Londonist does dance film festival

Constellation Change Film Festival is on this week! Read about it here.

Sensual information overload

Quartet
Musical Moves: a real time exploration that plays across the sense of the human body
The Great Hall at Barts, Saturday 17 February 2007

The project behind this performance is practically inexplicable and all the bumpf that I’d read in order to preview the event had not prepared me at all. In fact, the person who introduced the work at the start was far more helpful in saying that the project purpose was to develop two “interactive performance systems”. With this in mind it was possible to watch Quartet as a demonstration of the impressive technologies in development but it’s far from being an evening of entertainment or even any kind of art at this stage.

The presentation was split into duets, trios and ensemble pieces involving a live musician, a live dancer, a robot camera and a virtual dancer projected onto a screen. The humans were strapped up with various sensors that transmitted movement and sound information to the insensate participants and the sound system. The technology involved is baffling but at times it was possible to see the movement of the musician’s arm creating, at one point, a cacophony of electro bleeps and fuzz and then, influencing the movement of the virtual dancer (billed rather beautifully as an avatar of sensual information” but looking like an unfinished, undressed character in Second Life who hasn’t yet learned to walk properly). Equally, the live dancer performed some simple duets with the robot camera, whose design was evidently based on the adorable Johnny 5, which were at their best when she interacted with it, weaving around its moving limbs and staring soulfully into its camera eye, the images from which were projected onto the backdrop.

Disappointingly, the involvement of the choreographers, including Russell Maliphant and Lea Anderson, is not much in evidence but then it’s not about the choreography in itself but the interaction of the all the elements and there’s only so much a motion control robot camera can do without arms and legs.

The sound was element was stunning, although the electronic noise generated by the violinist and her arm was, at times, uncomfortable and alarming. I was sat next to an elderly lady with fruitcake breath and felt quite sorry for her; her breathing was getting short and I feared she was going to have a panic attack. Such an electronic sensory assault is possibly not what I’d recommend bringing your ageing mum too. However, the vocal section was hauntingly beautiful, the singer’s sounds being transmitted as her own backing track and pinging about the Great Hall in an amazing way.

In the feedback questionnaire (this is a research project, remember) I clearly ticked the box that described the performance as science, rather than art, dance or entertainment but it definitely engaged me cerebrally and the spoddery underpinning it all is intriguing. The potential for choreographers and musicians to use these systems is huge and I particularly like the robot camera eye view of the stage and the audience; it’s easy to forget how implicated an audience is in a performance. But I’ll be looking forward to the next stage of development rather than wanting to sit through this again.

Find out more about the Quartet Project here.

Londonist does dance

See here. And I got given a free ticket to the Saturday performance so I’ll be reviewing Quartet too. Huzzah!