Category: Dance

Getting ready to scream 'Woo!' with the rest of you

9/13/2013

You can thank Europeans’ dwindling Christian faith for a sensory bombardment that's taking over Europe. The poor attendance at all the churches and cathedrals has been a boon to a new totally immersive art-architecture experience of sound and image, artist-architect Francois Wunschel said in a lecture at Emily Carr University Wednesday night, while fellow Frenchman musician Fernando Favier manipulated the audio.

From left: Pierre Schneider, in front of a scaffolding support; Fernando Favier and Francois Wunschel.

All these old, underused stone edifices became opportunities to develop new forms of public engagement, said Wunschel. Pierre Schneider, his colleague at the Paris-based 1024 Architecture firm, shared with the audience some video examples: building facades visually distort and morph into faces; public squares transform into pulsating spaces of light and sound, all controlled by simple devices like a public microphone or a joystick.

Using MadMapping — AutoCad-like building-design software that overlays the spaces on actual architecture — Wunschel and Schneider are innovators in the growing artform that turns hard surfaces into an embodied experience that has become a signature European urban festival experience.

Tonight Vancouverites will get a (free) taste of all that at 10 p.m., behind Emily Carr’s digital media building on Great Northern Way, when the Paris team joins forces with some local artists as they premiere Live/Work, a 10-metre cube of scaffolding that promises to be a “manifestation of interdisciplinarity, collaboration and an exploration of the contemporary landscape in relation to changing cultural and economic conditions.” Gotta love that artspeak. (Translation: A bombardment of lights and sound that will have the locals yelling, “Woooooo!”)

Hypercube is all part of the New Forms Festival 13.

Below: Two videos of distinctive, immersive physical experience of sound, light: A voice-activated setup allows the public to animate a building in Lyons, France. At bottom: Transporting a dance club crowd through light and sound.

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Creative collaboration takes physical feats to new heights

1/4/2013

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I got the gift of a visual feast for Christmas: a date to see some performance-art mastery by Cirque du Soleil. And it was no less a sensory experience than the first show I saw when Alegria debuted in Vancouver in '03.

Amaluna also has an operatic storyline but I looked past that to better focus on the abstract. Narratives can be distracting, in the same way that lyrics in music distract me when I'm in the middle of a creative process. Instead, I let the spectacle of sound, light, and unimaginable feats of the human form wash over me.

I was close enough to the stage to feel the velocity of Olympics-level gymnasts in fiery costumes swinging through uneven bars while others scrambled below and pushed them into the air, in a kind of choreographed chaos in the dark void, set to a hard-rock soundscape and mesmerizing light show.

This is my kind of Olympics. All of the technical ability but none of the brutal, singular competition and nationalism. No instant-replayed technical errors, no ranking, no tears, but instead a slightly psychedelic viewer experience of human physical and creative potential.

Acrobatic coach Stacy Clark told thestar.com that she challenges the highly trained gymnasts to find ways "to strip away some of the intense discipline they had as a gymnast and turn it into a much more expressive experience."

I could see it on the faces of the mostly female cast from as far as China, Japan and Russia that they were fully engaged. Some of those talents were not found in elite training schools but in the world's most egalitarian performance space: YouTube.

Compared to Cirque, Olympics gymnastics — and the whole Games — feel too hard-core, too political, even fascist.

But I have to admit I'm a little puffed up with nationalistic pride myself as this wildly successful French-Canadian company displays new possibilities for showing off what bodies can do in creative collaboration.

A taste of Amaluna:

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Soundsuits required in my Heaven

4/12/2011

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American fabric sculptor/performance artist Nick Cave parties with decor and the domestic to create his Soundsuits.

I'm fairly new at this. Not the writing part; I've been doing that for quite a while. It's this big scary exploration also known as Developing an Art Practice. Your hands might be busy but you spend a good deal of your mental energy wondering if you're not wasting your time (and money), if you've got any ability at all to innovate, to create, or even to endure all the self-doubts and circular thinking. Some days it hits like paralysis. A friend calls it being "on strike."

I've checked with some established artists and they say that it doesn't get easier. In fact, it often gets harder. How do you filter out the clutter of opinions and stay focused? How do you re-energize and rejuvenate? Do you stay on this path, or take it in a new direction? How do you — and why should you — stay true to your art form?

Sorry I asked.

Then something miraculous happens. Last week it was in the form of the Nick Cave exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.

Here visitors are confronted with multiple galleries devoted to the hyper-coloured wearable assemblages of glittery appliques, grannie squares, day-glo faux fur, crocheted potholders, fake flowers, porcelain birds, beat-up toy tops and other improbable materials that form Cave's fantastic gaudy Soundsuits. They're like mardi gras costumes created by tea grannies on acid. The mash-up of culture-laden doilies and buttons, rhinestones, shaggy polkadots, braided rugs, beads, twigs and baskets were made even more joyful in the accompanying nightclub-ready videos on four massive screens devoted to the Soundsuits in hyper- and slow-mo action.

Cave is clearly committed to his process. Surely someone along the way must have said these Soundscapes would never sell, that spending his days combing thrift stores for crocheted afghans was a waste of time and stockpiling floral hooked rugs and embroidered cushion covers was just hoarding.

What did I learn? It's time to stop apologizing and get back to work.

Check it...

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Getting ready to scream 'Woo!' with the rest of you

Creative collaboration takes physical feats to new heights

Soundsuits required in my Heaven

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