TIMEDANCE
Digital Cinema Transmissions with Live Dance and Music Performance/Media Installations/Projection Mapping/Web Streaming/Film. Funders/Support Partners: Creative New Zealand, Otago Community Trust, The Body Festival, New Zealand School of Dance, Good Company Arts in association with music ensemble STROMA.
TIMEDANCE - an algebra of movement (World Premieres): The Body Festival 2012, Christchurch, New Zealand; Tempo Festival, Auckland, NZ 2012. Official selection Dunedin Public Art Gallery screenings and online streaming 2012. Official selection CINEDANS 2013 (Film Festival Auditorium Installation), The Eye, National Centre for Moving Image, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Official selection AV live editions for the Bauhaus University Facade as part of Genius Loci Weimar International Video Mapping Festival 2013, Weimar, Germany. Official selections: World Stage Design Festival 2013, Cardiff, UK; Romaeuropa International Festival 2013, Rome, Italy. Official selection Athens Video Dance Project 2014, Athens, Greece. A bespoke commissioned edition of TIMEDANCE was projection mapped across the Chowdiah Memorial Hall Facade to open the 2015 Attakkalari India Biennial in Bangalore. Official selection Soundislands Festival 2015 AV installations for ArtScience Museum Singapore. Re-worked film editions of TIMEDANCE appear in Good Company Arts projection mapping events “Theatre of Light”.
TIMEDANCE is in one sense a study of the dancer in action. Sinews of time - this is the algebra. It is not only examining but also restoring - reuniting from fragments. These pieces are coalescing to make the dance.
The root of the word algebra comes from Arabic ‘al-jabr’ which translates as ‘the reunion of broken parts,’ or ‘bone setting,’ and from ‘jabara’ which means to ‘reunite or restore’.
Acknowledging the early pioneers of photography, cinematography, and modern dance this work investigates breaking and restoring. TIMEDANCE is about extending our capacity to be fluid and receptive - to be open to the mystery of things. Etienne-Jules Marey’s methods of recording movement revolutionised our way of visualising time and motion. Best remembered for his chronophotography, Marey constructed a single camera system that led the way to the invention of cinematography. Photodynamism marks the intermovement fractions existing in the passages between seconds. We are working in a similar way to dematerialise the human figure - to reveal the exegesis of the dance. In the screen artefacts left behind the moving body a vibrant energy of gestures is seen. The dancer signals expanding consciousness, sliding through space, dissolving time. Using analogue and digital recording methods we have captured dance in a way that produces a memory sensation within the image.
Post production visualisations of sound are constructed in the film space using complex geometries, and this is in dialogue with the filmed dancer. It is a conductor-receiver relationship where the human form is augmented within the digital space through the use of hand held objects. The unique partnering system devised and taught by Daniel Belton, expands the physical relationship of the dancer to and from their spatial environment.
Human beings are standing wave patterns of energy - we are complex harmonics. Our bodies look solid, but from another frequency, we might look like luminous orbs with filaments of light transmitting as energy fields: the dancers leave trajectories of light hanging in space from their bodies in Time Dance. These become the spatial architecture through which the dancers move. For this work we establish a series of physical displacements which are sculpturally expanded upon in film, and enhanced through the music by composer Michael Norris for STROMA. This is both reflective and revelatory, and suggests we dance with our own memory, our individual and collective stories. Goethe said “Geometry is frozen music”.
Film Excerpts:
https://vimeo.com/dbel/timedancebauhaus
https://vimeo.com/dbel/timedanceartsci
https://vimeo.com/dbel/theatrelight
Reviews
Time Dance at the Tempo Dance Festival
The New Zealand Herald | Dance review for Time Dance, Live at Q Theatre | By Raewyn Whyte | Oct 18 2012
Dunedin-based choreographer/film maker Daniel Belton has received a string of international awards for his avant-garde short films. His most recent release, Time Dance, a feature of Tempo Dance Festival, shows why he has been winning those accolades.
The first figure we see on the big screen is apparently comprised of tubes and has courtly bearing. He bows and greets invisible others with a grand flourish, apparently at home in inky black space overlaid with heavenly constellations comprised of traceries of dots interconnected by fine lines. By the end of this extraordinary work, 38 minutes later, we have seen many variations on the human form. These range from real dancers performing in real time in the studio and among the strange rock formations at Castle Hill, to their movement sequences treated via 3D animation, edited, abstracted, layered, and intercut into impossible formations.
The most compelling sequences are the "real" ones dancers Alex Leonhartsberger and Verity Jacobsen in an extended Sarabande, and Mathew Roffe and Andrew Miller engaging in martial moves with brandished staves. The film is beautifully accompanied by the Stroma ensemble, conducted by Hamish McKeich.
The score by Michael Norris shimmers in much the same way as the film, and is derived from a Baroque dance suite by Bach. At times the musicians take your eye away from the film, as they are fascinating to watch. A live AV presentation of a much more abstract Belton film, Soma Songs, follows after a short break.
Review for Danz Quarterly 2013 Dr Claudia Rosiny (Bern). Time Dance by Daniel Belton and Good Company Arts (NZ).
Daniel Belton, head of Good Company Arts, based in Dunedin, New Zealand, produced a new dance film, Time Dance. This work under the subtitle “an algebra of movement” had its web premiere on November 10th and can be seen on the companies website under http://www.goodcompanyarts.com/. The idea for Time Dance grew out of Belton’s last series of seven short films, as he himself explains in the program notes on his website. Line Dances (2010) were inspired by artist Paul Klee and the Bauhaus school. Time Dance is about what the title says – time as an essential parameter of dance is shown as visual markings of movement. In collaboration with composer Michael Norris and the music provided by the new music ensemble Stroma from New Zealand, these 40 minutes of black and white film float in front of your eyes and ears like a mesmerizing meditation on time and space. The visuality of time, dismantled into traces of movement, is amazing and demonstrates a very unique way of exploiting movement, music and visual art.
The film starts on a single aural level: For nearly one minute of a black screen we listen to a flittering violin solo with high tones. This tunnelling leads us into a different time world when suddenly a negative image of a solo dancer in a white suite emerges out of the dark showing stroboscopic effects of his movements. Canadian experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren created an ingenious work with a similar effect in 1968. His method of making phases of movement visible in Pas de deux was at that time based on an intricate technique of putting single frames together. Like McLaren, Belton was inspired by French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey who invented chronophotography at the end of the 19th century. Belton worked with digital artists who beside analogue methods used digital effects that result in a highly conceptual landscape not only showing the “algebra of movement”, of reuniting broken parts, but also geometric grids and moving points maps.
The film consists of seven sections headed with titles referring to the music like “Rondeau”, “Polonaise” or “Menuet”. It is also the floating and rhythmic music of the Stroma quartet that adds to the concept. Norris based his composition on Bach’s famous Suite No.2 in B minor. It is the flow of the baroque music and subtle elements of live electronics that fit to the abstractions of movement. In some chapters the dancers hold a stave in their hand and this reinforces the formal movements. And here we see the link to his Line Dances and Oskar Schlemmer’s slat dance. Especially strong are those sections when body movements with slats and the grid and points map are multiplied to several duets that balance on virtual geometric pathways and are furthermore mirrored. As well as the end of the film when a solo dancer in reversed image trails away into a landscape that was shot on Castle Hill near Christchurch. With Time Dance Daniel Belton confirms his unique signature in creating dance films.
In DANZ Quarterly’s 2012 Critic’s Survey Raewyn Whyte selected Time Dance as one of the “Highlights of the Year”. Daniel Belton and the Time Dance project featuring collaboration from New Zealand School of Dance students was acknowledged with “Outstanding Choreography”.
DANZ Quarterly Summer 2013 excerpt review of Tempo Festival by Raewyn Whyte
Daniel Belton’s new avant garde dance film Time Dance held the audience enthralled with its ever changing imagery ranging from real dancers performing in real time in the studio or amongst the strange rock formations at Castle Hill, to their movement sequences treated via 3D animation, edited, abstracted, layered and intercut into impossible formations, and overlaid with fine lines similar to spider webs and drawings of the heavenly constellations. This beautiful film was accompanied by live music - a score by Michael Norris sensitively played by the Stroma ensemble conducted by Hamish McKeich.
Highlights from this year's Tempo Festival
Excerpt from review by Francesca Horsley | November 10 2012 | Listener Magazine
One of the highlights of the festival was Daniel Belton's Time Dance and Soma Songs, intricate integrations of dance and film - the former beautifully accompanied by the ensemble Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich. Belton's award-winning films are dazzling intellectual riddles in which he transposes the human form through digital manipulation to investigate themes of mathematical scale, history and connections to topography.
Running contrary to a contemporary notion that immediate fulfilment is all-important, Belton sees the body as an agent for inquiry. He removes dancers from traditional, earthbound settings and juxtaposes them on film with stone, ancient sculpture or abstract design, invoking the laws of physics and geometry - in much the way of an astronaut or space traveller - enabling us to re-imagine or re-see history or art. Dancers are dwarfed on screen, then brought back to full-bodied life, sometimes as fanciful characters.
Through these images Belton hints at the enduring cycles that connect and bind us. The composition by Stroma artistic director, Michael Norris, referencing JS Bach's precision, wonderfully illuminates these mysterious journeys.
SOPHISTICATED, TIMELESS AND INTERNATIONAL IN SCOPE
Tempo Dance Festival 2012 | Time Dance and Soma Songs | Daniel Belton and Good Company Arts Q Theatre Auckland, 17 Oct 2012 | Theatre News | Reviewed by Jennifer Nikolai
Two pieces intricately layered with parallel through-lines, gave audiences an extraordinary experience that left us wanting more. Good Company Arts, Stroma and collaborators have a history of producing numerous award-winning projects making dance theatre works and art films on the subject of human movement.
Seeing both for the first time, the experience of the new work Time Dance was contextualised by SOMA SONGS, clearly an initial investigation into concepts that Time Dance explored further, but with a life of its own. As stated in the programme - yes, it IS “a testimony to the creative team behind SOMA SONGS that 7 years after it's first release, this unique project is gaining new interest on the international stage.”
In both works we experience a playful study of human movement and our relationship to our origins, to nature and more dominantly to the history of 20th and 21st century technologies in motion capture, photography and cinematography.
Time Dance is sophisticated and equally accessible, timeless and international in scope. It resonates as a reference to the conception of moving image, to the pioneers of modern dance, to the algebraic systems surrounding human movement. In relationship to these large systems, Time Dance pays attention to detail, through smaller studies repeated, augmented and transformed. Such attention to detail is refreshing, at such a high calibre.
Imagine what audiences initially experienced when they saw the first moving images on screen.We were exposed to a similar rare experience of viewing silent cinema with accompanying live musicians playing a stunning musical score. Live and pre-recorded sounds intertwined, as did musicians, dancers and conductors, alternating roles.
The marriage between human movement studies and the dancing subject has a long history, to which Time Dance has now substantially contributed. For those of us who see dance as an ideal form to investigate moving image technologies and time; this work gives weight to dance as the form that integrates the human figure and our more timeless relationship to geometry, geography, our journey, our planet and the passage of time.
The live and digital dancer make these studies more than a possibility, they become poetry in this work. The dance composition and performance of movement vocabulary linked thoughtfully, accurately, beautifully to the history of modern dance, human movement studies and studies in light. Dance and the moving image create a language that gives each of these subjects respect and consideration.
Time is manipulated, altered and manufactured through the duration of the performance experience. The pace at which these collaborative artists have determined the length and subject matter within the arc of the larger work as a whole, is so satisfying. Each of the seven studies is developed with individual nuances that allow viewers to be entertained investigators, a delightful combination in such a proposed study. The moment where we get a close-up of the dancers in their duet, we get lost in who they are, how they move and their larger relationship to space. We see them, we want to see more, we get to see just enough, and we move on.
This element of tease and surprise returns again when we finally get to see a live performer enter the performance space, as she looks at herself, projected. Her presence is enormous, she occupies all of the space and yet she moves minimally in this live space, in dialog with herself and the environment. Geometry, geography, duration all meet in this moment. As the piece climaxes and then concludes, the experience of the work seems to have occurred so rapidly, with such satisfaction. Collaborators appear for a curtain call, there is a short interval and then we get more!
SOMA SONGS was a delightful accompaniment to Time Dance in its more playful manner, showing first attempts to explore space with stone. Again, investigating human relationship to materials in search of stories of architecture, the delightful play with scale as space and sound, was made even more playful with puzzles, landscape and echoes of initial studies in human movement with male subjects. Experimentation with light parallel to geographic stratification again references time and the relationships between human-made and natural forms. The live VJ and live audio processing performances were just as fascinating to watch as visual and sound cues rapidly moved again, so quickly through this work; a stunning accompaniment to Time Dance.
The relationships between SOMA SONGS and Time Dance make for a beautiful programme. Performances on screen and stage were equally stunning, giving full support to this intricate conceptual web that Belton and his numerous highly acclaimed collaborators have designed. These works are internationally transferrable, timeless, accessible and sophisticated. Thank you for a stunning collaboration, may we see more. We want more.