Augmented Dance by Light – Dance-Tech mid-term residency update

[Jeanne Bloch]

I arrived at Studio Lake for the Dance Tech February Residency with the project of focusing on a boring but healthy work process… : Creating a codification based on light and movement needs fastidious movement and space cutting out…

“Augmented Dance by Light“ is a research I started in order to figure out energy efficient alternatives to light design. I consider the light rather than the lighting power (energy) as a rare resource to use with scarcity on stage.
Working with the interactive textile designer, Pauline Vierne, we integrated small LEDs on dancers costumes to get dancers involved into the overall light design system.

Lighting the body space
During the first tests, I got very interested by the lighting effects created by the combination of light and movement: we were lighting the body space. And who else than dancers can deal with space and body?

We did many tests and learnt a lot from them, at the technical level as well as with the dance.

What I found very interesting while working at Lake Studio was the importance to get very basic when you deal with technical experimentation. This is the cost to leave space for amazing aesthetics outcomes. We are almost there and I hope to show you more in my next post….

Today, I can tell “boring” can be “enlightening”!

[danielle wilde]

hi Jeanne,

I'm excited to see what you are doing. You may be interested to see some work I did with Alvaro Cassinelli (and a whole lot of others) in Tokyo some time ago: http://www.daniellewilde.com/dw/lightarrays_yebisu.html

I can totally emphasise with the challenges of combining technical and aesthetic developments. We worked using a design-choreographic process. It was the first time I worked in this way and was quite successful. A lot of our process is written up in the papers at the above link. I'm happy to share more info though, as what you see is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg.

all the best with the rest of the residency

warm regards

Danielle