Performatica: Performance

Here's some video and video caps of the performance. We had a disastrous tech -- a lift that crumpled, and the video wasn't working for the first 2/3 of the run-through. But the performance itself went fairly smoothly. The video wasn't really set up to capture the performance -- it's actually the video I was shooting to provide the live feed for the projection. It's very vertigo-inducing to shoot; I have to look at the projection itself to orient myself to the bodies of the performers.

Performatica: Day 1

Here are some pics from our first full day at the festival. These are from the tech rehearsal. The show itself was at the Teatro Complejo Cultural, a really terrific space at the Complejo Cultural Universitario. The other dancers in the pics are Megan Harrold, Chung-Fu Chang, Christina Mullenmeister, Cari Cunningham, and Susan Rieger's company.

Rehearsals for Mirrors

Monday, I'm leaving for Puebla, Mexico, to participate in the PERFORMÁTICA festival. Kristin and I are staging a dance/multimedia piece called "The Mirror Has Six Billion Faces," which will be danced by Cari Cunningham and Rick Southerland. There's a brief article about the piece in the UNR Nevada News.


The piece was inspired by an article in the New York Review of Books, which discusses, among other things, the recent discovery of "mirror neurons":

The importance of body image and motor activity for perception, physical movement, and thought is suggested by the recent discovery of "mirror neurons" by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues. They observed that the neurons that fired when a monkey grasped an object also fired when the monkey watched a scientist grasp the same object. The monkey apparently understood the action of the experimenter because the activity within its brain was similar when the monkey was observing the experimenter and when the monkey was grasping the object. What was surprising was that the same neurons that produced "motor actions," i.e., actions involving muscular movement, were active when the monkey was perceiving those actions performed by others.

The "rigid divide," Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia write in their new book, Mirrors in the Brain,

between perceptive, motor, and cognitive processes is to a great extent artificial; not only does perception appear to be embedded in the dynamics of action, becoming much more composite than used to be thought in the past, but the acting brain is also and above all a brain that understands.

We can recognize and understand the actions of others because of the mirror neurons; as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write, this understanding "depends first of all on our motor neurons."[5] Our abilities to understand and react to the emotions of others may depend on the brain's ability to imitate the neuronal activity of the individual being observed.

These are some photos from an early rehearsal. Some of the work was developed through exercises where the dancers mirrored each others' movements. It was a strangely intense experience for them. Particularly in the beginning, they were sensitive to moments where one person seemed to be "leading" the mirroring activity, and their subjectivity seemed to be spilling over the mirror line. Hopefully some of those destabilizing qualities will be activated by the finished piece.




The rehearsals, at UNR, took place in an appropriately mirrored studio. Three walls (and even the plate for the light switch) are mirrored, providing melting glimpses of infinitude.

Mirror Scrap

It was interesting to see Mickey's disturbingly symmetrical portraits in the Junior Art Portfolio (see some of the pics in the blog post below) -- I've been playing around with some symmetrical concepts for a multimedia/dance performance piece I'll be staging in Puebla, Mexico in about a week, with Kristin as artistic collaborator and Cari Cunningham and Rick Southerland as the dancers. Above is a 5-sec clip of me playing with some live feed interlacing of video; the performance will include both live and pre-recorded clips that will fracture and combine the dancers' bodies.

Loosening up

Just prior to starting a big drawing project, I caught a performance by the talented local choreographer and UNR Dance Prof Cari Cunningham. Her company performed three pieces at the Urban Market in downtown Reno -- the event was sponsored by the Holland Project. I was itching to get a few drawings out of my hand, since it'd been a couple weeks since I'd put pen to paper -- the only drawing surface I had at my disposal was a flyer for Coconut Body Butter. When I got home I laid some marker over the pen doodles of the dancers -- I like the way the color blobbed up on the slick flyer surface. The color is in a permanent state of smudgeability -- I have a suspicion that if I run my finger over it a year from now, the colors will slide off the page like an oil slick.

There's a photo set of the three performances at the Holland Project's flickr page, from which the below photo is taken: