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GLOW
Latest news:
Chunky Move is delighted to announce that GLOW will return to Melbourne this year for the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
GLOW will be performed at the Chunky Move studios from October 12 - 27:
October 12 - 13 - 6pm & 7pm
October 14 - 4pm & 5pm
October 16 - 20 - 6pm & 7pm
October 21 - 4pm & 5pm
October 23 - 27 - 6pm & 7pm
Tickets:
Adult $25
Concession $18
* Booking fees apply
Book now. Tickets now selling
Click here to visit the Ticketmaster website and book tickets! Alternatively you can call Ticketmaster on 1300 136 166.
Recent performances:
In August, GLOW toured to the Netherlands as part of the Noorderzon Festival and then returned to Australia for two performances in the Darwin Festival.
August 21 - 22
Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, The Netherlands
For further details, click here to visit the Noorderzon Festival website.
August 26
Darwin Festival, The Studio - Darwin Enterntainment Centre, Darwin, Australia
For further details, click here to visit the Darwin Festival website.
Premiere Season Credits:
Performers:
Kristy Ayre
Sara Black
Lina Limosani
Creative Personnel
Credits:
Concept and Choreography: Gideon Obarzanek
Concept and Interactive System Design: Frieder Weiß
Music and Sound Design; Luke Smiles (motion laboratories)
Additional music: Ben Frost
Costume Designer: Paula Levis
Concept
Glow is an illuminating choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss.
Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states.
Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.
In Glow, light and moving graphics are not pre-rendered video playback but rather images constantly generated by various algorithms responding to movement. In most conventional works employing projection lighting, the dancer’s position and timing have to be completely fixed to the space and timeline of the video playback. Their role is reduced to the difficult chore of making every performance an exact facsimile of the original. In Glow, the machine sees the performer and responds to their actions, unlocking them from a relationship of restriction and tedium.
Director's Notes
Frieder and I first met at the Monaco Dance Forum at the end of 2004 and discussed the use of a data projector for lighting a moving body. In late 2005 in Australia we tested various relationships between a moving body and motion graphics using an infrared camera tracking system.
With a better understanding of the system’s capabilities, its possible applications and further potential, the dancers and I have attempted in the movement to create a type of “biotech fiction”, shifting the body into other imaginary sensual and grotesque creature states. The relationship of the digital pixel environment to the performer varies from being an illustrative extended motion of their movement, a visual expression of internal states, and also a self-contained animated habitat.
The relationship between the dancer and the graphics describe two entities that are in phase and at one with each other. Initially, only momentary fractures undermine this alliance, however as the work develops so does the unravelling and ultimate rupturing of these two elements.
In the opening scenes, GLOW’s high commitment to its aesthetics makes it visually very impressive. What may be more interesting however is the hint of a creature/person beginning to reveal itself from within this kaleidoscope system. The voice in the opening or the subtle shuddering of the body later on alludes to the possibility of something else beyond the clearly defined work of beautiful shapes and virtuosic execution.
As the work develops so does the initial responsive relationship of light and graphics to the moving body. At one point the dancer’s effect on a graphic pattern gives us the impression that all particles are related and that the body has merged into a single entity with the system. Later, projected shadow figures expelled by the performer take on a dramatic form of their own and influence the behaviour response of the dancer. Approaching a climactic end, there is an intense physical process that ultimately leads to the separation between the body of the performer and its projected image.
The seamless joint venture forged in GLOW between a moving body and tracking light and images ultimately reveals itself as flawed and in the end irreconcilable. The work expresses a desire to discard or escape elements from within ourselves and this can be seen as a visual metaphor for our own constant struggle with our primitive state of duality.
Media Response
"...a tour de force that will live long in the memory."
THE AUSTRALIAN
"Short in presentation but lasting in its eerie intrigue"
Sydney Morning Herald
"The creative team has hit its mark. Bullseye."
HERALD SUN
“…an astonishing performance, tackling Obarzanek's thrashing, flailing, joint-crunching action like a high-velocity missile, with only occasional respite.”
THE AGE
Shadows tortured by light
The Australian, Arts, Reviews
Review by Lee Christofis
5 September 2006
NEARLY two years ago, Chunky Move dance company's artistic director put a question to a man who would become his newest and perhaps most radical collaborator to date, German real-time interactive software engineer Frieder Weiss. The question was whether one could illuminate the isolated body of a dancer in the dark.
The result of their collaboration, a 25-minute work entitled Glow, is a tour de force that will live long in the memory. Like many of Obarzanek's previous works, Glow is not a narrative but generates deep emotional responses. It's not dancey but is still demandingly, multifariously physical.
The plain context - a white floor panel framed by a black surround, a screen to dance on, in fact - belies the complexity that unfolds on it as light and projections dress the dancer's body as it shapes itself into loose, akimbo poses or taut, distorted forms that fill nightmares. All these shapes, and the movement between them, are recorded electronically and manipulated in ways that refract the dance in different ways.
Sometimes the white floor goes black and, clad in white Lurex leotard, the dancer's body splatters across the floor like a reverse Rorschach blot.
Beams of harsh white light dissect the space geometrically and glaring bands pour down to outline the prone dancer's body like paint.
Miraculously, a spiral hologram pattern frames a new dance, then, paradoxically, shadows the curvilinear paths the dance takes, confounding the viewer's question of who or what triggers each new image. Subtler, almost imperceptible, are the fluctuating contour lines that appear on the dancer's exposed skin as her body rises and falls.
The clearest point at which humanity, imagination and technology meet is when, in another of Weiss's spectacular devices, the dancer falls to the white floor, leaving a black shadow behind.
The shadow rises and pursues the dancer, and is joined, ominously, by new shadows that emerge each time she touches the floor.
Images of anguish, impotence or exhilaration generate a level of excitation and empathy that eluded Obarzanek in his recent, grandly constructed Singularity, with its clever magic-box set and six dancers. Kristy Ayre created Glow's initial movement with Obarzanek, but I saw 22-year-old Sara Black perform it. Her presence, raw energy and intuitive, visceral impulses brought Glow's mesmerising imagery and cumulative urgency into throbbing theatrical life.
Excellent sound, which forces itself into the viewer's hearing almost subliminally, was created by Luke Smiles. Paula Lewis designed the sole, light-capturing costume.
Glow
Herald Sun, Entertainment, Review
Review by Stephanie Glickman
5 September 2006
One of Chunky Move’s missions is to continually engage with contemporary culture in a variety of mediums.
In Glow, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek teams with Frieder Weiss, an interactive software engineer, to create a powerful dance in which the performer’s body triggers music and lighting.
Many artists try this relationship and the result is often a situation of complex technology overpowering the visceral effects of live dancing.
This is not the case with Glow, which offers audiences a very intimate experience with a solo dancer that is deeply enhanced rather than hindered by Weiss’s contribution.
On two sides of the room, audiences look down on the action in a white rectangle on the floor. We hear every breath and muttering from the lone dancer (either Sarah Black, who performed on opening night, or Kristy Ayre). Towards the end, we even see smudges of blood gradually staining the white surface from a scraped ankle.
Black’s dancing was intense, from tight, ball-like hovers to sustained contortions and fully extended elongations of body.
She transformed from low-lying animal to standing, babbling human and crouching, shaking creature, never once losing her focus.
The movement was unrelenting and so well blended with light patterns and shapes that, visually, it was impossible to separate the elements.
Revolving on her back, Black appeared to draw circles with her toes and fingers. In perfect synchronisation, geometric webs of diagonal lines enclosed and expanded around her body.
This magic was created through fine detail and finesse. All contributors – including Luke Smiles and Paula Levis, whose sound design and costume, respectively, meld with and enhance the environment – made this seamless 20-minute performance highly effective.
The creative team has hit its mark. Bullseye.
Doubly emergent
Real Time Arts, Review
By Keith Gallasch
THEATRE LIGHTING ELUCIDATES MOVEMENT AND GENERATES MOOD. DESIGNER MAGICIANS SEDUCE YOU INTO BELIEVING THAT LIGHT EMANATES FROM THEIR SUBJECTS OR THAT DANCERS MOVE AND SHAPE THE LIGHT ABOUT THEM.
In Chunky Move’s Glow we are moved onto another stage in illusion-making: the dancer really does determine the extent and patterning of the light field.
We’re positioned around and above the dancer, her floor is the screen. That which lights her—video projections doubling as light source—is also moved by her. The machinery responds intelligently. Light trails behind her in painterly sweeps as she drags herself across the floor, shoots out grids around her supple frame from moments of tiny movement, and forms shadows from which, remarkably, she walks away.
We’ve seen performers trigger sound and light before, but not like this. As with such demonstration model stuff, you need a bit of sturm and drang to show it off. Glow offers just that in its dynamically immersive 26 minutes. The emergent art tool is at one with the dancer’s body in an account of an emergent organism, a huddled in-human shape inching across the screen-floor pulsing out colour and light and gradually assuming human proportion as it stretches and unfurls. The imagery it generates is initially a clean geometry but, once the evolved woman stands and walks, the floor blooms into dark shapes beneath her. These are the shadows she leaves behind. But she is no longer alone as they threateningly glide up to her. No longer the sole generator of light and life, fangs bared, she unleashes a guttural primeval cry. Evolution is suddenly more complex, as frightening as it is beautiful.
Glow, created for Chunky Move by artistic director Gideon Obarzanek and German interactive software creator Frieder Weiss, and with an engrossing score from composer Luke Smiles, was performed nightly by three dancers in turn (Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, Bonnie Paskas) for the Sydney season. The demanding choreography is at its best in the early stages of creature emergence where every nuanced movement of limb, torso or hand yields subtle transformations in the world around the dancer, the very world she is also creating.
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