Body Automatic
A technologically Mediated Installation
Theatre & Dance Performance Event
Dance Repertory Theatre& Sharir + Bustamante Dance Works
Department of Theatre and Dance
College of Fine Arts
University of Texas at Austin
Spring 2001
Yacov Sharir Project/Event/Festival Coordinator and DRT Artistic Director
Body Resistant/Body Automatic is a technologically mediated Event/Festival/Installation with a main focus of allowing all supervisors/creators and students attending these courses to engaged in an exploratory/collaborative and participatory experience within a high-performance interactive dance and dramaturgy environment. The process of learning will be emphasized in addition to new and interactive technologies that can support and enhance an installation and an interactive event in an alternative performance environment (the Theatre Room).
This event will include the following Department of Theatre and Dance courses:
The event/festival will involve the following dance companies and guests artists: UT Dance Repertory Theatre, Random Dance Company from London, and The Sharir+Bustamante Dance Works from Austin. Faculty members will include the following: Professor Amarante Lucero, Assistant Professor Jeffery Bullock, and Assistant Professor Ruth Margraff from the Department of Theatre and Dance. Composer Larisa Montanaro from the School of Music, associate professor Margo Sawyer from the Department of Art, Jose Luis Bustamante Co-Artistic Director of Sharir+Bustamante Dance Work and Wayne McGregor Artistic Director of Random dance Company.
Abstract:
The "Automated Body" is a proposed project designed to provide the Department of Theatre and Dance with the opportunity to explore, collaborate and cross the path from choreography, design and technology to the transdisciplinary development of ideas and innovative strategies leading to the creation of a new interactive work. The exploratory process will rely on the development of a new libretto attempting to identify key questions and issues related to topography, corporeality, temporality, and enhancements of these issues with the use of new technologies in performance/installation/event. All collaborators contributors are set to examine the consequences of these convergence including the artistic, scientific, technological and the affects of these convergence's on our ways of working and learning as a community.
Additionally, these experiences are set to call into question fundamental perceptions of space, time, embodiment, and identity, the building blocks of how we cognitively construct or visualize the performance world in which we operate. These experiences can be powerfully affective to the learning participant and ultimately to the performer. If virtual realities of increasingly immersive power are to be used in the classroom, and in performance, an understanding of these subjective human experiences needs to be factored into the design and the creative process. This analysis steps outside of a dance performance experience as aesthetic object per se and examines it a greater context whose subject is the interaction of the virtual (the perceived) environments and the real (the physical) as categories by which we organize and describe experience. The performance experience is first created both in real-time and pre-organized by the visible interaction of human and cyber-dancers/performers/actors in a laboratory/classroom set-up. It is then transported as an abstract and elusive category modeled in the multi-sensory modalities of a theatrical alternative performance space where visual, sonic, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive elements are illuminated.
Project Description:
I am proposing to create a technologically mediated full-length work for DRT that will function as an installation during the day and as a performance festival environment during the evenings. The work/installation centers on technological-mediation and interaction between the physical dancers/actors and computer-generated cyber personalities and performers. Real and virtual worlds experienced through multiple projection systems will be blended and simultaneously experienced, distinguishing the systems used from a full immersion using VR technologies where the visual input of the immersant is wholly and algorithmically generated.
Ruth Margraff in collaboration with her students will generate an original libretto for the work, computer generated cyberhuman dancers and video images depicting from the libretto will be produced. A large translucent centerpiece structure made of nine individual cubes will be suspended from the ceiling at the center of the Theatre Room. Three large projection screens will be placed in several strategic locations inside the Theatre attempting to reconfigure and redefine the performance space. Computer generated cyberhuman dancers, digitally manipulated video captures and video images of the physical dancers will be projected on to the centerpiece and on to the screens located on each wall. A shared mutual performance space will be occupied by both physical and cyberhuman dancers via the use of an added translucent scrim, thus creating the illusion of perceived, virtual and real performance spaces. As the work unfolds physical dancers and cyberhuman dancers will interact, eventually creating the illusion of blurred and perceived boundaries.
Although the work is technologically mediated, emphasis will focus on issues related to content, high physicality, and the emotional energies it elicits. Movement material will be generated in many different ways, some of which will be videotaped in several remote sites and others from selected local areas. These areas will be selected for their local significance and unique characteristics. The physical dancers will rehearse and perform the movement material in the selected outdoor locations. This material will then be captured on a videocamera, manipulated digitally on a computer and then projected on large screens. I am particularly interested in the different performing qualities arising from the same movement material generated in several outdoor locations and performed indoors in real time mixed in a computerized environment.
The space:
I am proposing that this event/festival will be considered the last event of the Department of Theatre and Dance season for the academic year 2000.
I am requesting the use of the Theatre Room for the duration of ten days at the end of the fall period 2000, and for one month at the end of the spring semester of 2001.
It is important that we consider two phases for the creation of the event/festival. Phase one (development) will be conducted and developed in the classrooms between attendees and faculty creators through conversations and coordination efforts. During this phase the libretto and content materials will be developed. A minimum support informance/demonstration by all course participants and faculty creators will bring to a conclusion the developmental period.
Phase two, (construction) will consist of an augmented level of rehearsals, manipulation of digital images and the creation of all interactive elements (the multiple sensory systems.) Four weeks of uninterrupted use of the facility will provide attendees and creators with the opportunity to test, mount the installation (physical and virtual,) conduct projection trials, construct and mount the physical set (central piece.)
I see "Body Resistant/Body Automatic" serving as a first of such event ever conducted in an academic set-up. Additionally, it could open the door for other Theatre and Dance faculty to participate in the scholarship and discourse related to issues involving the use of interactive technologies in a learning and performance environment.
Performance:
Length, not to exceed one hour and thirty minutes. The full-length work will feature a the internationally acclaimed award wining Random Dance Company of London and the Sharir +Bustamante dance Works
Fees for guest Artists: Sharir + Bustamante Dance Works
