AXIS - water planet
AXIS - anatomy of space
World First 360 Dome Cinema Dance Film with Kinetic Sculpture, Choral and Electronic Music. Performance Installations supported by the Asia New Zealand Co-Commissioning Fund of Creative New Zealand, The Arts House Singapore, Otago Museum and Royal New Zealand Ballet. Funded by Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa, Otago Community Trust, Dunedin City Council, Asia New Zealand Foundation and associated partners.
World Premiere: Perpetual Guardian Planetarium, Otago Museum as part of ID Fashion Week 2017, NZ. Asian Premiere: The Arts House, Singapore, opening Soundislands Festival 2017 (Performance/Installation). Official selection: Festival de la Imagen and ISEA 2017, Manizales, Colombia; Tempo Dance Festival, STARDOME, Auckland, NZ (Matariki Festival 2017); The Oceanic Exhibition NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore 2018; International Computer Music Conference, Daegu, Korea 2018 (Finalist); iD Dunedin 2019 live-projection edition; Auckland Live Aotea Square Mediawall Installation in association with DANZ 2019. Official Selection Sino Digital Garden (Water Planet Edition) 2019, Hong Kong. Niio x Art Asia Awards 2019 (Finalist) inaugural Niio x Art Asia Awards 2019 catalogue selection. Awards Finalist at San Francisco Dance Film Festival 2019, USA. Art Basel Official Selection curated by Bitforms Gallery in association with Niio. Award Winner at Esports Digital Art Prizes 2019 hosted by Niio and Cyberport, Hong Kong.
Key Creatives: Director/Designer Daniel Belton with Donnine Harrison (Creative Producer), Jac Grenfell (Dome Specialist), Joyce Beetuan Koh/PerMagnus Lindborg (Music Composers), Jim Murphy (Kinetic Sculpture), Tanya Carlson (Couture) and artists of the Royal New Zealand Ballet (Dance Performers).
"Axis – anatomy of space is poetry" Theatreview
"A visually stunning work" Otago Daily Times
"Axis is a scintillating show in every way — pushing the boundaries and breaking new artistic ground" Theatreview
The human voice vibrates as a choral partner to the digital dancer in motion for this full dome and expanded cinema project. AXIS creates a polydimensional arena where dancers can multilocate in the blink of an eye. In this elastic field, figures switch places like notes on a musical score. Through the eye of the camera we look to dematerialise the body in motion so that it becomes idealised - further extracted from personality. With the same evolutionary effect as was followed by the ancient Greeks in their search for beauty, AXIS offers a resonating, lyrical space. Dancers are seen travelling through apertures tensioned with the happening of projected light. Their choreography establishes a circuitry of luminosity. Like a great celestial dynamo, the dome environment transmits oscillating digital dance and sound - illuminating song cycles in a cosmic choreography of light.
We are each made up of photons. Photons are particles of light. Light is inspiration. Every space has an ‘anatomy’. The visualisation of sound for AXIS arrives through a music notation system synchronised to the generation of pure light - expanded points and lines. Optical devices, along with mapping and sound technologies alter how the human body is perceived in space and in time. Sequenced code renders geometry that is traversed by the dancer in motion during digital transmission. Human beings are standing wave patterns of energy - we are complex harmonics. Our bodies are solid, but from another frequency, we might look like filaments of light transmitting as energy fields. Ultimately our physical bodies are the products of wave actions. For AXIS - anatomy of space, the breathing dancer signals expanding consciousness.
We are electrical beings and storytelling beings. In an inspirational sense the pull of this work is creating a language that encodes human gesture and voice in projected light environments. Every space has an ‘anatomy’. Imagine a great loom of light that outputs cascading dance and music for 360 degree domes and site specific locations. This work shifts the viewer back and forward in accelerated time in a new digital cinema that unravels and folds the ambient filmic contents of the work into a space odyssey. The dancers are engineers of this dynamic orrery-like environment. The visualisation of sound for AXIS arrives through a music notation system synced to the generation of pure light - expanded points and lines. This virtual acoustic architecture creates the dialogue with the human figure. AXIS was the worlds first Dance Cinema designed for Full Dome Planetariums - it creates an alternating space where projected digital dance merges with intricate motion graphics and surround sound.
ALL-ENCOMPASSING ENGAGEMENT
AXIS - anatomy of space | Choreographer/Director: Daniel Belton for Good Company Arts at Stardome Auckland | 21-22 Jun 2017 | Reviewed by Jennifer Nikolai for Theatreview
Axis – anatomy of space is a collaboration between Good Company Arts and renowned artists Joyce Beetuan Koh, PerMagnus Lindborg, Tanya Carson, Jac Grenfell, Donnine Harrison and artists of the Royal New Zealand Ballet with director Daniel Belton (Program note). Axis – anatomy of space is poetry.
This 360-degree full dome cinema work is pioneered by an extraordinary collaborative interdisciplinary team. New Zealand audiences are fortunate to have the opportunity to experience this work with such high calibre artists in the accessible and experientially inviting venue, the dome. 360 dance can more traditionally be viewed on mobile devices, through VR headsets or projected in cinematic venues but this reflection of light and the relationship we have to natural light extends us through the capacity to be able to look around the night sky. The venue itself, The Stardome Observatory and Planetarium makes possible an experience otherwise non-achievable. This is a venue that urban dwellers may go to, to connect with our night sky, with the solar system. The technology of a 360-degree cinematic experience takes us through an illuminated constellation surrounding us as we sit back, lean back, look around, and choose the 360-degree perspective we wish to experience. Looking into the cinematic dome, we see our solar system illuminated. But this work is more than just the exceptional opportunity we have to experience this genre in a public space. The collaborators in this exquisite work, have significantly created that all-embracing principle of higher unity (Good Company program notes: from Lama Govinda) that unfolds in the experience of being part of this experience.
It is rare to feel such a sense of all-encompassing engagement with what we humans may recognise as space, the universe, natural forces, the breath of life and the relationships all things living, the sun and the moon, the waves we hear on coastal shores in New Zealand and the connection we have with that vast open sky that we look up to each night. This too, is the relationship we have to the physical self and our breath, our blood and life force... all in the poetry of Axis – anatomy of space.
So beautifully solar and sonic is this experience of staring up and around at high contrast black and white dancers, illuminated shapes and the occasional, highly impactful blue ball that represents breath, water, the moon, or the circulation of all things connected. The significance of black and white in the conception of moving image, although dominant, is contrasted minimally with a radiant blue, but only occasionally. With the subtle teasing of blue illuminations, the blue circle or cycle concludes the work, as the crashing of waves also closes the mesmerising sound-score. Environmental, found sound is sourced from insects, and waves in contrast to vocal sounds that play in an extraordinary range through its musical score. Voices in nature, in symphony; also move the visualisations of the artists of the Royal New Zealand Ballet. The quality of dance in motion is slow and repetitive. Sequencing of images are meditative. The repeated variation of solos and duets colliding as do stars, shape pathways and particles in the geometry of space. The ethereal essence of the dancers guides the overall quality of the work, with subtle movement choices that punctuate anomalies in nature, or rest as in the breath, within a musical score.
The sound creates a cosmos. Dancers are the cosmos. The human form interacting with line in the 360-degree perspective fully respects and challenges the technology in an affective and rare viewing experience. Axis – anatomy of space is poetic, meditative and harmonic. In the tradition of Good Company Arts, the development of optical devices and sound technologies with the divine performances of Royal New Zealand Ballet artists creates once again, a stunningly unflawed work. Good Company Arts, director Daniel Belton and collaborators set the bar for optical, moving image experiences and dance. As a taster representing the calibre of The Tempo Dance Festival 2017, this work is an extraordinary initiator of so many more, strong dance works to come.
