EQUILIBRIST

Cinema Installations/Live Sensor Transmission Performances/Projection Mapping. Supported by Creative New Zealand and commissioning partners. This project stemmed from Daniel Belton’s Creative New Zealand Choreographic Fellowship series LINE DANCES.

Official selection; Zentrum Paul Klee film installation commission for their “Pictures in Motion” 2016 Exhibition. Live Sensor Mapping and Projection Performance at Zentrum Paul Klee 2016 in association with Creative New Zealand, Massey University Wellington and Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (Featuring Daniel Belton and Tom Ward supported by Stuart Foster and Joshua Lewis). Multi-projection mapping commission for the major exhibition “Prozesse” 2016 at HBKSaar Media Facade in Saarbrücken, Germany in association with K8 and xm:lab. Finalist Selection ARFF Berlin International Awards; Semi-Finalist Berlin Shorts Award. Winner Best Experimental Film ARFF International Awards 2020; Winner Best Art Music Video International Music Video Awards Budapest 2022. Finalist Selection Rome Music Video Awards 2023.

For this performance and film project we combined live tracked sensor dance, utilising live mapping, projection and sound to create unique live performance events and activated cinematic journeys. Director Daniel Belton, designed and led this response-dialogue with Paul Klee’s lithograph “Der Seiltänzer”. Parameters set by screens, cameras and mapping technologies alter how the human body is perceived in space and in time. EQUILIBRIST is an evolving cinematic collage, which transforms, retimes and aligns itself during live digital transmission - the work is investigating and expanding ideas around balance and projection.

The climax for EQUILIBRIST is that it leads us to more possibilities for reading space; opening thresholds of dimension, and rediscovering the game of balance. Using analogue and digital recording methods we live-capture and re-project dance in a way that produces a memory sensation within the image. Through the eye of the camera we are looking for the interior essence of dance, and at how gravity can affect a choreographic relationship to line. This is sculpturally scaled in the projection field, and enhanced through motion capture with live performance. The theme of balance was an important one in Paul Klee’s art. It was a subject which he also emphasised to his students during his time as a teacher at the Bauhaus. Several of his works feature a tightrope walker, and in a lecture Paul Klee stated ‘The tightrope walker with his pole is a “symbol of the balance of forces”. He holds the forces of gravity in balance (weight and counterweight). He is a pair of scales’.

Digitally redrawn elements of Paul Klee’s work become the virtual scaffolding for a playful search with the human figure in space, again. Realtime effects generate physical traces, echoes and displacements which are triggered through sensor reprocessed performances. This conductor-receiver dynamic creates a tension in the work which sustains it - the relationships are subject to pressures and changes. All performance is time based, and we measure time through movement.

Paul Klee’s colleague, Oskar Schlemmer talked about the emblems of abstraction and mechanisation in art. He said ‘Among the emblems of our time are the new potentials of technology and invention which we can use to create altogether new hypotheses and which can thus engender, or at least give promise of, the boldest fantasies’. “Klee’s awareness of dualism - of the extremes between order and chaos, tragedy and comedy, the horizontal and the vertical - is central to his philosophy of art” Margaret Plant.

Key Creatives: Daniel Belton (Director/Designer/Concept/Film Editor/Cameras/Sound Design/Choreographic Direction/Digital Performer), Donnine Harrison (Digital Performer/Creative Producer/Co-Designer) with Jac Grenfell (Digital Motion Graphics/Cameras/Sound Design), Dr Anthony Ritchie (Piano), Emmett Hardie, Courtney Poulier, Katie Hurst-Saxon, Sir Jon Trimmer (Digital Performers), Tanya Carlson and Kelly Nichol (Costumiers), Donna Jefferis (ZPK Performance Costumier), Tom Ward and Daniel Belton (ZPK Live Performers/Choreographers), Stuart Foster and Joshua Lewis (ZPK Performance Mocap/Projection/Live Technical Support).

Best Experimental Film Around International Film Festival Berlin* Best Art Music Video International Music Video Awards Budapest*

Mapping Film excerpt for HBKSaar Media Facade Exhibition "Prozesse": https://vimeo.com/dbel/prozesse

“The performance and the choreography of the EQUILIBRIST matched perfectly with the topics of our exhibition Paul Klee: Moving Images, all the more as it resulted from an exhaustive study of Paul Klee's art theory and pictorial thinking. It was the highlight of our program of this year that comprehended various dance companies to develop their choreographies in the context of our exhibition. The EQUILIBRIST was a fascinating and highly innovative approach to Paul Klee's idea of motion and enthused the large public as well as the Klee team.

The collaboration and the challenging rehearsal process of Good Company Arts with our technical team was excellent and highly professional. Daniel Belton and Tom Ward as performers as well as Stuart Foster and Josh Lewis who were responsible for operating the projection scenography and motion capture proved as very gifted and committed artists.

The aim of EQUILIBRIST to be a powerful sensory experience for the audience as well as an investigating and expanding choreographic research on balance and dimension was completely fulfilled” Dr Michael Baumgartner, Zentrum Paul Klee.

"Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another'' Federico Fellini