ITP THESIS PROJECT IN COLLABORATION WITH TISCH DANCE
ABSTRACT >> The goal of this thesis is to experiment with new processes of creating choreography. It is targeted at challenging traditional practices of making performance by introducing interactive Video-scapes and 3-D environments as playgrounds in which to explore new forms of performative ‘events’. The project of this thesis is making a 15-to-20-minutes worth of choreography that will emerges from live improvisation of the dancers in such interactive environments. Video-tracking and wireless sensor suit will track the dancers and manipulate the projected image in real-time.
PERSONAL STATEMENT >> I am working towards creating a new type of dance studio. A dance studio that’s technologically responsive to the dancers; where dancers interact with the live and pre-made videos and sound Where dancers trigger different videos, affect sound control the playing rate of the video and manipulate the images simply by moving. I’m attempting to make a tool for changing existing choreographic practices by introducing the notion of rehearsing and composing in and for (rather than just performing in) the interactive environment and discovering the new choreographies that can emerge from that. In a sense, building a playground for dancers and choreographers to work in.
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<< Prototype testing >> 4 parallel video strips designed to be triggered and controlled by four live dancers (here triggered by a hand and a cable jack moving in front of a webcam). |
DANCE >> VIDEO-ART >> VIDEO-DANCE >> PERFORMANCE-ART >> NEW MEDIA >> Starting from dance, most work involving dance and video done up until now corresponds with the old paradigm of image versus background. Descending from the iconographic tradition of Western art and more specifically from that of 17th century's great ballets and operas, video is used as the backdrop that helps situate and contextualize the main spatial and textual event occurring on stage - that of live performance. It serves as an epistemological inventory of symbols and references that, when successful, can create a dialectical relationship between the image and the background. Most often then not that background is pre-determined - "canned" (At most the performer will get to refer to it during the show). While La la la Human Steps and Wim Vandekeybus use video as interludes between dance segments,
In video art the situation is somewhat reversed. Artists such as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Bill Viola have integrated performance into their videos. In most such cases the result of renedring live performance as video tends to homogenizes the two, creating a 'flat' video that contains fossilized perfromance. Thirdly came a genre that creates dance specifically for the camera. At its core lies the possibility of investigating movement through editing, mainly digital. Close-ups, new angles, montaging, collaging, repitition, playing with speed etc. have all contributed to a new understanding of the infinite richness of dance as raw material, but have also gone in the fossilzing direction of video-art and have re-incorporated that material into narrative structures of film (DV8, Wim Wandekeybus, Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia).
he video artist will work in a seperate space on making the video and there will be minimal implication between the two until the actual show. In order for performers to truly explore video they need have it present in the rehearsal process, the need to work with it.
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<< dance studio
video/VR studio >> |
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DANCE AND TECHNOLOGY >> Palindrom, Troika Ranch, Merce Cunningham
THE PROCESS >> Over the course of the past months we have been improvising with the system that is a video camera, Jitter patch and a video projector.
