Troika Ranch used enough spycams, body movement sensors and other high-tech gizmos in their performance last Thursday to easily bury the company’s four dancers under an avalanche of extension cords, video recorder tripods and electrical tape.
But their creation, “Future of Memory,” which travels to the 42nd St. Duke Theater in New York City on Feb. 27, proved that only one thing was more carefully scripted than the eclectic movements and concise choreography: the non-stop interaction between organic dancer and electronic, digitalized apparatus. This show seamlessly combined man-made, unflinching machinery with a technically stunning array of modern dance techniques and styles.
The hour-long production, which explored the ways memory is stored, lost and revived, had an unfortunate, but inspirational, birth. Troika Ranch Artistic Director Mark Coniglio was in New York during the Sept. 11 attacks and the photographs of victims displayed publicly after the tragedy scorched a singular scar into his mind.
“I saw the towers come down,” Coniglio explained. On Sept. 15, he returned to lower Manhattan.
“I was walking out of the subway when I saw pictures,” he said.
The prints that caught his eye, part of the somber, endless displays that dotted the landscape soon after the towers collapsed, were more than simply mugshots of victims. They were life portraits, hundreds upon hundreds of visual anecdotes without words, driving quickly into his heart.
“There were personal pictures of people at birthdays and weddings,” he said. To him, the presence of these photos had an immeasurable impact because they allowed victims to transcend numbers and endure as individuals. Soon after taking in the moving, yet horrid, sight, his creative mind began to wonder, “Why are photographs so important?”
“Future of Memory,” performed for the first time before a standing room only crowd in Warner Main Space, used motion-activated sounds and video projections to weave a fluid yet often ambiguous web of memories and storylines, which become jumbled and rearranged during the performance. Four distinct characters were defined and developed through the piece, and each portrayal was interwoven with visual cues as well as ambient sounds, whose pitch, timbre and duration were regulated both by the dancer in performance and by the sound board.
Coniglio handled the board from the balcony, cuing the activation of the dancers’ movement sensors. The technology behind this was amazing: body motion sensors worn by the dancers were linked to film projections, sound effects and music.
Through the system, a projection may advance a frame each time the dancer bends an arm. Entire musical pieces can be composed as a dancer moves across the space. The result is a wonderfully organic composition.
“Ninety percent of the movement is improvised,” Coniglio said. “The show is like a collage of four peoples’ memories.”
Starting with four empty pedestals onstage, objects linked to each character during the performance were immortalized on the stands, suggesting the sense of a pictorial memory. The objects – three tall glasses, a plastic bowl with spoon, a pair of boots and a shiny stone – were replaced after each storyline had concluded.
A video compilation, including waves tossing up on a beach, footage from a camera in the hands of somebody running haphazardly down a boardwalk, blood dripping onto bare feet and a water droplet rippling into a calm, first blue then fading to red liquid, vividly resembling a bomb’s explosion all served as a compliment to the memories held up high on the pedestal. The video, in fact, was repeated frequently throughout the performance, first as an unknown reference to tales yet unspun, and later as a reminder of stories already told.
Though the genre of dancing done in the performance all falls under the heading “Modern Dance,” many distinct styles and sources are integrated into that genre and were prevalent in the performance. “The Future of Memory” employed the notable form known as Contact Improvisation, a partnered form that actually originated in Warner Main in 1972.
The premise of Contact Improv is the partners’ shared connectivity, giving each other weight at the point of contact to sense each other’s movement. They create the dance simultaneously, with no one person actually leading.
Dancer Michou Szabo said that combining dancing with words and acting made “Future of Memory” extremely complex to choreograph and refine.
Coniglio, to his credit, has fostered this creative atmosphere since day one.
When they first began the project, the five dancers in the permanent troupe (one of whom did not perform Thursday) were each sent out to find five items that would help them define a character. When they returned, Coniglio ordered them to have imaginary amnesia. They were told to pretend that they had no memories, and that they were to build an entire personality based on items in the room. “We created the characters from there,” Coniglio said.
“We have to speak, manipulate technology, be musicians and be theatrical,” said Szabo, adding that the sixty-minute performance took a year to create. The company has performed excerpts before, and they used that experience and feedback to improve the overall effect. Sometimes certain ideas or movements may seem arbitrary, but the majority of the dancing improvised in performance follows one golden rule.
“We do what seems appropriate,” Szabo said. “We try to never say ‘no.’”