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SHEENA DIMATTEO: The band who made dancing on the treadmill
famous, OK Go, just teamed up with esteemed dance company,
Pilobolus, for their new video, "All is Not Lost." The
video is the gorgeous, and Pilobolus is known for taking
its beautiful dancers' bodies, putting them together to make
crazy kaleidoscopes of shapes.
I was so excited to sit down with the artistic director of
Pilobolus and get his thoughts on this crazy collaboration.
ITAMAR KUBOVY: We had a number of different ideas that we
were all interested in and exchanged a lot of materials,
videos, links, references.
And, initially, we imagined something much, much larger.
But eventually we settled on this table that's really quite
modest, a six foot by eight foot glass table.
There were probably in the range of 12 to 15 dancers.
We filmed the video over four days--
four days, yeah--
in a small town hall in Woodbury, Connecticut.
And this town hall had a beautiful ceiling.
And we knew that if we could use the ceiling of the great
building, then we'd have one less thing to worry about
because it would serve as our background.
And then, in terms of what we were wearing, we ultimately
knew that we wanted something that would allow our bodies to
remain very much circles and lines and curves and work well
in that kind of kaleidoscope setting.
Probably spent about a week just shooting alphabet.
And it's complicated because when you're shooting a
Katakana Japanese alphabet, you don't have that same
intuitive sense, unless you happen to be a native Japanese
reader, writer, speaker.
We all kind of had a role in imagining it.
A lot of it was also not who recognized or decided but how
we were going to figure out what it would look like.
So we ultimately were helped enormously by a very simple
piece of Bollywood video editing software, which
actually, in a very cheesy way, allowed us to split
screens and look at multiplication of screens in
different orientations.
We had a completely clear choreographic path through
every single take of every 12 frames.
Some squares that you see there, in the final image of
the video, in the 12 image of the video, each of those
squares was performed from the beginning of its appearance to
the very end of the video.
There was a dance for square 12 and a dance for square 11
and a dance for square 10 and a dance for square 9.
And each one of those dances was danced slightly
differently and with a different cast from the
previous one.
There were days that really felt like we just crunched
numbers and then figured out how wrong we were after doing
that for an hour.
Pilobolus found real kindred spirits in all of OK Go.
And we have a specific desire and plans to continue to work
together on projects going forward.