Wed 7 Feb 2007
The brilliant (and twisted) Real Ben Brown sent me this fantastic video of a dance interpretation of protein synthesis carried out with hundreds of students on a football field in 1971. It’s narrated by Nobel laureate Paul Berg and check out that sound track! All kinds of awesome.
Fri 17 Mar 2006
(Sorry for not writing about this before it happened… too busy making it happen!)
The ITP-Dance performance at the NYU Tisch Graduate Student Organization Spring Festival was a success! Last few days have been even more hectic than usual, so only writing about it now.
Our theme is the city and this piece explores the idea of crowds, compression/decompression and repetition. The inspiration comes from the New York subway experience. The setting (Kimmel Center) was great, with a massive projection screen behind the dancers.
Here is our rough cut video (9MB .mov).
One issue I’ve been struggling with when combining dance and video is where the audience should direct their attention. There is definitely the tendency to switch back and forth between the dancers and video. I find the ending the most satisfying, in part because of the contrast between the stillness on the stage and the frenetic video.
We’re not sure what our next step will be yet. We’re taking a short break then setting our next target!
Tue 21 Feb 2006
The ITP-Dance collaboration will be presenting a short piece at the TISCH GSO Spring Festival on March 7, 2006, at the Eisner and Lubin Auditorium of the Kimmel Center. It’s a stretch for us to put something together for an event so soon (and during midterms), but it’s happening! Check out the first part of the choreography (.mov).
Mon 30 Jan 2006
The first blog post from the ITP/Dance collaboration is up. It has videos of the dancers improvising with video pieces that Leif and I did. Leif’s is used in Time and Hands, and mine is used in the Subway videos. We’re still very alpha at this stage, but even from this second meeting it’s clear that this will be a great collaboration.
Our final piece will deal with the theme of The City and ideas like compression/decompression, crowds, public/private space and so on. What’s great is that everyone is approaching it with the goal of making everything integrated with the theme (no eye candy for eye candy’s sake, and choreography done in coordination with the technology). We techies set up our video toys, the dancers improvised and Chrisanty got all of us to participate in some dance exercises. Pollie has wonderfully volunteered to document and the videos of work in progress will help us keep up the momentum that’s already building.