This live/audio/visual performance is a part of Stony Brook University’s HYBRID GEOGRAPHIES concert which examines the transformations of space that have taken place with the advent of digital technologies.

Collaborators

Video: Aaron Henderson
Sound: Ted Coffey
Choreographer: Mikey Thomas
Mover: Sunshine
Pre-recorded Movers: Mikey Butane Thomas, Lynne Price, Lilly Susskind, Jenny Berkowitz, Marilyn Mullen, John Hoobyar, Melissa Talleda and Angelica Daniele

www.hybridgeographies.net

Related posts:

1. WATCH/PLAY Performances in Baltimore
2. WATCH/PLAY
3. STREB VS GRAVITY

Choreographer Mikey Thomas and local movers perform in downtown Baltimore.

Performers:
Mikey Butane Thomas (Goucher College, Assistant Professor, Dance)
Lynne Price
Lilly Susskind
Jenny Berkowitz
Marilyn Mullen
John Hoobyar
Melissa Talleda
Angelica Daniele

About WATCH/PLAY:
Surveillance cameras observe and record all kinds of everyday actions, but their primary purpose is to record (and/or discourage) crimes. What would happen if we used these cameras to examine other aspects of our culture, and opened their feeds up to the public-at-large?

Related posts:

1. Keyframe at Hybrid Geographies (WATCH/PLAY)
2. WATCH/PLAY

Upcoming Shows

Institute of Contemporary Art
Boston, MA (October 22, 2009-October 25, 2009)

Herberger Theater
Phoenix, AZ (November 6, 2009 & November 7, 2009)

About
STREB – BRAVE is my 3rd collaboration with Elizabeth Streb, and our first to utilize responsive and generative visual content. Using video tracking and custom sensors (developed by Arizona State University’s Arts, Media and Engineering Department), we sense the position, velocity and direction of performers and equipment. This information is used to control responsive and visceral 3-d environments. This project uses openFrameworks, an open source C++ library, to create the real-time visuals, and we’ve created a specialized playback software, “playOF” to facilitate the realities of creating a powerful, responsive and tour-able projection design.

Collaborators
Aaron Henderson – Projection Design
Elizabeth Streb – Choreography
Mark Beasley – openFrameworks/Python programming
Byron Lahey – Pendaphone development*
Winslow Burleson – Pendaphone development*

*Arts, Media and Engineering, Arizona State University

Tour History
Prospect Park Bandshell (Brooklyn NY), The State Theater (New Brunswick, NJ), SLAM (Brooklyn, NY), University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI)

Related posts:

1. STREB VS GRAVITY
2. STREB – Wild Blue Yonder
3. Catapult Review – Village Voice

The Art Institute of Chicago’s New Blood Festival
Links Hall, Chicago, IL

Related posts:

1. Back to school
2. Over and Under
3. Metamorphoses in Cover Blown (Graduate Exhibition)

Real-time, algorithmic and pre-recorded video unite with Elizabeth Streb’s aesthetic of grace and danger. The screen provides alternate viewpoints, both micro and macro, for the action at hand. Archival footage and reactive software fill the 20′ x 20′ screen

About the show:

“By exploring the frontiers of performance space, and creating works that reflect the spirit of our technological age, Ms. Streb is carrying dance into a new dimension.”
- The New York Times

Elizabeth Streb’s trademark risky choreography combines the visceral impact of extreme sports with the poetry and split-second timing of dance. Exploding with the suspense and energy of near-misses and imminent crashes, STREB Extreme Action’s daring performers explore the boundaries of force, gravity, action and reaction. Whether flying, falling, or seemingly suspended in mid-air, STREB fearlessly challenges nature, creating a new aesthetic of grace and danger. In this gripping new show, action-architect Elizabeth Streb takes her audience ringside for a match-up of human pitted against the phenomenal forces of everyday physical action. STREB materializes the unseen, ever-present, air-traffic controllers of our universe and puts those invisible action partners center stage.

Collaborators:
Elizabeth Streb: Action Architect/Choreographer
Michael Casseli: Set Design
Laura Flanders: Librettist
Aaron Henderson: Projection Design
Shelly Sabel: Lighting Designer
Maxim Safioulline: Sound Designer
Justin D’Apolito: Technical Director

Tour History:
World Premier:
July 12-15, 2006. La Guardia Drama Theater, Lincoln Center Festival, New York, NY

The Eccles Center for the Performing Arts (Park City, UT), Walton Art Center (Fayetteville, AR), The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center (Great Barrington, MA), Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (Burlington, VT), FirstWorks Providence (Providence, RI), Williams Center for the Arts (Lafayette College), International Festival of Art & Ideas (New Haven, CT), Jackie Gleason Theater (Miami Beach, FL), Kravis Center (West Palm Beach, FL), Proctors Theatre (Schenectady, NY), Napa Opera House (Napa, CA), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Bumbershoot (Seattle, WA), Britt Festival (Jacksonville, OR)

Related posts:

1. STREB – Wild Blue Yonder
2. STREB – BRAVE
3. Catapult Review – Village Voice

Blue Land Media and I worked on the video for Elizabeth Streb’s homage to the magic and mayhem of early flight.

About the show:
It is an age-old human dream to stretch the body into space and to venture into unknown territory where gravity just might lapse. Wild Blue Yonder is an action event for the rough of heart and deep of longing – people of all ages who are curious about escaping earth. STREB is inspired by Wilbur and Orville Wright, who a century ago made the first powered flight; by Amelia Earhart, who spanned the Atlantic Ocean; by Chuck Yaeger, who broke the sound barrier; by the Chinese MiG pilots who shrank the turning radiuses of their dog-fighting planes to create a physically impossible G-force; by any astronaut who’s ever braved the vomit comet; and every kid, regardless of age, who is willing to go where humans haven’t…To all these, STREB pays homage.

Wild Blue Yonder is the story of the actions people do, and the places people go when they dream. It is a story that requires the impossible, so with action contraptions we expand the body’s reactions, and we duet with nature’s forces of movement. Action, movement, courage, invention, and machines, these are what have made flying dreams real. The horse, the rider, the wheel, the motor, the car, the plane, the jet, the computer, all in their time were the next utterly impossible future dream, always defying the wisdom of the age.

Wild Blue Yonder requires the audience to have the experiences they have when they dream. In these dreams the impossible and absurd is real. Humans do fly. With the machines we build, the airplanes we fly, the unprotected ledges we jump from, our bodies take on that adventure dream. The Action show demonstrates how the extreme idea happens. STREB will take the audience into the wild blue yonder merely by witnessing what we do. Fast, Hard. And Out of Control. Radical Actions.
Elizabeth Streb

Collaborators:
Elizabeth Streb: Chreography
Michael Casseli: Set Design
Aaron Henderson and Blue Land Media: Projection Design
Laura Flanders: Librettist
Noe and Ivan Espana: Action Collaborators

Tour History
Wolf Trap (Vienna, VA), Napa Opera House (Napa, CA), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Bumbershoot (Seattle, WA), Britt Festival (Jacksonville, OR), Jazz at Lincoln Center (New York, NY), City Center (New York, NY), The Oriente Occidente Festival (Verona & Trento, Italy), University of Wyoming (Laramie, WY), (Boulder, CO), Wausau Area Performing Arts Foundation (Wausau, Wisconsin)

Related posts:

1. STREB VS GRAVITY
2. STREB – BRAVE
3. Catapult Review – Village Voice

I co-created (with Jamie Jewett) this evening-length performance that blended dance, an original score, and projections. The narrative is a contemporary re-imagining of the inventor Daedalus, finding him some years after Icarus’ death.

Animation from After the Fall (8 minute excerpt from the middle of the performance)

About the show:
After the Fall reimagines Daedelus, the grandfather of technology, as the forlorn protagonist in a landscape of projected images. A sculptural series of projection screens (lit by Juliet Chia) and an original score by Timothy Quigley (songs by Jeff Wallman) provide the environment in which Daedalus (Matt Schicker), Ariadne (Mira Kim) and an everyday Icarus (Ian Van Voorst) discover just how the real-time and video imaged world is only a symptom of the past’s impotence in healing the present.

Credits:
Jamie Jewett and Aaron Henderson: Concept and Video
Jamie Jewett: Choreography
Aaron Henderson: Animation
Thalia Field: Dramaturgy
Juliet Chia: Lighting
Timothy Quigley: Music
Jeff Wallman: Songs

Performance History:
2004 Green Street Studios, Boston, MA
2003 St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery, New York,

Related posts:

1. Snowblind
2. Inflatable
3. STREB VS GRAVITY

Snowblind : Overwhelmed by the light reflected from snow particles. When filtering becomes the world, when information becomes a landscape, and bodies are viewed cinematically rather than experienced subjectively. The transformation from “establishing shot” naturalism to the storm of subordinate experience-data is enacted in the fierce and reflective movements of a solo performer responding to herself on screen.

Jamie Jewett and Aaron Henderson: Concept and Production
Mira Kim: Performance
Matmos and Mark Isham: Music

Exhibition History:
Tens the Limit
May 2-3, 2003
Green Street Studio
Cambridge, MA

Snowblind was initially comissioned by Entity, a digital media collective
2002 IMMEDIA conference
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

Related posts:

1. After the Fall
2. Inflatable
3. Mud

Aaron Henderson: Concept, Costume Design and Video
Alyssa Stith, Kelly Gottesman and Kareen Balsam: Performance
Tim Glenn, Jamie Jewett, Aaron Henderson: Camera

Related posts:

1. Mud
2. After the Fall
3. Snowblind