e-Dance project

Views from an outsider:

“Date: Friday 18th January 2008, 3pm- 5pm Venue: stage@leeds, School of Performance & Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT.

This event marks the culmination of 18 months of collaborative practice-led research between performance academics in the School of Performance & Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, and digital technologists from KMA Creative Technology Ltd. The afternoon will consist of performance-demonstrations, presentations and discussion of the work undertaken in this project. We would welcome your contribution to the evaluation of our research. Refreshments will be provided afterwards. “

Sita Popat and Scott Palmer, from Leeds, presented an involving final part of the AHRC project involving an open session with questions and comments. Demos showed examples of the live and mixed projection (‘sprites’ in various forms) within the performance space – creating new positions of the operator to be within and possibly on, the stage. This blended the boundary from operator to dancer; and the space they occupied.

From demos a couple of personal thoughts;

• Sprites were all projected light sources and thus acted as controllable movable illumination points – used as a way to focus audience attention on the dancers.
• Illusion of depth caused by double illusion, although an artifact sometimes helped – and colours on-top of other colours also acted as composition elements.

and a few questions (open)

• Should the performer-operator be on the stage? or seen (illuminated) by the performer-dancer or seen by the audience?
• Where now is the choreographer or director? In fact also where now should the audience be – in which space?
• What is foreground and what is background? – and can this change position?

There was a healthy discussion and ideas on the role of the performer-operator as opposed to the performer-dancer.

Further details at their official site: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/paci/projectingperformance/home.html