shaven head, very closely cropped beard and round wire-rimmed spectacles, he looks every inch the ascetic. But the essence of David Forlano is hardly that simple. Musician, dancer, jewelry maker and choreographer (not to mention Liberace's cousin), Forlano lives comfortably in multiple worlds, as a tour through his spacious Kensington studio reveals.

One room has a smooth, sanded wood floor and mirrored wall. A pile of instruments, some of them hand-crafted by Forlano from industrial materials, sits in a corner. There's a mat on the floor in front of which are sheets of paper neatly placed in a semi-circle—notes for a piece Forlano will present this week at the Community Education Center. A small tape machine sits nearby. The space is otherwise bare. Here's where Forlano plays music to accompany assorted local dancers, including his girlfriend Roko Kawai.

An adjoining area serves as Forlano's "technology room." It's packed with video equipment (VCRs, editing machine, a few sound decks) and what Forlano jokingly calls his "mobile recording studio." This has several synthesizers, drum machine, sampler, an old sequencer that's currently broken and digital tape equipment.

A quick turn, and you're standing in the midst of organized chaos: the nerve center of City Zen Cane, a nationally known jewelry operation Forlano runs jointly with longtime friend and business partner Steven Ford. Tabletops are a jumble of intriguing hand-crafted beads, pins of abstract design, colorful blocks of polymer clay and other items used in the jewelry-making process.

The contrast between the spare atmosphere of the dance area and the overflowing jewelry studio is striking. "That's a reflection of my collaborators," Forlano explains. "Steve's way of working is much more jumbled. Roko likes it very open and breathable."

Guests are often taken aback when wending through the space, situated in a complex known as Sharktown. "When dancers come they're surprised by the jewelry stuff," Kawai comments. "They say, 'I never knew you did that.'" Likewise, those who know Forlano from craft shows (City Zen Cane has shown several times in the Philadelphia show, and their jewelry is sold at the PMA, the Guggenheim and the Smithsonian) are surprised to learn he's part of the dance world. Further, those familiar with Forlano's participation in the local improvised music scene are usually unaware of his involvement in other art forms.

Those who know Forlano best see these divergent interests as deeply interconnected. "David's pieces are very much about a moment in time. They are unique, individual experiences of the process of him making a piece," comments Ford, who thinks Forlano's pins in particular "reflect his personality—which is introspective and nuanced and slow to reveal itself. His palette is suppressed with sparks of bright color. That's in keeping with his music, too. He does long passages of repetitious things and just when you think it's getting monotonous, something happens. He likes minimal art, but then there's this high energy of surprise."

Kawai adds, "There's always a sense of innovation and experimentation with the materials. With City Zen Cane, Steven and David are into pushing the envelope and finding new applications that no one else has done. They've come up with a lot of techniques that are trade secrets. And that mentality is seen in all the art making, whatever the form. David is always finding new images and working with new technological tools. You see it a lot in his video work, where he'll split screens or when he abstracts landscapes so they're just flickers of color."

The urge to consistently explore fresh territory has been with Forlano since his childhood. An artist aunt who lived next door to his family's home in Horsham helped instill the desire early on. Young David frequently hopped over to his aunt's digs, where he'd do "all kinds of projects. Watercolor, sculpting. She had me doing really advanced approaches. That opened me up to the art world."

There was a piano in Forlano's house. His father played it in the style of a second cousin, none other than the flamboyant Liberace. Forlano took to the ivories, too, though his playing was more offbeat. "I'd sit down for hours with a four-track set-up with microphones on top, under and inside the piano. I filled glasses with water and would run my fingers over the rims to get sounds. It was really fun," he recalls.

In school he briefly played the clarinet, then switched to the saxophone. He formed a "typical garage band" playing cover tunes by popular rock groups. Later, art rock outfits like Yes and Pink Floyd, plus David Bowie albums produced by Brian Eno, caught his ear, leading Forlano to explore a more progressive approach.

He attended Temple University's Tyler School of Art as a painting major. In his junior year Forlano signed up for the school's program in Rome, where he met Ford. "Our work was totally different," Forlano observed. "Mine was color explosive, very raw and emotional. Steve's was very calculated, more intellectually based. I'd never seen that kind of painting. I was intrigued. And we had the same drive and energy in talking about art."

The pair became fast friends and roommates. Just out of college they formed a construction company. Then in 1988 they started City Zen Cane, so named because their jewelry is made using an ancient process developed by Roman and Egyptian artisans called caning.

Meanwhile, David continued to pursue music. He attended a few workshops led by one of his sonic heroes, Robert Fripp. Soon Forlano's musical style took a marked turn. "Fripp would get you to zone out, to make a note as perfect as it could be to the point where it's converted to something spiritual. When you sit and listen to a string vibrate for that long, it's like meditation or a chant," Forlano says. "That led me to making music that was a lot more than I was doing before, where I was just overlaying lots of track. I got into resonance and vibration."

When a girlfriend gave Forlano a tabla—an Indian hand drum—for Christmas, Forlano started taking classical tabla lessons from Lenny Seidman, who asked him to be part of a show at the Painted Bride Art Center. The performance featured dancers, Kawai among them. Forlano was turned on by her passion for dance. She was attracted to his "sweetly magnetic" eyes. During a friendly post-rehearsal dinner the pair got to talking about their earlier days as painters. Kawai later asked Forlano to accompany her for a new piece she was working on. Soon they were collaborators as well as a couple.

Kawai encouraged Forlano to venture into movement theater. "He's very physical," she notes. "He was the captain of his swim team in high school, so he's got great head-to-tail connection and his shoulders are really loose."

The new piece debuting at the CEC this weekend represents the first time Forlano is choreographing Kawai. Titled Footprint/Songline, it's designed to unfold in organic fashion. "It's an abstract narrative of a timeline of sequential events that goes from one place to another. My idea with this performance is to not offer answers but to give curiosities… So each person can take it to their own level and make it valuable in their own terms."

As the title suggests, the piece takes inspiration from the cosmology of Australian aborigines. "They have the idea that there's no separation between individual, animal and community. Whereas in our world I feel we have way too many systems that categorize or separate."

For David Forlano, who easily moves between so many worlds, it's a world view that makes a lot of sense.

Footprint/Songline, Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Ave., Fri. and Sat., Dec. 18 and 19, 8 p.m. (215) 387-1911.