By Julius Ferraro for thinkindance.net
November 22, 2015
Day one of < fidget >’s 6th Annual Fall Experimental Music Festival is called Space, Pulse, Pat-tern, Presence, but it could easily be called Disorientation. Four short pieces, though they differ wildly in tone, form, humor, movement, and medium, use deliberately counterintuitive elements to evoke mystery, suspense, and even confusion.
dark matter, a video by Zornitsa Stoyanova with live music by Michael McDermott, opens the night. Silvery foil paper, crumpled into the shape of a cave, stands on the stage. As the lights dim, Stoyanova enters, performs a short dance exploring the way this material moves, then lays out a sheet of flat foil. She shines colored flashlights on it, which reflect in spots on the walls, casting organic, cellular-looking refractions. As she explores, jagged mountains and valleys, or rows of bone, seem to make up the smooth, sheer surface of the foil.
In the video, a symmetrical image of what looks like a small, dark cave is struck by a pulsing light, begins to expand and contract kaleidoscopically, and bursts open when a segment of leg appears—a dancer inside the foil. Just as the image starts to coalesce into a body, that body moves quickly toward the camera, and we lose it. Dancing bodies, through fragmented video, are reduced to visual elements and the impression of motion.
Full article with review of the rest of the evening you can find here.
