SOMA SONGS
Digital Cinema Transmissions/Sonic-Sculpture Installations/Projection Mapping/Film Installations/AV Performance Livesets.
World Premiere: Performance Installation featuring Daniel Belton (percussion, tuning forks octave), Jan-Bas Bollen (sensor bass, bowed tuning forks, electronics), Jac Grenfell (tri-format projection mapping) and Good Company Arts. Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand 2005. Official selection; Body Festival Christchurch, NZ 2006; Otago Festival of the Arts Dunedin, NZ 2006; Tempo Festival Auckland, NZ 2006; Fuel Festival Waikato Museum of Art, NZ 2006. Official selection Canariasmediafest 12th Canarias International Video and Multimedia Festival, Spain 2006; Finalist VideoDansa Barcelona Prize 2007, IDN Festival, Spain. Official selection VAD Video and Digital Arts Festival, International Competition, Girona, Spain 2007. Official selection ABC of Dance4Film for Channel4UK produced by MJW Productions London and Circe Films Melbourne 2008. Finalist ReelDance Awards Sydney for Best Dance Film Australia 2008. Official selection Sala Parpallo Art Gallery, Valencia, Spain 2008; TTV Performing Arts on Screen International Festival, Riccione, Italy 2008. Official selection LIVE_REPEAT_PLAYBACK Symposium AUT University Auckland, NZ 2010. Official selection Auckland Festival NZPQ11 Auckland, NZ 2011. Official selection NZ Exhibition PQ11 Prague Quadrennial, Prague, Czech Republic 2011 (AV Performance Series/Installations). Paired with TIMEDANCE in the Good Company Arts 2012 New Zealand festivals tour as AV live performances by Belton and Grenfell. Official live programme selection Festival Internacional de la Imagen 2012, Manizales, Colombia (Liveset). Official selection Bauhaus University Facade Performances and Projection Mapping at Genius Loci Weimar International Video Mapping Festival, Weimar, Germany 2013. Official selection World Stage Design Festival 2013, Cardiff, UK; Romaeuropa International Festival 2013, Rome, Italy; xm:lab in association with N.O.W DanceSaar Internationales Tanzfestival for Media Facade HBKsaar, Saarbrücken, Germany 2013. Official selection Museo de Arte Moderno, 2014 Buenos Aires, Argentina. Toitū Settlers Museum film installation, Dunedin 2015. Official selection and co-commission Aarhus Festival for DOKK1 as “SOMA SONGS MORE LIGHT” in association with Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa, Henrik Elburn, ProShop Europe and Aarhus Festuge, Denmark (10x21K projectors and sound). AV Liveset for the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Awards (Daniel Belton), Auckland 2015. Official invite to Immaginare La Danza International Conference, Rome, Italy 2015; Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting AV Livesets, Yokohama, Japan 2018.
Funders and co-commissioning bodies include: Screen Innovation Production Fund, Otago Community Trust, Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa, British Council New Zealand, Royal Netherlands Embassy, Gaudeamus Foundation, Goethe Institut New Zealand, NZPQ11, Aarhus European Capital of Culture, Aarhus Festuge Denmark.
Soma Songs can be defined in terms of how we project into, draw, mark out, and imprint our journeys on the world around us. The choreography and music for this project evolved through workshop processes. We trace our stories of architecture from the first attempts to capture and hold space with stone. The skeletons of stone structures have sat with us for millennia. There is embedded rhythm in all of the work for Soma Songs. The Soma Songs blocks in their flat two dimensional form are sound glyphs. They represent a musical notation system - tone links with alphabetical characteristic in code - cubit sound. The digital glyphs have elements we can associate with the structural characteristics of music when they follow a linear trajectory, and pattern is evident. Inherent in this is the connection to the filmed human body as glyph - digital gestures become holographic and hieroglyphic in the context of cinematic motion.
Architectural rhythm is read by scanning the surfaces of planes, as in scanning a musical score, reading the patterns the notes make in time. When you set up a curve, you set up a rhythm. The curve signals rotation - there is more length on the curved surface than a flat surface which implies accelerated movement. Curves signify returned movement. Light is both wave and particle. In Soma Songs the idea is to conduct this energy and its resulting memory. Light has a consciousness, geometric forms affect us because there is consciousness in the form. We are on the edge of shadow when we engage in the architecture of light - spaces and forms come alive when given the pulse of human presence. For Soma Songs, it is the movement of the dancers which engineers the space - they are activating and defining the constructed architecture. Reflections and refractions occur in response to shifts in frequency of light and colour. The synaesthetic event happens when these are synchronised with sound.
Our soundscape and performed movement share a common logic which determines how they relate. Aspects of the sound are triggered by specific movements and actions from the dance figures. Choreography and space changes determine a reconfiguration of the structure built in the opening film sequence. This enlarged device now suggests a ship or a library. The dancers actions are deciphering sound, engaging navigation and enabling the reassembled vessel to travel at warp speed.
Live AV Transmission Excerpts:
https://vimeo.com/dbel/somapro | https://vimeo.com/dbel/somadenmark | https://vimeo.com/dbel/somatokyo | https://vimeo.com/dbel/somaflotokyo
Projection Mapping Excerpts:
https://vimeo.com/dbel/somasongs-aarhusfestival | https://vimeo.com/dbel/somasongs-aarhusfestival-3
Finalist VideoDansa Barcelona Prize IDN Festival Spain* Finalist ReelDance Awards Sydney Australia*
Reviews
Ghosts in the Machine
Reviewed by David Eggleton | New Zealand Listener Magazine | 23 Jul 2005
At the beginning of Soma Songs, two male dancers, dressed in white overalls, move in nimble fashion along the wall of a limestone quarry, not so much representing labourers at work as symbolising a line of energy, like a ripple of light, being emitted by the high white wall. Soma Songs is a multimedia touring dance performance that takes the form of digital video projected onto three separate screens and was supported at its premiere by a platform of live music. It's part of an ongoing series of dance works – the 15th in 12 years – put together by choreographer Daniel Belton and his collaborators, known collectively as Good Company. Belton's recent pieces show an obsession with what might be termed technological mysticism (that intersection where the ghost in the machine blends with the human spirit), which is expressed through (or compressed into) the power of dance. Soma Songs, all film sequences, resembles something sewn together out of scraps of gossamer: it's delicate and ethereal. A sawn block of stone becomes by turns a stumbling block, a puzzle block, a juggling block and a building block: it's a cosmic cube, a cornerstone of the universe. The dancers (Belton and visiting Brit Tom Ward), positioned mostly as white blurred figures against a dark background, so spectral that they resemble holograms, dance rings around the cube like forces that have been released from within it. The music, put together by Dutch composer Jan-Bas Bollen, evokes core samples, sound waves, a planetary hum. There are scrapings on stones, the clack of sticks. Bass guitar thrummings are augmented by tapped tuning forks, and hands being waved over infra-red sensors to trigger bursts of white noise. Digital artist Jac Grenfell fills in the video screens with computer-assisted designs of half-circles, circles, angles and grids: the cube turns into a 3D jigsaw, its component parts disassembled then reassembled by the dancers. These dancers, made to vibrate mesmerisingly like hummingbirds, or stage fits like psychotics in strait-jackets, pull their own dance phrases apart, then rebuild them, their time-lapse movements reminiscent of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's gridded photographic sequences designed to accurately demonstrate human movement. By the end, the dancers arrive at a state of anti-gravity still clinging to their cube mother-lode, which now resembles a spacelab. Two figures in space, they are stranded there without lifelines. The effect is haunting, and brilliantly realised.
Soma Songs
Dunedin Public Art Gallery | Jun 24-26 2005 | Dunedin Entertainment Guide.
This stunning programme of dance, architecture and sound showed recently at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. It is a collaboration between Daniel Belton and his Good Company of international and local guests. Three screens of video projection showed dance and geometrical investigation, with poignant animation by Jac Grenfell, and twisting, every-space-covered dance by Belton and Tom Ward (UK). This projected dance is not ‘real’ dance as Belton comments,“you can’t hear the breathing” but perhaps this is ‘augmented’ dance, where the dance is slowed, or quickened, there are close-ups and animated shapes. Yet the experience was nearly as good - your eyes are drawn back and forth across the performance area immersing the audience in the spectacle. Jan Bas Bollen from Amsterdam with the live sound performance from himself and Daniel Belton gave the performance its groove and magic. Their laid-back approach and alien instrumentation was spot-on, as they played up to the screens. Nigel Jenkins’ is again lending his technical sound expertise to Good Company, and Aduki’s dancers’ costumes were belled in the pants like Gene Kelly’s sailor suits. Dunedin is fortunate to be home to such a talented crew. It is the networking of creative people that makes Good Company and impressive unit making highly original works. Fantastic!
Electronic Wizardry at Work
Soma Songs | Dunedin Public Art Gallery | Jun 24-26 2005 | Review by Alison East | Otago Daily Times
Daniel Belton and Jan Bas Bollen enter the packed auditorium and seat themselves at their sound desks. The highly complex musical “weaponry” includes programmed laser beams, computers, microphones and bass guitar, rocks and tuning forks. Behind them, on three large screens, the video images appear as a series of jerky, sporadic, changing and evolving shapes and figures. A rock wall is navigated by two dancers who jump around the page like human hieroglyphs. We become like archaeologists mining a dark interior landscape of stone. The sonics created by Belton and Bollen sound like chisels on rock, cut through by other sounds, as a hand is passed over the laser beam. This is the Belton teams’ most mature work yet. I say team, because one cannot help but marvel at the integration of art forms at play here. Videographer Jac Grenfell is also a master of 3D animation software and digital image re-sampling. Other important artists include sound engineer Nigel Jenkins, international guest dancer Tom Ward, and artist Peter Belton. Producer Donnine Harrison has helped put it all together. There are too many important others to mention. The highly innovative 65 - minute event of moving geometry, building pulsating rhythms and shifting light takes us on a strange genealogical journey through mathematical and architectural time, leaving us floating on the final structure like humans lost in space. Well done, team.
Circular Linear Motion - Expanding, Contracting Light and Sound
Reviewed By Bronwyn Judge | DANZ Magazine | Sept 2005 | Daniel Belton and Good Company | Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Soma Songs is an unusual and riveting work involving acclaimed international artists from various media. Unlike conventional dance performances, the live element is the presence of the technical wizards: image resampler and projectionist New Zealander Jac Grenfell and audio resampler and composer Jan-Bas Bollen from Holland. British dancer Tom Ward and Daniel Belton greatly add to the success of the piece when they appear as digital footage. It would not do it justice to call it simply a dance work, although the performance is devised by choreographer Daniel Belton and Good Company. There is in fact no live dance as such, Daniel and Jan- Bas provide live music, using sensor sound to accompany an intricate engrossing film show that covers three large projection screens. The screens are filled with examples of Greek architecture, building blocks and dancing figures in a dizzying progression of morphed images retaining just enough information to be recognisable and yet altered to a degree that requires an audience’s serious focus and involvement to read. The most impressive aspect of this performance is the superb integration of every element into the whole. Even the graphics of the title are spelt out in computer-generated circles and lines for the opening screen shot. There is an intriguing play between what is real and what is virtual and this is carried through different layers of the work. Dancers spectacularly spin upside down with ease while set design modules are carried as if they are weighty blocks of Oamaru stone and are shifted with apparent difficulty. It is essentially a monochromatic piece but the senses are assaulted, such is the speed and complexity with which the artwork is projected. Soma Songs could be termed intellectual in content. It doesn’t really touch the lush landscape of the emotions and is definitely a masculine work. The next project in the pipeline is apparently a female version. It is tantalising to anticipate whether it would do as much for defining gender specific dance as this choreography of architecture and the human form in constant circular and linear motion, cradled by waves of expanding and contracting light and sound.