dance

Svaha, Tantra, Death is a shamanic operation on perceptions and inner experience. This performance does not involve showing existing work; instead, it creates a transformative event and its entangled representation. We will perform virtual generation, completion, and dance of Yamantaka, a Tibetan tantric deity. We will perform textual transformation of the world. We will be re-situating electronic literature performance practices in philosophical and corporeal register. The work moves from hi-speed text through generated clusters of Yamantaka, to ordered and disordered images of the natural world and its bodies.

(Source: http://chercherletexte.org/fr/performance/svaha-tantra-death-a-second-l…)

This performance of Piringer’s video poem “Broe Sell” extends the Lettrist dynamics occurring on screen onto the stage and the dancers. There are two significant props: a white sheet on the ground that may represent a page or screen surface, and a constant trickle of little crumpled pieces of paper falling on a spotlit space in the front of the stage. The dancers act like letters— or better said, letters placed in Piringer’s hand, which leads them to behave much differently from what we’re used to seeing on page or screen. In synch with the music and displayed video poem, the letter-dancers cluster and disperse, articulate their joints, collapse, rise again, and gaze time and again at the paper trickle.

Choreography: Kristina Merrill
Poetry: Joerg Piringer (“Broe Sell”)
Dancers: Jenny Alperin, Andrea Fitzpatrick, Kara Hodges, Stephanie Ohman, Lexi Julian

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This piece is performed to the beat of a metronome playing at 100 BPM (beats per minute), the fast end of the andante tempo. That allows for Hatcher to read his poem “Control Relay Logic” one word at a time, adjusting the duration of each word to fit the space between beats, as is customary in rap music. This externalized rhythm for the poem makes the spoken word strange, but also musical, allowing Hatcher to repeat words beyond what he might pull off with a traditional reading. The dancers’ movements are also timed to that beat, making their synchronized movements somewhat mechanical. Their repetitive motions are also appropriate in this context, making them seem like logic gates, electronic switches, parts of a machine that is processing information in an orderly fashion.

“Signal Box”
Choreography: Hayley Sunshine
Poetry: Ian Hatcher (“Control Relay Logic”)
Dancers: Kara Hodges, Brianna Jahn, Ashlee Lodico, Marika Matsuzak, Megan Starnes

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This nonverbal piece juxtaposes a single dancer with Hans Richter’s 1921 Dada film. In this film white, black, and grey rectangles move in and out of the screen, shrinking, growing, and changing shapes. The dancer’s movement cast shadows upon this surface as she spins, poses, reaches out with her arms and legs in ways that make me wonder whether she is interpreting letters upon this stage and screen. Is she writing on these spaces? If so, her letters are not the static things we’re used to inscribing on a page or word processor. These are letters that feel at home on a time-based medium, such as the stage and this film by Richter. And in good Dada tradition, they are freed from meaning.

Choreography: Shelley Hain
Film: Hans Richter (1921)
Music: Sue Harshe
Dancer: Danielle Delong

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This powerfully expressive nonverbal poem builds on the title, with the dancers’ actions and movements in front of a video produced by Jhave. The first meaning of bindings is clear as the dancers come on stage boung by strips of fabric or are bound by other dancers. This act is portrayed in different ways— forcefully, gently, voluntarily, but never cruelly— yet the soft materials seem very effective in handicapping the dancers, who continue to dance oddly, as if exploring their new bodily conditions. As the piece progresses they are all freed, yet this seems to bring no solace to their bodies, which continue moving awkwardly.

Choreography: Brianna Jahn
Poetry: Jhave
Dancers: Kate Kenyon, Ashley Peters, Holli Simme, Samantha Will

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This performance is about circularity: counterclockwise rotation of letters and words around a central axis on screen, dancers enacting different kinds of spins and gyrating movements focused around a globe. Each concentric line rotates at different speeds, aligning the letters from different lines to generate intriguing combinations. As the performance progresses, the word rotation gradually speeds up until the words become a rapid stream, suggesting an acceleration of time. The dancer’s movements speed up as well, as their playful interactions with the globe become increasingly frantic yet gentle, much like the music by The Kronos Quartet.

Choreography: Kerry Ring
Poetry: Loss Pequeño Glazier
Music: “White Man Sleeps” composed by Kevin Volans,
Performed by The Kronos Quartet
Dancers: Julia Tedesco, Ellie Sanna, Meghan Starnes

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The opening performance in “Language to Cover a Wall” is about the word made flesh: Glazier reads his poem “Etymon / Encarnación” while a young woman dances to the rhythms of his voice. The words juxtaposed in the title both gesture towards primeval origins of language: etymon refers to the origins of words, while encarnación is about the immaterial gaining a body. And we can’t help but notice the bodies on stage: Glazier sitting in a chair, reading his poem engrossed in the words on the page, gently swaying like José Feliciano. The contrast of a young female dancer in a white dress, interpreting lines of sounded breath with her body, bending her articulations with an agility matched only by the poet’s vocal articulation of the poem.

Poetry: Loss Pequeño Glazier (“Etymon / Encarnación”)
Dancer: Sarah Burns

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This performance is based on Memmott’s video poem “NONCE.EXECUTOR” a poem that juxtaposes words with phrases and images that somehow define or describe them. The dancers are positioned between the screen and a disheveled blonde doll sitting on the front of the stage with a spotlight shining on it. The dancers’ movements are very doll-like, making stiff movements that emphasize their joints and how they bend and rotate on dolls. Are the dancers an explanation or description of the doll?

Choreography: Ashley Peters
Poetry: Talan Memmott (“NONCE.EXECUTOR”)
Dancers: Samantha Crosby, Danielle Delong, Julie Marazzo, Kristina Merrill, Shannon Moore, Megan Rutkowski, Holli Simme, Julia Tomanovich, Emily Wilhelm

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The Wave Electronic Illuminated Hypertext is a multisensory etext derived from a series of new media performances. The work explores and articulates a collection of meditations on myth, metaphor, and digital embodiment.An interactive assemblage of images, videodance, sound, animation, iconography, and text, The Wave creates an electronic architecture of hyper-dimensional poetic language. This electronic architecture expands and redefines the dramatic text as a fluid, animated, interactive infrastructure that exists in a liminal hyperspace between text and performance. The work expands and redefines the dance as dynamic, sensate, experiential process of inner transformation integrating the mind, body, and senses in metaphorical movement.Cumulatively, The Wave is an original "posthuman myth" derivative of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The dancing body of a woman warrior embodies the fundamental metaphor. She encounters gods, goddesses, enigmas and archetypes, all of which are reflections of herself in virtual space. Her psyche is reflected, refracted, expanded, and transformed into vertical, virtual dimensions. She becomes a meta-body: an elusive, shape-shifting equation of light, intelligence, rupture, and complexity."The body is not just repositioned by new technologies but supplemented, extended, and remade into a material-information entity whose boundaries are continuously constructed and reconstructed in its interactions with instruments whose total cognitive capacity exceeds our individual knowledge." – Adalaide Morris, New Media PoeticsFinally, The Wave is an electronic exploration of the format of the illuminated manuscript, most commonly associated with poet/artist William Blake. In traditional illuminated manuscripts, gold ink was used to represent the "light of God" illuminating the text. In this work, the light is electronic and represents the force of contemporary mythic experience through the exponentially expanding apertures of the digital.

(Source: Introduction to the project from The New River)