May 16, 2002
Dancer goes dot-com
As you sit in the audience waiting for a dance concert to begin, the last thing you might think the dancers would be worried about is their computer. Well, welcome to the 21st Century, in which it seems the computer has invaded everything, including dance. When the Faculty Dance Concert plays this weekend, it may include the crucial involvement of a computer.
“May,” you say? Well, that goes back to the worry we mentioned above. The Dance Program’s artist-in-residence, Rob Kitsos, has been experimenting with a new piece of equipment called a sound sensor. Placed on the wings of the stage, the sensors react to the stage lighting — triggering different sound files that are on a laptop computer. Basically, Kitsos explains, the music changes depending on the light.
It’s a risky experiment, one that Kitsos tried out in a performance at On the Boards last month. But that wasn’t totally successful. “The technology’s so new, we weren’t sure how effective the sensors would be or how much we could depend on them,” Kitsos says. “So we ended up programming a lot of the sound files to happen at certain points in the piece. In the end it was a combination of pre-programmed decisions and the improvisational nature of the sensors changing.”
He went into technical rehearsals still undecided about how big a role the sensors would play in the Faculty Dance Concert, but there’s no doubt they’ll be playing a role in dance concerts someday, at least at the UW, where dancers regularly stray outside their field for inspiration and collaboration.
Take Peter Kyle, for example, who will also appear in the concert. A part-time lecturer in dance who earned his MFA here, Kyle studied acting as a graduate student and appeared as Riff in the UW production of West Side Story. Last year he cast his acting teacher, Robyn Hunt, in a dance he choreographed, and last month the two produced a collaborative show at On the Boards that combined elements of drama and dance (see the story of that production in the April 18 UWeek).
Then there’s Dance lecturer Pamela Cohen, who’s choreographing a dance for the concert called au habituate. It will include a Rachmaninoff piece sung live by Sarah Roberts, a grad student in the School of Music, and art by Kelly Jue, a senior in fibers in the School of Art.
It was visual art that first inspired Kitsos to create Yellow, the piece in which he experimented with the sound sensors. He had gone to the Wolfgang Loeb exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery and walked into a white room with a square of bright yellow pollen that Loeb had collected from flowers.
“It was just an incredible visual experience,” Kitsos says. “I thought I’d like to create a dance piece that had that same kind of intensity, so that color became part of the dance in a way.”
So Kitsos went to costume designer Christine Smith and asked for costumes in a vivid yellow. The sound sensors entered the picture when Kitsos was learning digital technology at the Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CARTAH). He got into a conversation with Richard Karpen, the director of the center, who also happens to be a professor of composition in the School of Music.
“He told me that he’d composed for dance quite a bit and gave me a few of his CDs,” Kitsos recalled. “They turned out to be great, so at first I thought I would just ask Richard to compose music for the piece. But then he happened to mention that CARTAH had just gotten these sensors in.”
How could Kitsos resist experimenting with something new?
That the experiment hasn’t been an unqualified success hasn’t discouraged him at all. He had already been headed in a technological direction when he wrote a grant to purchase video-editing equipment for the dance program a couple of years ago. Since then he’s been spending time at CARTAH learning new tools to enhance what he does.
Making Karpen’s acquaintance didn’t hurt either. Kitsos will be using some of Karpen’s music for Yellow, as well as some by Don Craig, a teaching assistant at CARTAH who is also a graduate student in the School of Music, and some by the Dance Program’s music director Paul Moore.
Nor does Kitsos confine his experimentation to electronic technology. For another dance in the concert, Feeding Athena, he and two other dancers will be suspended above the stage in harnesses. This time he turned for help to one of Meany Hall’s technical directors, Brian Judd, who once worked for Cirque de Soleil and knows something about hoisting people safely 20 feet from the ground.
The piece, Kitsos explains, is about sacrifice and violence. The suspended dancers will be equipped with wireless microphones and reading from pop culture texts such as Pulp Fiction and Alien.
This will be the last chance for University audiences to catch Kitsos’ act, at least for a while. After four years as artist in residence, he’s moving on to a two-year contract at a performing arts academy in Hong Kong, where he’ll no doubt be experimenting with all that a new country has to offer.
“I’m really excited about it,” he says.
The Faculty Dance Concert plays at 8 p.m.
May 17 and 18 at Meany Theatre. Tickets are $12 ($7 for students and seniors) and are available at the Arts Ticket Office, 206-543-4880.
