Large-scale interactive acoustic and performance space.
Creation: Sarah Fdili Alaoui and Roxanne Nesbitt
Dancer: Alexa Mardon
Self and Self-Portraits is an interactive installation and performance bridging dance, music, digital technology and architecture. In Self and Self-Portraits the movements of a performer produce sound through interaction with a digital soundscape and a large-scale acoustic spatial instrument. The instrument is a series of metal strings stretched across the space in the configuration of Rudolf Laban’s kinesphere. During the performance, the dancer inhabits the instrument, playing with the acoustic tangible kinesphere by plucking the piano strings. The sound of the strings is processed using granular synthesis to become the digital soundscape, a spatially fragmented memory of the acoustic installation. The dancer’s movement is captured using motion-capture technology and is used to trigger the sound grains and generates the different sound textures in real-time. Self and Self-Portraits reveals the dancer’s embodied exploration of her personal space, through the interaction with both acoustic and digital sound around her. We consider the digital and acoustic sound produced as two representations of the dancer’s movement and the produced sound reveals her embodied experience of this space. The acoustic and digital representations become self-portraits of the dancer in space that create an ambivalent, almost schizophrenic, duet between the acoustic tangible space and the fragmented digital memory.