e-Dance project

Sita and I have spent the last two days with Andrew and Anja in Manchester.  The aim of the workshop was to revisit the video stream material from the first workshop in January and begin to look at the possibilities that this material might provide compositionally.

In the first workshop, we were testing the system and generating material for the windows. We were exploring what the system offered creatively that standard video cameras don’t.

 Yesterday we looked at Memetic as a playback system. We asked ourselves what Memetic and AG offer as a performance environment. How do we play with recorded material in this environment? How do we navigate and compose video stream material? What does the system permit/enable in terms of the relationship between live and streamed material? 

Most of the first day was discursive and playing with the video streams.  Initially we watched the video, but gradually they became background information from which we extrapolated the kinds of developments that we need to move forward. We started to construct a ‘to do’ list for Anja and Andrew.

We began with the question: what can we do with this environment now?  Picking up on the idea of the window/frame from the first workshop, we translated that into some practical develoment needs with Anja and Andrew.  For instance, we were particularly concerned with the properties of the windows, their animation, and their presentation for a performative context.

On the second day, we experimented with the potential for layering of material via multiple recordings.  We took some of the video streams that we recorded at the first choreographic workshop and played them back through memetic, whilst simultaneously recording live new material improvised in response to it by Helen. This gave us two layers of material. It also provided some interesting ideas about the mediatisation of space, not only between the windows but also experientially by the live performer who is performing improvisationally to their body presented in a fragmentary manner through the live windows.  We then went through the cycle a third time, using the first two sets of recorded material and improvising a third gestural response in a new set of windows. Operator control of the streamed videos allowed a playful approach to highlight the differences between the pre-recorded and the live by jumping around through the video streams in performance.