highlike

Vitor Freire

Projeto IJO
FILE SAO PAULO 2015 FILE LED SHOW
“IJO” means dance in Yoruba. The project was born inside a series of actions with the objective of reframing the place of dance and a re-appropriation of the public spaces. Adapted to FILE FESTIVAL, the project unfolds its initial ambition, painting the walls and buildings of the city with dancing. By positioning themselves in front of “IJO”, the participants will have a visual representation of their bodies exhibited in real time on the FIESP building. Dance to tell who you are.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM

简宁汉
מרס קנינגהם
マース·カニングハム
머시 디스 커닝햄
dance
Мерс Каннингем
Paul Kaiser
Shelley Eshkar

Dancer Matthieu Chayrigues

Compagnie Centre National de Danse Contemporaine-Angers.

Photo: Charlotte Audureau.
BIPED

“Ever the experimentalist, Cunningham collaborated with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar using motion capture technology to create BIPED. As the name suggests it’s in its most basic sense an exploration of the biped, the ambulatory two-legged body.
Eshkar and Kaiser place a scrim in front of the dancers on which they project a moving décor of lines and patterns.” Lisa Traiger

Hussein Chalayan

フセイン·チャラヤン
ЧАЛАЯН
후세인 샬 라얀
Gravity Fatigue

Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan has created elasticated costumes and sequinned garments for performers in his first self-directed dance production (+ slideshow).The production is split into 18 chapters that each explore themes of identity, displacement and invisibility.

Maria Guta and Adrian Ganea

Cyberia

Performance & live computer generated simulation

A postmodern fairytale, Cyberia takes place somewhere in a cold distant East, stretching between and endless imaginary realm and a vast physical space. It is a westwards journey towards a promised future with no arrival and no return. There is no here or there, only a twilight zone between a departure point and a simulated destination. Between digital video projections and a physical setting, using the mechanics of a video-game engine with a motion capture suit, Cyberia is the simulation of an endless pre-climax state where a performer and a CG avatar dance as one to the rhythms of an imaginary West. In a world oversaturated by digital data –mysticism and paranormal are as popular as ever. Emerging technologies are increasingly incorporated in a form of postmodern spiritualism, as Arthur C. Clarke points out: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Louis-Philippe Demers

Repeat
In the midst of the promises and fears surrounding robots and Artificial Intelligence, especially in the manual labour sector, Repeat attempts to imagine the illusory dance moves of the so-called augmented body tainted with the gender stereotypes of human ballet duets. Repeat shifts the performing body of the assembly line into the performing body onstage, unceasingly carrying out its tasks. The body meshed with the industrial exoskeleton tolerates and sustains strenuous tasks but ironically, it enables those actions to be repeated even more. Repeat uses passive industrial exoskeletons that are currently deployed in the workplace. This ain’t no fiction, this is the future promised to the human worker.

Sanja Marusic

Dutch-Croatian photographer Sanja Marušić uses an experimental approach to colour, composition, materials, and manipulations in her work to create dreamlike scenes that are at once cinematic and alienating.She travels the world in her production of these otherworldly images, finding settings and forms that play with our relation to the subconscious, simplifying the bodies of her subjects with geometric shapes, and abstracting the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements.Putting places above people, many of Sanja’s photographs are set in wide open futuristic spaces in an attempt to create surreal and alienating visual emotions. She often uses cool and bright colours as well as singular objects and accessories in order to create unique and enigmatic narratives.

ILANIO

Deva:Alpha

Deva: Alpha was a series of five live performances blending dance, performance art, music, and concept fashion. The goal of the project was to explore a hypothetical fashion language, one unencumbered by the historical functions and cultural signifiers of fashion as we know it. The peformances were highly improvisational, with a distinct theme for each one, along with distinct live musicians and choreography. Deva: Alpha took place over three days, and was performed in San Francisco.

Daito Manabe

真鍋 大 度
Perfume

Perfume is Japan’s top techno-pop girl trio – Nocchi, Kashiyuka and Aa-Chan – whose music and synchronised dance sessions have won them a global online fan base. This year they have had their first sellout European tour. Their distinctive sound is the work of Japanese electronic music guru Yasatuka Nakata who has been their music producer since 2003. Their stunning performance at the Lions International Festival of Creativity at Cannes recently was the result of their collaboration with leading Japanese techno-artist Daito Manabe. Manabe is one of a new generation of programmers whose genre-crossing work has placed him at the cutting edge of techno-art-music-performance. His art embraces dynamic sensory programming, projection mapping and body capture; lasers, robots and sonar.

ANGELIKA LODERER

Angelika Loderers work is refering to the basic research of form and space. She uses fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and combine them with sort of traditional sculptural techniques. In the process the play between chance and control defines the aesthetics of her work. The experimenting with attidudes – via a very specific amalgam of materials, shapes and objects- brings forth a new, metaphysical result. “In transience, fragility and decline, I see the formal expressions to which I refer in my designs, and which to some extent provide the framework conditions for my processoriented work. From the abundance on offer, however fragile and vulnerable in composition, the elements fall into place, becoming worthless once again when dismantled.”

Mary Ellen Strom

Nude No 5
Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar

Mary Ellen Strom’s works unearth submerged narratives in the environment, history, and in cultural discourse. Working primarily in video, Strom uses the language(s) of drawing, painting, sculpture, and dance. These media are used to generate an embodied understanding of place by utilizing movement, signs, and metaphors.

Merce Cunningham and Olafur Eliasson

he Merce Cunningham performances, the final events of Dance Umbrella’s 25th Anniversary season and co-incidentally in MCDC’s 50th year, took place in the vast, 152 meter long Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern within the embracing environment of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project.

Peter Jones

colourscape
Colourscape is a large labyrinth of colour and light. It’s a sculpture of pure colour that the public actually go inside. Everyone puts on a coloured cape to become part of the colour experience and enters into a new world where one can freely explore the potentials of light, colour and space. There’s also music, dance and theatre taking place inside. Originally created by artist Peter Jones in the early 70s, Colourscape is a walk-in structure of nearly 100 interlinked chambers.

Anna Halprin

Parades & Changes
Parades & Changes, replays is a full scale re-creation of the masterpiece Parades & Changes, a major 1965 work of American postmodern dance legend Anna Halprin. The provocative Parades & Changes, Halprin’s first “collective creation” dynamited the codes dominating dance by exposing the process of performance: improvising around several “scores,” dancers dress and undress, inventing gestures and vanishing naked in rolls of skin colored paper. This “ceremony of trust,” as it was named by Halprin, seeks to utilize dance as a medium for being together: her prolific composition addresses the process, the place, the action, and the performer as both unique and corresponding entities.

ROBERT WILSON, WILLIAM BURROUGHS AND TOM WAITS

The Black Rider
The Black Rider is in twelve parts and a prologue. I had the idea that there would be indoor and outdoor scenes, man-made and natural environments, and that the scenes would alternate. I made a prologue to introduce the company. It begins with a black box standing up. The devil and the entire company come out of the box until they all stand in a line in front of the stage, as in a circus where all artists are introduced at the beginning. Then the devil sings a song: “Come on along with the Black Rider, we’ll have a gay old time. Take off your skin and dance around in your bones. I’ll drink your blood like wine. Come on along with the Black Rider, we’ll have a gay old time…” Anyways, the audience gets a certain idea what the piece is going to be like. Then the characters disappear and the black box gets bigger and bigger, until the whole stage is engulfed in this black spot. The first scene takes place in the interior of a room, with an old family portrait on the back wall – played by an actor.

WAYNE MCGREGOR

واين ماكغريغور
韦恩·麦格雷戈
웨인 맥그리거
ויין מקגרגור
ウェイン·マクレガー
Уэйн МакГрегор
rAndom International
FAR
Wayne McGregor’s anatomy-defying choreography and ground-breaking approach across dance, science, film, music, visual art and technology has fuelled a string of truly unique works. FAR is no exception. Inspired by the controversial Age of Enlightenment, FAR mines an era that first placed ‘a body in question’. Ten incredible dancers confront the distortions, sensuality and feeling of the 18th Century‘s searing contemporary sensibility to a haunting score by the critically-acclaimed composer Ben Frost. Staged in a mesmerizing environment of shadow and light (rAndom International, Lucy Carter), object and film (Moritz Junge, Ravi Deepres), FAR binds cutting edge design with choreography made from a radical cognitive research process.

POTLATCH

Gretchen at the Potlatch Feast

“Potlatch is a festive event within a regional exchange system among tribes of the North pacific Coast of North America, including the Salish and Kwakiutl of Washington and British Columbia.”
The potlatch takes the form of governance, economy, social status and continuing spiritual practices. A potlatch, usually involving ceremony, includes celebration of births, rites of passages, weddings, funerals, puberty,and honoring of the deceased. Through political, economic and social exchange, it is a vital part of these Indigenous people’s culture. Although protocol differs among the Indigenous nations, the potlatch could involve a feast, with music, dance, theatricality and spiritual ceremonies. The most sacred ceremonies are usually observed in the winter.
Within it, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. Status of families are raised by those who do not have the most resources, but distribute the resources. The host demonstrates their wealth and prominence through giving away the resources gathered for the event, which in turn prominent participants reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, gifts included storable food (oolichan [candle fish] oil or dried food), canoes, and slaves among the very wealthy, but otherwise not income-generating assets such as resource rights. The influx of manufactured trade goods such as blankets and sheet copper into the Pacific Northwest caused inflation in the potlatch in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Some groups, such as the Kwakwaka’wakw, used the potlatch as an arena in which highly competitive contests of status took place. In rare cases, goods were actually destroyed after being received. The catastrophic mortalities due to introduced diseases laid many inherited ranks vacant or open to remote or dubious claim—providing they could be validated—with a suitable potlatch.
Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called “coppers”, and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. To give a potlatch enhanced one’s reputation and validated social rank, the rank and requisite potlatch being proportional, both for the host and for the recipients by the gifts exchanged. Prestige increased with the lavishness of the potlatch, the value of the goods given away in it.