There was a time when video projection in dance was a super cool idea; now it's just par for the course. So when the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre's longtime Artistic Director Garry Stewart opted to use live video rather than stills for his latest work, we were probably thinking, 'so what?'. However, Proximity takes the idea of multimedia in performance and gives it a fresh algorithmic makeover. Stewart's journey to Proximity took him to France via Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring and into the orbit of renowned Paris-based video engineer Thomas Pachoud. “He writes code,” Stewart explains with a grin. “He doesn't consider himself an artist as such. He just loves algorithms.”
Pachoud's mathematical precision and Stewart's vision for a piece about perception led to the idea of dancers filming one another live on stage while a simultaneous video feed, filtered by Pachoud's algorithms, was splashed on big screens behind them. It's clearly a trick that works because, since its 2012 Adelaide Festival premiere, Proximity has toured Europe to all-round acclaim. Over its 48-year career, ADT has established itself as one of this country's leading contemporary dance outfits, building a great international reputation with a string of astonishing works, Proximity the latest and perhaps most innovative.
“I guess you could make a blanket statement that video in dance is really tired but there are always technological advances in any kind of media and I like to work with them,” says Stewart, though his penchant for technology is not without its choreographic challenges. “It does create certain limitations, particularly in terms of placement on stage and lightning. In order for the effects to work the bodies need to be lit in a certain way in order for the effects to be created.” Tech factors aside, Proximity is a lot deeper than a shimmering high-end live dance video. As Stewart has it, “The video effects themselves are really there to serve an idea about perception, about the way in which we perceive each other and the world around us.”
Like a lot choreographers, Stewart tethers his more philosophical musings to the concrete form of the body. “I was doing a lot of reading into the neurology of perception and the neurological maps we use to map the world around us and our relationship with other objects. Y'know, when we hold a pen or drive a car we incorporate those objects into our body plan. So, the video became a metaphor for those interconnections.”
