LiquidBody media projects 2018:
Dancing with Monsters is an audience-interactive dance film made for Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth’s Murakami Festival at the Modern. Part of Caryn Heilman and LiquidBody’s Somatic Cinema series.
Rear View Mirror is a videodance in development that visualizes subtext of life’s passages.
Icarus at Home is a series of filmed movement flights set in the homes of a worldwide cast of LiquidBody dance collaborators spanning several years of development.
Liquid Music is a video art series that liquifies collaged footage of live musicans and cityscapes from Athens and New York City to the world jazz scores of Nana Simopoulos. It can be enjoyed as a stand alone visual and auditory experience or is sometimes used to immerses the live musicians of the Nana Simopoulos Group during a live concert that often includes live LiquidBody dance.
Touching Gravity 2/Tilt is an interactive, aerial videodance that exists solely on the internet at http://turbulence.org/works/touching_gravity. Dance clips are superimposed on a composited image of two rivers in the towns of North Adams and Adams, Massachusetts. Part of the “Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses” project, the two New England towns are (re)connected through a colorful, fluid, multilayered dance that incorporates the movement of the natural landscape from each town, seen through the “difference” blend mode of the Flash interface. Users can create and save their own versions of the dance by determining the order and timing of five different clips. Periodically, additional clips will be added so that both the dance and the user experience may evolve.
Composer and instrumentalist Nana Simopoulos has contributed five tracks to accompany the five dance clips; each piece is played on a single instrument representing a different continent. Together, they form a single composition that is layered over the sounds of the two rivers, providing the listener with the ability to remix the musical textures.
“Touching Gravity 2/Tilt” is part of the larger project “Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses” — a collaboration between Greylock Arts and Turbulence.org — that includes four commissioned networked art works that will all eventually be housed on the commissioned website www.newadams.es. “Touching Gravity 2/Tilt” will also be part of an interactive, site-specific series at Topia Arts Center (Adams) that looks at the idea of tilting angles of perception to reveal new possibilities.
“Touching Gravity 2/Tilt” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support was provided by Frank and Barbara Peters through the Medici Circle award at the University of California at Irvine.
Beacon 365 is a serial videodance taking a look at 20-30 second gestures in episodic nonlinear spurts over several years eventually covering all 365. Research conducted at the University of California, Irvine in 2009 informed the piece that launched January 1, 2011. Click to go to the Beacon 365 page to view links to all the installments.
Symphony of 100 Carpenters is a “constructive” community art-making concert that kicks off Topia Arts Center’s green capital campaign with a “big bang”. LiquidBody is choreographing the live action for this symphonic event as well as creating a videodance. The videodance features close ups of the construction workers actually doing the demo and building of the stage extension supplemented with augmented realities for the space based on the arts and education center’s vision and mission.
Nude Ascending a Staircase is a video dance work shot at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Hillier, cinematographer and cinematography instructor. It is being edited in the LiquidBody media studio. Using the cubist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” as a jumping off point, the idea of multiple angles of perception occurring within one “moving object” is explored. Cubism in motion.
Meeting in the Shimmer is a multimedia stage work with video projection on a fabric sculpture backdrop by Gisela Stromeyer that visualizes some of the nonlinear spaces referenced by the piece – the shimmer that appears before an embryo forms, the essence of regenerative energy, totipetant space, the cycles of dissolving and forming organic structure. The shimmer is sculpted live by the video artist and projected to subtley appear to emanate from the bodies of the improvising dancers. Audience interactive sounding is recorded and added to the subsequent performance’s soundscore bringing together the toned names of everyone who has ever attended the performance of the work.
Beacon is a multimedia dance work that projects the duet being danced live behind the dancers. Particularly evocative, gestural moments are captured in freeze frame and slowly dissolved back to the live gestural dialogue onstage. These moments become beacons of sculpted light allowing the viewer to experience the dance both as the exquisite flow of dialogue between the dancers in real time, and also as a light sculpture radiating meaning beyond time.
Portals is a videodance that is set inside doors. Working with the idea of a crossroads framed to accentuate the emergence of the visceral impulse that propels a body into motion, it contrasts the static and linear form with the fluidly ephemeral.
Alchemy is a multimedia dance that immerses the dancer in projected video of the four alchemical elements of earth, air, fire and water. The transformative capacities of the body are explored with the help of audience toning with sounds corresponding to the four elements.
Continuum Movement Archival Project is produced by Julianne Blake. LiquidBody media continues the important ongoing project of archiving the visionary work of Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement.
Primal Resonance is a multimedia dance with aerial moments that uses two video projectors to transform fabric into moving sculpture and create a dynamic environment for movement. Invocation creates a golden space, Circles references evolutionary cycles, Electricity uses video artist triggered lightning flashes, Skins allows a dancer to morph into different “skins”, Fireflies sets the environment twinkling, And Ever references a colorful forest environment from dusk to dawn.