How was digital technology integral to the form/content of your piece?
To answer this, I have to explain exactly what the digital technology was in this piece.

A video camera positioned stage left captured the movements of the dancers onstage. This camera fed into a laptop running Isadora with a MIDI manipulator as an additional input device. The video coming in was captured into a buffer in Isadora. A live operator (Hal, who also wrote the Isadora script that made this possible) then “scrubbed?? through this video buffer with the MIDI controller – the equivalent of rewinding and fast-forwarding through the captured video at different rates, pauses and repeating segments forward and backward as he went. A 50/50 mix of live video and scrubbed video were then projected on a screen behind the dancers.

This technology was integral to this piece in a lot of different capacities.

- Since the camera was positioned to the side of the stage, it displayed the choreography from a 90 degree angle to what the audience was seeing. Therefore, Ambika’s choreography had to created for multiple viewpoints. And since it was a flat, larger-than-life projection, Ambika (who has a great deal of experience working in film) created choreography that would read on film as well as on stage, for an audience.
- Hal’s live manipulation exploded the choreography of the piece. This was my original impetus for pursuing this concept: I was editing some video of a friend dancing one day when I discovered that I could create completely new choreography through selectively scrubbing and pausing the footage; choreography that didn’t have to abide by the laws of gravity or how the body worked or moved in a real-life continuum of space and time. So, when this was presented in addition and in contrast to the live dancing, I felt that it just exploded the notion of chorography and movement and time and space in a really beautiful way.
- Themes that particularly interest me as an artist are time and memory. Time is a linear continuum, but our experience of it isn’t necessarily. Everyone has a “daily routine?? and experiences time in loops – of weeks, months, and years, having the same experiences over and over again, each time a little different but still mostly the same. The way we remember time is also not linear. Events in “right-now?? time trigger memories of “then?? time, whether it was 5 minutes ago or 50 years. And sometimes a particularly bad or good memory gets stuck in our head and “replays?? itself over and over again. Using live video enabled me to explore exactly these themes.
- Since it was a 50/50 mix of “now?? and “then?? video, the projections of the “dancer-as-she-is-now?? and the “dancer-as-she-used-to-be?? had equal weight. This, I felt, really exploded the themes of memory and loss. The “dancer as she used to be?? at times felt like a ghost who was very much physically present – especially when the “dancer as she is now?? physically aligned with her: as if someone having an out of body experience were coming “back in?? to physically re-inhabit the ghost.

Did the digital technology itself present any staging challenges?
Originally, I wanted to have the video projection be an exact match of what the audience was seeing – I thought this would make it even more effective when their “perception?? of the choreography was manipulated. However, I totally didn’t put 2 and 2 together and forgot that, well, if the audience is also seeing a rear projection behind the dancers, that will be captured on the video too. And anyone who’s ever plugged in a video camera to their tv and then turned the camera on the tv knows, this causes a psychedelic feedback effect in which there are infinite tv screens, one inside the other, inside the other, inside the other…

I discovered (or rather, remembered with a “d’oh!??) this fact when I set up the camera for the first time, and I decided to have the camera be from the side instead – that way it picked up none of the video projection, only the dance, which was what I wanted to focus on.

Another problem was that the stage lights were reflecting off of the wood floor, and the camera was picking up these hot spots more than the dancers. It took a lot of fussing with levels to get the dancers to be as prominent on the video as they needed to be, and ideally, they would have been much more prominent – they were still a bit washed out.

Were there any technologies that you would have liked to have used but did not?
Well, if there were some way I could have had the video camera in the audience, and have it NOT pick up its own projection, that would have been nice…Hal played around with some masking techniques, but nothing really did the trick, since the camera doesn’t know what is live and what’s projected. It also would have been nice to have been able to totally isolate the video image of the dancers and not pick up any of the floor, walls, or other texture of the space.

Did your piece impact the audience in the way you anticipated?
Yes and no. The first night we had a great reception; two people said it was the best integration of video projection and live performance that they’d ever seen! Which was quite flattering. The second night the air conditioning was broken and people were too hot and cranky to comment. Artistically, though, I was hoping that the piece would have been a lot more moving and beautiful and heartbreaking to people, but I think this was just a “first draft,?? and you never “hit it?? with your first try at something, do you? Now that I’ve seen the video of the performance, I have a lot of ideas about how to improve things and steer it more in the direction that I want. I will hopefully be revising and refining this piece as time goes on, and eventually it will hit the pitch that I want.