MORTAL ENGINE

source: poptechorg

Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek of Chunky Move showed a brief sequence of his choreography, which included dances that looked like giant spiders scuttling across the stage, the illusion of rose petals blowing across prone dancers and intertwined bodies bathed in pulsating, monochromatic shards and shafts of light.

Obarzanek has become increasingly interested in using projectors as part of his pieces. He realized that he didn’t like the confines of using pre-rendered images (which forced dancers to be in specific places at specifics times), so he worked with a software engineer to create a program that takes information from a moving body and use algorithms to create new images based on their movements. Obarzanek would then project that back onto the dancers, allowing for a more organic form of expression, illustrating what Obarzanek describes as their “creature part”.

In this way, light because its own entity in the show. It’s as if, Obarzanek said, he is choreographing with light. This, combined with noise and feedback, allows his team to create something truly unique.
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source: theyellowagency
Gideon became interested in dance towards the end of high school and after graduating deferred science at university to study at the Australian Ballet School. He later danced with the Queensland Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company before working as an independent performer and choreographer with various dance companies and independent projects within Australia and abroad.

Gideon founded Chunky Move in 1995 and was the company’s Artistic Director until 2012. His works for Chunky Move have been diverse in form and content including stage productions, installations, site-specific works and film. Gideon’s works have been performed in many festivals and theatres around the world in the U.K, Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Gideon’s film, DANCE LIKE YOUR OLD MAN, co-directed with Edwina Throsby, won best short documentary at the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival, 2008 Flickerfest International Film Festival and the 2008 Cinedans Film Festival in Amsterstam. In collaboration with Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor, Gideon has also received a New York Bessie award for outstanding choreography and creation for Chunky Move’s production of TENSE DAVE. In 2008 he received two Australian Helpmann Awards for GLOW and MORTAL ENGINE.

In 2012, Gideon created a new work for The Australian Ballet’s 50th anniversary season. THERE’S DEFINITELY A PRINCE INVOLVED meshed classical and contemporary dance with documentary-style commentaries to popular and critical acclaim.

In the same year, Gideon was also an Associate Artist of The Sydney Theatre Company. He wrote and directed a new play, DANCE BETTER AT PARTIES for their 2013 season. With filmmaker, Mathew Bate, Gideon will also co-direct a documentary/drama film of the same work to premier at the Adelaide Film Festival and broadcast on ABC Television.

Most recently, Gideon was awarded a prestigious Creative Australia Fellowship to further research with other film, dance and theatre makers, new works that would be simultaneously created for both stage and screen.
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source: bombaklakvjfrance

Mortal Engine est une danse vidéo laser. Le corps humain devient lumière, changeant de couleur au gré de l’histoire. Les limites du corps humain sont illusion, la cinétique de l’intérieur, un échange avec la lumière et la vidéo dans un constant etat en devenir.
Primé au festival de Sydney et Edimbourg cette production signale tout de même au début du spectacle qu’elle contient des lumières stroboscopiques, un son très fort, des lasers, de la fumée et des scènes de nudité.

” In Mortal Engine, the limits of the human body are an illusion. Emanating from within, crackling light and staining shadows represent the most perfect or sinister of souls. Drawing on the kinetics of the interior, enveloping lasers and movement responsive video projections paint an ever-shifting shimmering world. Within this visually spinning, humming and oozing environment , dancers fluidly exchange and combine form with light around them in a constant state of becoming. Witnessing moments of exquisite cosmological perfection, or grotesque evolutionary accidents of existence, we are ceaselessly driven forwards by the reality of permanent change.”
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source: chunkymove

A NOTE FROM GIDEON OBARZANEK

As a development from the original solo GLOW, Mortal Engine looks at relationships, connection and disconnection, isolation and togetherness, in a state of continual flux. Conflicts between the self and shadowy other – the other within as well as the other as the other. Duets are seen as both couples and as singular selves struggling to escape inner darkness – mortality, sexuality, desire.

Soft, expressive sounds are dangerously tensioned between abrasive noise disturbances in Ben Frost’s music. At times delicate beauty can emerge from intense sonic harshness while seductive tones threaten to disintegrate into dark clouds of rumbling distortion

Robin Fox’s laser and video images have a brutal and direct relationship to the sound they illustrate and when experienced exclusively, their connection with dance is not immediately apparent. When fed information of the dancers’ movements however, they become a powerful extension to the performers’ bodies and their own capacity for explosive brute force or controlled subtlety.

Created by a team of individual artists, the aesthetic/kinetic world of Mortal Engine is pulled together through the computer engineering of Frieder Weiss. As an engineer he often claims that he has no aesthetic position on the productions he is involved with, however his unique software distinguishes all his work in a very powerful way. Frieder’s interactive systems make it possible for instruments and bodies that generate light, video, sound and movement to all share a common language and respond to each other in real time. Mortal Engine has no pre-rendered video, light or laser images. Similarly the music mix is open allowing various sounds to be completely generated from movement data. In addition, pre-composed phrases are triggered by the dancers’ motion or by the operator in relation to where the performers are in any given sequence. This essentially means that there are no fixed timelines and the production flexes according to the rhythm of the performers. While the scenes are always in the same order, the work is truly live every night, not completely predictable and ever changing.

I would like to thank Reka Szabo and The Symptoms who I worked with in Budapest for a short but intense period of time. In teaching a workshop involving similar technology at the beginning of their rehearsal period for Nothing There, shared themes emerged and also differences that helped me clarify my ideas and directions for Mortal Engine. Any possible similarity with elements of our work is no coincidence.

All Chunky Move productions demand great effort from a large group of people and Mortal Engine is no exception. I am very fortunate to be able to create work with an excellent producing, technical and artistic team within the company and outside. It would not be possible to achieve these works without their great personal initiative and generous collaborative spirit.

Thank you.