Category: Dance

Displacement

Photo by Dr. Javier Alejandro González Ortega

After the 2010 El Mayor Cucapah 7.2 magnitude earthquake in northern Mexico, seismologist Alejandro González Ortega interviewed Don Chayo, a Cucapah native who witnessed the surface rupture. When Don Chayo drew parallels to the origin stories of the Cucapah people, González began to wonder if these stories may have recounted earlier seismic events that had been passed down over the generations.

Over the next several years, González and his colleague, choreographer/physicist Minerva Muñoz, created a performance piece based on 3D seismological data collected by 12 measurement stations during the event. Muñoz enlisted the help of composer Carla Scaletti to map the data to sound using Kyma and artist David Olivares to map the data to video using Unity.

As Muñez and González conducted further research and interviews with the Cucapah elders, a much more disturbing story began to emerge — that of a displaced people whose livelihood was being cut off and whose very language was being forgotten. What had originally been intended as a science/art collaboration about seismic activity began to morph into a deeper metaphor for displacement, disruption and loss.

The result — Wí Shpá, A journey in bare feet — is a poem in movement, images, sounds and words that explores pilgrimage, displacement, change, the relationship of humans with the environment, transformation and resilience.

The sound and visuals were created from seismological data and satellite geodesics of the El Cucapah Mw 7.2 earthquake that occurred on April 4, 2010. Consistent in many details with the cosmogony myths narrated by Don Chayo that had been passed down over generations, El Mayor-Cucapah Mw 7.2 was the most intense earthquake recorded in this region over the last century.

Wí Shpá, A journey in bare feet is an elegy to the ancestors and to the women and men of today; to the people of the river, of the earth, fire and wind. It is a glimpse into a universe in which animals are gods, and meaning is associated with each of the four cardinal directions, colors, the power of nature and of the land.

“Cosmogony of an Event, El Mayor Cucapah Mw 7.2” is an inter and trans disciplinary dialog of artistic creation and research combining the myths of Cucapah cosmogenesis and the scientific studies of El Mayor-Cucapah Mw 7.2, weaving a network of collaboration, tradition, scientific research, knowledge and experiences, but above all, creating a dialog between scientists, artists, native community, collaborators and the general public who participate in this live performance/ritual.

Credits:

Direction, stage creation and interpretation: Minerva Muñoz *
Production: Alejandro González, Minerva Muñoz / La Machina Productions
Scenic Advisor: Jorge Folgueira
Lighting: Minerva Muñoz
Composition and sound design: Carla Scaletti
Visual Art: David Olivares
Video: Marco Meza, Rommel Vázquez
Aerial Video (drone): Alejandro González
Photography: Alfredo Ruiz and Rommel Vázquez
Science: Javier González-García and Alejandro González
Audio Engineer: Rommel Vázquez
Scenography: Leoncio García
Makeup: Rosario Martínez
Lighting technician: Miguel Tamayo
Communication and networks: Stephanie Lozano
Support: Juan Sánchez

VR_I: social, free roaming virtual reality


Gilles Jobin’s VR_I — an immersive virtual reality contemporary dance experience with a 3D sound track created entirely in Kyma.7 — has its world premiere from 6 to 10 October 2017 at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal. Unfolding on multiple, parallel space and time scales, VR_I immerses you in a wordless experience of the continuum from infinite to infinitesimal, leaving you with a new sense of perspective on your place in the universe.

In partnership with Artanim Foundation and utilizing their motion-capture and VR technology, VR_I is a pioneering work in social, free-roaming virtual reality. As many as five people can enter the experience together and see their own and each other’s bodies as avatars sharing the same virtual world as the characters (the dancers).

In VR_I, music emerges from the environment: wind in the desert transitions to a humming chorus sung by giants; wind chimes in the art-filled loft organize themselves into 5/8 rhythms as columns rise up from the floor, only to dissolve back into wind chimes again as the columns recede; in the city park, bird songs are echoed in flute melodies, and cicadas transform themselves into rhythmic patterns over tambura-like drones.

Each spectator hears an individualized soundscape, and there is no way to really know what everyone else is experiencing (just like in real life). Sounds and musical elements are positioned in space and attached to objects, giving each spectator a unique mix as they move through the space, culminating in upwardly spiraling Shepard-tones that swirl around and lift up the listeners as they contemplate their own place in the continuum from infinite to infinitesimal.

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk

— from the Native American Diné Blessing Way

Choreography: Gilles Jobin
Dancers: Susana Panadés Díaz, Victoria Chiu, Tidiani N’Diaye, Diya Naidu, Gilles Jobin
3D Music & Sound Design: Carla Scaletti
Costumes: Jean-Paul Lespagnard
3d modeling: Tristan Siodlak
Animation: Camilo de Martino
3D Scans & Motion Capture: Artanim
VR Platform: Artanim

For tour dates and booking information, visit: vr-i.space

QUANTUM in India

Award-winning choreographer Gilles Jobin‘s piece, QUANTUM, will be on tour in India at the end of November through early December 2015. Inspired by Jobin’s residency at the CERN laboratory for high-energy physics, the piece incorporates a lumino-kinetic sculpture by Julius von Bismarck and a multichannel Kyma soundscape by Carla Scaletti that includes sonified data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN performed live by Marie Predour.

Gilles Jobin and his dance company will perform in:

Bangalore on the 26th and 27th of November 2015 at Chowdiah Memorial Hall
New Delhi on 4th and 5th December 2015 at Kamani Auditorium

Gilles Jobin will also lead choreography workshops for dance professionals, students, scholars and/or scientists around the idea of “movement generators” developed during his CERN residency and the creation of QUANTUM:

Bangalore workshop at Attakalari on 26th and 27th of November
Delhi workshop Danceworx on 3rd and 4th of December

The workshops and performances are part of a larger Swissnex India festival of inspiring science, art and innovation.

Electronic Milonga

tango

 

It’s not every day you get an opportunity to dance to the music of composer Bruno Liberda. But when ensemble minimal tango, led by Diego Collatti, invited Liberda to enrich their milonga music with his electronic surges, Liberda realized it was an opportunity not to be missed.

Liberda will be putting microphones into pianos, bandoneons, violin, guitar, and double bass in order to create electronic Tango.  Come to dance (or even just to listen).

Sunday, April 12, 22 uhr, Public Theater / red bar

QUANTUM in the desert: art, science, technology & collaboration

In April 2015, QUANTUM, the dance piece Jobin created inspired by his residency at CERN, will be touring northern Mexico including Culiacan, Hermosillo, Tijuana, Ensenada and Mexicali. Technical director Marie Predour will be running the live sound for the piece using a Kyma 7 Timeline.

Choreographer Gilles Jobin took a moment to talk a little about the piece, to explain his ideas on algorithmic choreography and to reflect on collaboration, art, science, and technology.

 

What’s interesting about technology is not so much the technology as a tool, but technology as a new way of thinking — as a different way to organize your work or to think about your work. The same is true when choreographers work with scientists or with musicians. There is a kind of exchange of practices that is enriching for everybody.

14 April Culiacan РFestival Danza Jos̩ Limon

16 April Hermosillo – Un Desierto Para La Danza

19 April Tijuana – Cuerpos in Transito

21 April Ensenada – Espuma Cuantica

23 April Mexicali – Entre Fronteras

27 April to 2 May Torreon – Gilles Jobin will be on the jury for Premio Nacional Guillermo Arriaga

QUANTUM World Tour

You’ll soon have a chance to experience Gilles Jobin’s QUANTUM for yourself when the Swiss choreographer and his dance company begin a world tour beginning with three performances at BAM in New York October 2-4 2014.

From a review of QUANTUM in Le Monde:

The perspectives opened to Gilles Jobin by particle physics have given a new texture to his dance. Tight but flexible, light but consistent, it propels an unceasing stream redistributed in layers of forms in constant motion. On a stunning score by Carla Scaletti, the circumvolutions are made fresh and compelling.

Dancers: Catarina Barbosa, Ruth Childs, Susana Panadés Díaz, Stanislas Charré, Bruno Cezario, Denis Terrasse
Music: Carla Scaletti
Kinetic light sculpture design: Julius von Bismarck
Costume design: Jean-Paul Lespagnard

Marie Predour, the company’s technical director, will be running the musical cues live from a Kyma Timeline each night.

Check the schedule for the latest information on when and where you can see a live performance.

Making people

In Garth Paine‘s new interactive Kyma work, CrossTalk, created in collaboration with Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley, the text is automatically transcribed from the dancers’ speech as they describe inner body sensations and their relationship to the system. Later, the dancers collide with the sentences and the system generates a new language which they then dance, and so on. Watch as the printed sentences take the form of dancing stick figures projected on the back walls:

The creators describe it as an auto poetic system for making behaviors based on the anthropological idea of “making people” as described in their paper published in MOCO the Proceedings of International Workshop on Movement and Computing at IRCAM.

In July Garth presented an entire evening of his music (all composed and performed with Kyma) at the Skopja Summer Festival in Macedonia.

QUANTUM at CERN Open Days

QUANTUM at CERN Open Days. Photo by Gilles Jobin

Choreographer Gilles Jobin’s latest creation, QUANTUM, combines movement-generators and interaction algorithms inspired by the four fundamental forces, Kyma sounds based on collision events captured by the ATLAS experiment at CERN, and a kinetic light sculpture that explores resonance and forcing functions. An outgrowth of Jobin’s residency last year at CERN, QUANTUM is an example of what can happen when artists and scientists interact with one another, exchange ideas, and learn about each other’s work. One hundred meters above the beam line of the Large Hadron Collider, against the colorful back-drop of a photograph of the CMS detector, six dancers form and dissolve fluid patterns of vibration and heat, playful non-contact interactions, flowing across the stage like a Bose-Einstein condensate, and bouncing through a bubble chamber, carried along by spinning waves of quadraphonic sound, as lights careen in wave-like patterns above their heads.

You can see the piece performed again, this time in a theatre, from 4 – 8 November 2013 in Paris at New Settings #3 / Théâtre de la Cité Internationale – Paris – France

And again on 14 January 2014 at Bonlieu Scène nationale – in Annecy, France.

More details and credits on Gilles Jobin’s site.

A description in New Scientist magazine;

A review from Le Temps in Geneva;

A radio interview with Gilles Jobin on RTS with excerpt of music;

A preview from Le Courrier

DSC02677

 

Dance of the particles

Choreographer Gilles Jobin‘s newest piece “QUANTUM” was inspired by his 2012 residency at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, where Jobin worked with physicists under the auspices of the Arts@CERN program.  For Jobin’s QUANTUM, six dancers will be illuminated by a kinetic light sculpture designed by another Arts@CERN alumnus Julius von Bismarck and sheathed in skin-tight costumes designed by Belgian fashion designer Jean-Paul Lespagnard.  Music for the production, composed by Carla Scaletti using Kyma, incorporates data from the Large Hadron Collider, including the 2012 data with evidence of the Higgs particle (thanks to physicists & inspiration partners Lily Asquith and Michael Krämer of the LHCSound  project).

Jobin-QUANTUMGilles Jobin’s QUANTUM, in rehearsal during July 2013. Photo: Gregory Batardon

The first performances will take place at the CERN CMS Experiment, directly above the detector where the Higgs Boson was discovered last year. Each evening, from 23 to 26 September 2013, audiences will be transported from Theatre Forum Meyrin to the CMS Experiment for the performance followed by a tour into the entrails of the large Hadron Collider and encounters with the artistic team and CERN physicists. For tickets, visit the Theatre Forum Meyrin site.

On the following weekend, there will be two performances a day as part of the CERN Open Days (28-29 September 2013) at the CMS experiment; CERN Open Days is one of the rare occasions when the entire CERN laboratory is open to the public.

The piece will then go on tour with electronic musician POL running the live Kyma score, beginning with 4 nights at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale in Paris from 4-8 November 2013.

—

Dancers: Catarina Barbosa, Ruth Childs, Susana Panadés Díaz, Stanislas Charré, Martin Roehrich, Denis Terrasse

Science advisers: Michael Doser, Nicolas Chanon (CERN physicists)  

Engineer: Martin Schied

Costumes assistant: Léa Capisano

Production: Cie Gilles Jobin РGen̬ve

In collaboration with: Collide@CERN, Théâtre Forum Meyrin, CERN Expérience CMS

With the support of:  Fondation d’entreprise Hermès dans le cadre de son programme New Settings, Loterie Romande, Fondation Meyrinoise du Casino, Fondation Leenaards, Fondation Ernst Göhner

La Cie Gilles Jobin is supported by the Ville de Genève, la République et Canton de Genève et Pro Helvetia Fondation suisse  pour la culture.  Gilles Jobin est artiste associé à Bonlieu Scène nationale Annecy. 
Gilles Jobin et Julius von Bismarck ont tous les deux reçu le Prix Collide@CERN 2012.  
 QUANTUM est développée à partir de la résidence d’artistes Collide@CERN Genève.  
Versuch Unter Kreisen a été développée à partir de la résidence d’artiste Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN et exposée pour la première fois au Festival Ars Electronica à Linz, Autriche, en septembre 2012.Â