Non-Organic with Organic?

boy(1995)a film by Rosemary Lee and Peter Anderson, Performer Tom Evans

Non-organic with the organic? How can you make these cohesively mix well together without appearing unbalanced? What I am talking about is electronic media, and the expressionistic queen, dance. In the last five to seven years, since the onset of the digital technology boom, dance is finding its way into an exciting new medium for media guru's to delve into and vice versa. Both mediums--moving image, music, and dance all transpire to express drama, human emotion (whether evoking audience emotions or in the performance), and life stories.

Dance is a way of speaking. Dance performances or just freestyle dancing is one way to know each other. Dance helps identify who you are. Dancing with others is way to experience details with one another. Its one of the most intimate ways to be with someone. At the heart of Native American culture is dance such as Pow Wow and/or spirit dancers. The Aborigines use improvisational and trance dance to express dreams they’ve had.

The interdisciplinary company, Troika Ranch has become widely known and popular for its innovative ways of combining dance, live performance, and multimedia. What they have not done thus far is find a way to integrate, mesh, blend, and balance dance and media together. Last year, I went to a show they held at SUNY Brockport. The performance was about male and female relationships, male-male relationships, female-female relationships, human duplication, and self-expression. They mixed real-time images of the dancers with their own developed software program they called Isadora. During the performance, I spent half of the time trying to observe the real-time video images and couldn’t appreciate the dance, and the other half, involved in the movements of the dancers yet the giant images in the background kept distracting me, pulling me away from the dancers. I left feeling very discombobulated between the mediums.

Dance performances captured in choreographed films currently seem to be doing a decent job of balancing the two. As interdisciplinary mediums work together more, it will all depend on the key ingredient--balance.

Here are 2 sites with two dance films I like.
Reines D Un Jour (Queens for the Day) http://www.dancecamerawest.org
The Boy by Rosemary Lee http://www.mdx.ac.uk/rescen/Rosemary_Lee/rlchoreo2.html
Okay, I will give you the site of Troika Ranch too... http://www.troikaranch.org/