Last Updated Friday February 1, 2008, PST 3:56 AM
In Disney's "Peter Pan," Peter has to fly back to the Darlings' house to find his shadow. The liberated shadow refuses to reunite with its owner until Wendy Darling sews it back onto his toes.
"Glow," a dance piece by the Australian company Chunky Move, is also a drama featuring rebellious shadows and their owner. Artistic director Gideon Obarzanek and technology designer Frieder Weiss put together a light projection system that reacts to the movements of a solo dancer onstage, an experiment that took a turn for the metaphysical.
"The light gives the sense of her body glowing from within, visualizing her internal emotion," said Obarzanek. Infrared information from the dancer's body, read by a device, is instantly projected back in different light and shadow patterns that respond to her movement.
But in the second half of the work, the shadows disperse all over the performance space. "They start moving on their own, so that she is reacting to them," Obarzanek added. "These are images that come from an instantly replayed memory of movements she has just completed. The shadows appear to have come from her, despite being semi-autonomous.
"It's quite scary," he said.
"Glow" debuted stateside last year in Pittsburgh, but this will be its first New York appearance. Those who venture out for this experimental dance experience at The Kitchen in Manhattan will have an intimate experience in a space retooled especially for the performance. The dancer performs on the floor, and seats on all four sides allow viewers to look down on her.
"If I used a vertical screen, the dancer would be fixed to the floor by her feet," explained Obarzanek. "With the floor, the body can float within the image." Vertical screens, he added, are a more familiar way of viewing performances because of television and movie mediums. With the horizontal frame, Obarzanek tries to make the experience less familiar -- and more interesting.
The "Glow" project began as a challenge from Obarzanek to Weiss. He wondered if Weiss could design a lighting system that responded to the performer onstage, instead of creating a lit space to which performers confined their movement.
Weiss could and he did. Over a six- to eight-week period, Obarzanek and Weiss worked together to coordinate choreography and technology. That may seem like a short creative gestation, but Obarzanek usually finishes a piece in half the time.
"One of the inherent frustrations is that programming is painstakingly slow," he said. "It's incompatible with working with a dancer in the studio. ... You may discuss a small change with Frieder, and it will take two days to do."
But on the whole, the experiment was more successful than either imagined, and it is still evolving. Obarzanek has just finished debuting "Mortal Engine," a piece for six dancers using the same technology, in Australia. " 'Glow' was a very literal relationship," said Obarzanek. "The projected light simply lit the body, using algorithms to accentuate and interact with it. But 'Mortal Engine' has a more sophisticated life and decay to it, so that the shadows seem more autonomous."
A little rebellion, it seems, may be coming to a full-on mutiny.
Will Obarzanek be bringing the big light show to America?
"I certainly hope so," he said.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
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