Dance & projection at UC East Bay

Last week, Kristin and I went down to UC East Bay, to present a piece Kristin has been choreographing with some UNR students, and a projection of some animation/dance work we'd done in the past. It was presented to a couple classes, one taught by Eric Kupers and one by Kimiko Guthrie (outside of teaching, they're the artistic directors of Dandelion Dancetheater. They had a successful run of a show in New York last summer, even snagging a review in the NY Times, which was one of the summer's little thrills -- it was nice to see pictures of folks I'd worked with, reproduced in an official capacity under that stately "New York Times" header font.)



Babs put together a portable "nest," derived from the one she constructed out behind the art building, that was used as a piece of sculptural stage-setting. The dancers were Mandy Albert, Nicole da Roza, Teryn Jackson, and Daniel Miller. Nicole also edited together a projection of stills, taken from prior performances and in staged settings, which added to the dreamy atmosphere of the thing; the title of the live piece was "Dreaming in Black and White."


We got some good questions from Eric's class, kicking around the differences between projected work and live performance. Here are a few pics; a few of them have bigger versions, and look the better for it, so click on through for the full effect.

Nesting

Back in 2008 I did a brief blog post about "The Nest," a structure Babs Laukat put together for the New Genres class; the nest still stands, though winter (and probably other forces) have removed the light fixture and the strands of twine. Kristin has been talking to Babs about staging a performance in the Nest; earlier today, Kristin worked with Teryn Jackson, a dance student at UNR, on working out some movement for the space. Sometimes a place just calls out for an activity. Teryn was very game, playing out suggestions from Kristin, me, Babs, and Bab's brother, Daniel. By the end she was covered in strips of bark and bits of wood; we gave her a little round of applause. Here are some pics:

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.