Hapless Hooligan: Dance & Animation

This is right up my alley -- a collaboration between artists I've admired for a while. Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel about the Holocaust, "Maus," really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the medium, has worked with the dance group Pilobolus (who I most recently caught at Artown last year) to create a blend of drawing and dance. The show is called "Hapless Hooligan," and I'd love to get a chance to see it.


Spiegelman did a strip on the collaboration for the New York Times, here (Spiegelman is proud to be a philistine, but calling "The Red Shoes" dull is a bit much):

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/11/arts/dance/SPIEGELMANWEB.html

And here's a preview of the process, below. I worked with Element Dance Theater several years ago to create a blend of dance and animation, called "Zoetrope" -- the dancers interacted with animation that was created to specifically play off the dancers themselves, and they also did some shadow-play with an old Betty Boop cartoon. I really identify with the push-and-pull between stasis and movement, and the particularly ephemeral qualities of dance that Spiegelman talks about in the interview.