Experiments in Visual Music
FUSE
“[The work] has the power to rock a bit of your world.”
30 minutes
World Premiere: World Music/CrashARTS
ICA Boston
May 2008
Light, alive in its many forms, the Film Frame, the Lumia Box, Silent Cinema with live accompaniment, and the film "Blade Runner” are the inspirations for "FUSE”.
In the 1920s and 30s, Thomas Wilfred, a Dutch-born American artist sought to define light as an artform, coining the term "Lumia" to describe this new medium. Wilfred developed a self-contained mechanical device with a screen like a television set called the "Clavilux" to perform Lumia. This apparatus could play colorful and dynamic abstract light shows for days or months without repeating. Devising compositions for his "lumia boxes", Wilfred was able to choreograph color, volume, shape and movement trajectories of luminescent strokes to mesmerize viewers with elegant and vivid dances of light. After World War II, Wilfred found a new passion as an early pioneer of projection in theater. We were inspired to adapt Wilfredís ideas to an intermedia performance and have created our own lumia-box for the stage, envisioning it as a film frame or an oversized TV set.
We used Ridley Scottís 1982 film "Blade Runner", based on the cult novel by Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to structure FUSE. "Blade Runner is a masterpiece of spectacular set & lighting design and its intriguing cast of characters provided us the raw materials to choreograph a drama in tune with a constantly evolving score of light and sound.
“Wonderful, a tour de force!...a wild meditation on the TV set.”
“...it grows with more viewings. There is a lot going on there. You bit off something big and should feel nothing but pride...”
“Before the artistic collaboration of Kinodance, who knew dance, film, and the arts could be blended in such a way that the original boundaries between each medium ultimately seem to have never existed at all. In their mission to fuse the various arts, Kinodance succeeds.”
“...the movement suggested dramatic encounters. Characters seemed to stalk other characters, capture them, partner them in shadow duets. A woman ricocheted off the walls; I thought of Lillian Gish trapped in a closet in Broken Blossoms... a collection of scenes from German expressionism and silent movies...”
“At times the dancers look imprisoned; at other times they’re empowered, as they effortlessly swing up, catch hold of the ceiling, flip upside down, and hang like bats. It all adds to a state of beautiful unreality...
Kovgan’s images are often eerily evocative, like the displaced blue flicker from a TV in another room. Even when the action becomes frenetic, it’s hypnotically so. And some of the most powerful work comes in the slower, more ambient sections, which build to a surprisingly emotional pitch.”
Credits
Direction: Kinodance Company (Alissa Cardone, Alla Kovgan, Ingrid Schatz, Dedalus Wainwright)
Choreography: Alissa Cardone & Ingrid Schatz
Performance: Alissa Cardone, Stephanie Lanckton, DeAnna Pellechia & Ingrid Schatz
Music/Composition: Roger Miller, original score for prepared piano
Sets: Dedalus Wainwright
Film and Video Design: Alla Kovgan (with cinematography contributions by Mkrtych Malkhasyan)
Lights: Kathy Couch
Costumes: Laura Coulter
With the support from LEF Foundation, World Music/CrashArts, ICA-Boston & NEFA Meet the Composer