Dance Review: Technology mash-up - koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO presents Blocks of Continuality/ Body, Image and Algorithm at DTW

“Standby . . . Ready . . . Go. Go. Go.”   The technicians, musician, and performers at DTW’s presentation of koosil-ja/danceKumiko’s Blocks of Continuality/ Body, Image and Algorithm prepare for each part of the evening with verbal checks and affirmations.  In most dance performances, there are aspects of the work that the choreographer and performers want hidden: the light board, the sound technician, the costume changes and set-up. Blocks of Continuality, on the other hand, is a multi-media performance in which all aspects of the project are transparent to the audience.  At the front of the stage, technicians sit behind a table covered with laptops, wires, and media players.  They face the stage so that their actions and laptop screens are visible to the audience. The dancers Melissa Guerrero, Ava Heller, and Elise Knudson, begin each section of the work with an efficient confirmation “Go,” and then begin their series of tasks.

For Blocks of Continuality, the DTW space is transformed into a multi-media experiment lab. The three dancers watch twenty-four small screens to obtain their cues, movement phrases, and visual references.  The audience watches two large screens, which project live video footage of these same twenty-four smaller screens.  The dancers move between trios, duets, or solos but maintain their focus on the screens for almost the entire evening.

During the first two sections of Blocks of Continuality, musician Geoff Gersh creates a minimalist soundscape to accompany a pre-recorded score by Geoff Matters.  In the first part of the performance, the small (and subsequently the large) screens play video footage of magazine advertisements and unrelated clips while the dancers incorporate the movements on the screen with their live action.  When a woman on the screen kicks a wall repeatedly, the dancers who are scattered around the space similarly kick the walls, the floor, or the audience’s seats.

For Blocks of Continuality, the second section takes up most of the evening... During this technological “telephone game” of sorts, the dancers watch indigenous and folk dances from around the world and then mimic the movements with varying levels of accuracy and energy.  Because the audience is presented with a video feed of screens the dancers are watching, the image is distorted and slightly blurred.  This creates an interesting circle of reference.  The audience is drawn to the live, present dancers in front of them; however, the dancers’ focus on the small screens shifts the audience’s attention to the large screens. This is an inherently unsatisfying action given the quality of the video and the perceived distance between the audience and the content.

Koosil-ja strips folk dances of their contexts by transferring the movements to her dancers, who are dressed in black, through a media intermediary.  Within this process of abstraction, many of the dynamic and rhythmic aspects of the movements are lost.  Although the dancing is purposely ambiguous and only for a few moments clearly choreographed, there are some memorable moments.  Twice during Blocks of Continuality, a dancer watches another dancer performing a solo on the small screen.  The live dancer then mimics the phrase, slowly making the movements more and more abbreviated until they are almost not moving at all.

During the final installment of the performance, the three dancers strap Nintendo wii remotes to various parts of their costumes and, through this wireless technology, each control the motions of an avatar.  Each of the three large screens follows the journey of an avatar through an online world named “The Slums.”  Amazingly, as the avatars and their human counterparts navigate through the “Slums,” Gersh creates music with his thoughts, thanks to a installation that detects his brainwaves.  Through meditation, Gersh’s brainwaves cause the installation to drum against a wall near the front row of the audience.  However, given the limited range of motion in Koosil-ja’s choreography, the avatars movements are very subtle and the correlation between the live dancing and its effects on the second world are not always clear.   

Koosil-ja shifts the importance of the evening onto the event itself- not necessarily the choreographic product.  Blocks of Continuality succeeds in creating an intriguing installation, an event exploring technology and modes of assimilating movement.  The audience is not meant to be entertained; rather they are present to witness this experiment and contemplate as one would at a museum or gallery, with inspiration and without urgency.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Tze Chun
Performance: Blocks of Continuality/ Body, Image and Algorithm
Choreography: Koosil-ja
Venue: Dance Theater Workshop, New York City
Performance Date: March, 2010
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