KEY POINTS:
Arts Laureate Shona McCullagh, our most lucid and forthright champion of contemporary dance, creator of some of the most intelligent, zany and articulate choreography seen on these shores and, most recently, winner of the Dance on Camera Festival in New York, has yet another new angle.
Mirror Me,
an interactive installation work, created in collaboration with multimedia artist Michael Hodgson (from the electronic dub band Pitch Black) and composer John Gibson, explores a dynamic new interface between computer technology and the moving body.
"It is a true relationship - and it happens in present time," she says.
Ten years ago, McCullagh moved her major modus operandi from creating live choreography to working with dance on film. But despite her resounding successes around the world, and a growing international reputation, she confesses to a lingering level of frustration and dissatisfaction with the melding of most live performance and the projected image.
"It has to do with scale and the fact that the projected image always dominates. As soon as the projection occurs, all eyes go there. The human component is swamped."
Mirror Me is a polished and sophisticated experiment in creating a truly symbiotic relationship between live body and projection, and one in which the real human maintains the balance of power. In this instance, the viewer is the performer. Three other components are involved: a camera that picks up the movement, computer software to variously process that movement, and a screen to receive the manipulated and projected image within a two-second time frame.
McCullagh speaks of the four distinct software installations as "scenes" or "treatments" or "different lenses to create different worlds". Intriguing soundscapes motivate and inspire the participating body to move and the result is kaleidoscopic as truncated body parts separate out and reform with themselves to new multi-coloured patterns or as a single body becomes a veritable ghostly host.
The experience is one of self-reflection to a theme of seeing oneself through a created aperture that colours that reflection - and one she recommends exploring with a child, who is far less likely to be inhibited in their response.
Also premiering at the launch of Mirror Me is McCullagh's limited edition interactive artwork, Aviva, that takes the same concepts into a work that can be hung on the wall at home, and her new short film Mondo Nuovo.
"Aviva is the artwork that will never be completed," she says with considerable glee, "and one that constantly responds to your image or to your voice, to make an image that is constantly changing."
And if one version of this never-ending movement karaoke begins to pall, then McCullough offers downloadable updates to change the scene. "Humans are compulsive pattern seekers and that can be enough."
But her core belief that art's greatest function is to help us understand our human experience, to create meaning, is also reflected in the software applications.
Mondo Nuovo emerged from a five-week rehearsal process last year to create a 75-minute full-length live work - McCullagh's first such project in a decade - with composers Gibson, David Long, composer and technical consultant Hodgson, actor Carl Bland and three dancers, Will Barling, Lina Limosani and Sean McDonald. It was this work from which the software used in the Mirror Me installations was first produced.
"The human face of technology is initiated by a living body, the projection dancing with the originator as an extension of the dancer, a longer limb, a multiplication of themselves, adding depth, responsiveness and repercussions to their movement in space," says McCullough in one description of the work.
A public performance last year was prevented by the fire in the West End theatre, although a private showing to market the work was held. A trip as guest speaker at a Netherlands festival resulted in invitations for the installation version to show in Poland and, on the BBC Outdoor Screens, as installation work in Liverpool and Manchester. McCullagh is hoping local festivals will be interested in the work.
What: Mirror Me, by Shona McCullagh, Michael Hodgson and John Gibson
Where: MIC Toi Rerehiko, 321 K Rd
When: March 28-May 3
