Troika Ranch Manifesto: Profile as Vision

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

This is a crucial text for "the field"(from Troika Ranch's profile):


Troika Ranch is the collaborative vision of artists Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello. Established in 1994, and based in New York City, Troika Ranch produces live performances, interactive installations, and digital films, all of which combine traditional aspects of these forms with advanced technologies. The artists’ mission in producing this wide range of art experiences is to create artwork that best reflects and engages contemporary society.

The name Troika Ranch refers to Coniglio and Stoppiello’s creative methodology, which involves a hybrid of three artistic disciplines, dance/theater/media (the Troika), in cooperative interaction (the Ranch). This method preceded the organization Troika Ranch, which was formed as a means to support the artists’ engagement in this process. During the 1990’s, Coniglio, Stoppiello and their company Troika Ranch were among the pioneers in the field that came to be known as Dance and Technology. They performed in festivals and venues internationally and were greatly sought after as guest artists, teachers, and lecturers. In response to the desire in the international arts community to understand this emerging genre, Coniglio and Stoppiello began developing educational programs. Among their public outreach activities are workshops, lectures, online and traditional publications, websites, software and hardware. Having conceptualized and invented much of the technology, equipment, and techniques currently in use, their expertise is unprecedented. The educational programs Troika Ranch provides have become a significant part of their contribution to the arts.

As the use of technology in the arts has developed and integrated over the last decade, the need for the separate moniker Dance and Technology has dissolved. Troika Ranch’s present concerns correspondingly reflect this broader scope, expanding across genres and pioneering new frontiers. As innovators and visionaries, Coniglio and Stoppiello produce art that values live interaction – between viewer and viewed, performer and image, movement and sound, people and technology. It is time-based but typically includes an element of spontaneity, in that the events and images that unfold lie within a certain range but are not exactly replicable. As authors, they establish images, direct performances, determine time frames, and devise technologies. The works may be presented as performances, installations, or in portable formats. In sum, Troika Ranch engages in creative endeavors using all that contemporary invention has to offer.

The company has received major funding from the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arts Council England as well as from the Brooklyn Arts Council, Meet the Composer and Art/NY’s Nancy Quinn Fund. The company tours nationally and internationally with recent performances at the Laban Centre London (UK), the Forum Neues Musictheater (Germany), ISEA/ZeroOne Festival (CA) and 3LD Art & Technology Center (NYC).

Where are you based?
Brooklyn, New York / Berlin, Germany

Area of interest on performance and new media
All.

How did you learn about dance-tech.net?
Marlon Barrios Solano

Enviornments and applications that you use the most for your projects
Isadora, Eyesweb, mocap, Final Cut ( or any other video editing), camera work, Second Life, Protools (other sound editing software), robotic devices

How do you train yourself or your performers. How do you approach your embodied practices? what kind of technique do you use?
Interaction is the word that singularly defines the driving force of our artistic practice. Whether it is between audience and performer, performer and image, movement and sound, or human and machine, interaction as an idea fundamentally shapes our work from its inspiration to its presentation.

Interaction first comes into play as we collaboratively develop materials for a work with our fellow artists and performers. Recognizing that each human being possesses a vast and unique set of life experiences, we encourage all involved in the creative process to take on a role of authorship. We push our collaborators to locate the intersection of their personal background with the overarching theme of a work, and encourage them to use this connection to deeply inform the manner and method of creating and realizing materials.

The second instance of interaction extends this collaborative authorship into the moment of presentation. Our groundbreaking software and hardware senses movement and vocalizations and creates a way for performer’s to directly influence the final presentation of visual and sonic digital materials. In our work the performer on stage or the viewer in an installation becomes the final arbiter of the material’s timing, dynamics and organization, and thus are key collaborators in the penultimate creative moment of composition.

The final moment of interaction occurs upon the work’s presentation to an audience. We intend to present a dense and highly physical theater of ideas that echoes the multiplicity and maximum sensory capacity of our time and culture. Visual imagery, dance, music and text implode into a flux point from which we leverage specific properties from each discipline to powerfully communicate on multiple levels. This density often leads to our works being described as experimental; they are, in fact, grounded in traditional theatrical values. This is because our work is content-driven: the materials in a work are present to serve the narrative arc. The relationships – between man and machine, man and woman, action and image – exist to drive expression and present –and translate– the essence of the human condition. In the end, our aim is to examine an ongoing human effort: the desire to integrate the most basic expressions of the soul with the most complex creations of the mind.