Light Art Dance Project Rehearsals

LIGHT ART DANCE is a project group that together with Jürgen and Grit and the lovely dancers of my contemporary class at Westside Studio have been working on.

It’s been an interesting process this time. It’s the second project we have done together so there is quite a bit of familiarity yet also expansion in what we are doing. The first project we did together it felt personally quite calculated. I’d never worked with these people before and working with amateur dancers is always a different process to working with professionals. Yet the scenes that I created and choreographed had clear distinct ideas with my usual quirkiness. It was very much a potpourri of ideas that mixed together to create an entertaining evening. Though the ideas were new, they drew on past experiences and were put together with moments that I was quite certain would work. The challenge was also the integration of the projection art, but the novel idea of using a gallery window to project onto and having the dancers enter and exit from this “Haunted House” created a great illusion and helped keep the two art forms interacting. The biggest challenge then was to get the dance and the projection timed together so that they enhanced each other. It took time but was well worth the effort and experience.

Now we have come to a second project! This time we are indoors, but not in a traditional theatre. The thing that I found most interesting in the first time was the space in which we performed… a square with the gallery window facing out into it. The audience was positioned at the end of the square and because of a slight slope we had rows of benches to give everyone a great view. This time we are in a church hall. It has a balcony at one end and a white wall at the other. The length of the hall creates a fascinating space… 10m wide but 24m long. My initial instinct was to seat the audience at one end and have the performance at the other. But it seemed to presented and direct. There is always more to a space than the obvious use. Being that it is a church hall it reminded me of my time in my childhood that I attended mass, when the church was full. Being in the shape of the cross we were most often looking at the priest and celebration side on. This idea of different perspectives stuck with me. So the idea came to position the projection at one end like an altar and have the audience on both side along the length of the room. The two sides naturally see each other and the dance is in the middle. It has a bit of the performing “in the round” feel and I am very interested in the reaction of the experience. The idea is to bring the audience closer to the dancers and to take away the 4th wall idea that a traditional theatre presents. This lends itself to modern dance too as there is the philosophy that we don’t perform explicitly to someone (one directional) rather the performance is observed (multi directional).

More to come….

For further information, see the project page here.