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[ Music ]
>> So this idea of the laboratory concept grows out of,
increasingly in recent years, the leadership in music
and in theatre and in the heart or seeing our work and talking
about our work more in the rubric of the laboratory.
I want to bring you into the midst of this project
that happened a year ago that grew out of a collaboration,
for the first time in this particular mode,
between the Hopkins Center and the theatre department
where the dance ensemble that had normally been
under the umbrella of the Hop, went to the theatre department
and together we figured out a much better way
of working together where the theatre department actually
becomes the production entity for the annual big show
that happens in the spring.
And it was phenomenal.
And so not only us as collaborators but others dove
in from across the campus
and that was really part of the idea.
>> What this project was, I think a really good example of
and a successful model of, is combining teaching with training
with creative process, all of that under the umbrella
of what I would say a really true collaboration is
because nothing would have existed if it hadn't been
for everyone, 57 students, four faculty, Peter, myself,
Dan Hollowitz [phonetic] and Laurie Logue [phonetic].
And student participation I think was very incredibly
positive of what the work yielded in terms
of student participation, student community building
and just students finding a better understanding
of very difficult subject matter themselves.
I mean this was about war, we called it the echoes of war,
the emotional concept of war.
So I mean, dance was a way to embody this.
In that respect I think that it was not only groundbreaking
for us here at Dartmouth College
but I think somewhat groundbreaking in terms
of what other institutions are doing in this regard
where you take a very topical issue and spend
such a long period of time working
to develop a very unique and indigenous work.
[ Noise and background music ]
>> A lot of the narrative and the choreographic elements
of the piece were created simultaneously
with the visual elements, which in theatre is unusual.
Usually you'll have a text and then everything plays off
of that text but there were certain moments here were
sometimes the visual media would be the impetus
for a particular movement.
And so the collaboration between those elements clearly were
pretty dynamic and interesting.
What I want to, I have here is just a, it's a program
that we use and I wanted to show you how it worked a little bit
and what the potential was.
So if you look up on the left there's like a movie player
and essentially I just have a movie that's in there
and I can patch that movie player over to a projector
and it will appear onto the screen.
And then I can manipulate these things in a host of ways.
So I'm putting a color, colorizer on the thing
and I can change the color on this and I can change the hue.
This has a very specific purpose and it just takes the edge
of the images and pixoids.
Sometimes it's interesting,
sometimes it's not so interesting.
I love this one.
There are two films going on right now.
You can't see, one is a river.
And I can take the river and I can put it into the highlights
or into the dark parts of the image and I have control
of this with my mouse.
As I move it over, the dark parts of the image disappear
and the river appears underneath it
and then I can move my mouse up, it goes over the light parts.
And then you can do it diagonal
and eventually you can take over entirely.
Laurie and her students created this
and they actually just created one dancer
and I just multiplied them and made a little kick line of them.
These are actually, I tend to try and make this look like what
that is so each of these are one of the dancers.
So I can take any one of them and make them much bigger
and I can move them around wherever I want as well.
So what we're gonna do is play,
it's a five minute edited version of VISCERA.
You'll see clips from it and you'll see clips from watching.
>> So this is the very opening piece we call almost
the Precept.
Theatres light and we see the sort of ghosting effect
where the performers are coming in behind,
you know behind the screen which is animated
with the bigger tower of course.
And so this was how the whole piece began coming
into the theatre.
[ Inaudible talking and background music ]
>> Before they become a soldier.
>> We drew from poetry, we drew from journals on war,
we drew from military language, psychological,
psychiatric reports, to create, create more [inaudible].
[music and singing] This section was called watching
and the idea was that you're watching,
this audience is watching them watching what they are seeing
[inaudible] things.
You know that idea of being completely inundated
by the seeds of war to the point that we no longer feel anything.
[ Music ]
[ Inaudible talking and background music ]
>> It's about the socialization.
It's about everybody doing the same thing.
The person who is doing the solo actually had completely,
had a very serious knee injury so he is post rehabilitation
as he does this so there's something real for him
about being really being on crutches.
And this of course is about the person who returns,
the person who is in rehab and how we see this person.
And this is just the very, very end.
This was our message of sort of hope,
what I would call the group chorus
that ended the entire piece.
Very slowly we all came together,
each of us in this group moment.
And this is a lot of ensemble.
This is a lot of repetition and unison movement.
And we usually, you know, we usually don't do
that because it is so predictable
but in this case we thought that this was,
had to be the end of this piece.
>> In terms of the physicality of the process,
we'd never worked here before.
I'm a trained dancer, never worked with theatre students
so that was very, very interesting.
We never did any digital stuff.
And then I guess kind
of the result section was really putting everything together.
And as we said before, we had no idea what everything looked
like until kind of the very last, the very last music
as it came together, you know the skeletons, the music,
the lighting and it just created this world
that we couldn't have visualized from the studio.
>> I don't know how many of you are theatre buffs or dance buffs
or arts buffs but the cutting edge right now in the theatre
and certainly with our students is the erasing
of lines between disciplines.
So there's no such thing as oh, so and so is a musician,
so and so is an actor, so and so is a dancer.
And so Ford and I with these projects are trying
to eliminate those barriers
because that's the way the students see the world,
that's the way they story tell, a piece of music here,
a piece of text there, movement there, it's all one form.
And so the training we're pushing them now
into blurring those lines and even bringing,
as we said in this case, bringing computer scientists
into the art center to say you know,
and some of these pieces do,
some of the actual choreography was created
in response to the visual images.
You know sitting in a room as a faculty member just say
with a colleague from the scientists responding
to what they saw in dance and bringing an image in on a laptop
and saying well this is what I thought and speaking
through her language, which is the language
of the computer generated image
and then having us respond [background music] again
to that, very, very exciting and that's where,
it's what we call devised theatre so it doesn't start
with a script and a playwright but it actually starts
with an idea and then takes hold.
[ Music ]