left to their own devices is a triptych which rewires sound and movement, flipping the tropes of a dancer moving to music. These three pieces use installation, interactivity, and improvisation, through uncanny devices that rethink conventional sound/music partnering. Each piece—Hypnagogia, Barrel Roll, and Heterodyne—uses a small contraption that creates movement while also surveilling it. The music is generative, created on the spot by bespoke software and microelectronics. Parts of each piece have been presented at the Tanzhaus Zürich, The Brick Theater in NYC, and Bennington College.
These pieces are modular and configurable, inviting collaborators from solo performers to large groups, and adapt to installation in museums, stages, or alternative spaces. The suite of three pieces provides an evening-length show, or an exhibition adapted to the space at hand, and the technologies are compact and portable. Each piece creates its own metaphorical space, meditating on ideas ranging from aging to surveillance, from stasis to echolalia.
hypnagogia is a transitional state between sleep and wakefulness, in which people experience sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and uncontrolled tics. With hypnagogia, “sleep starts”, or bursts of energy through a limb, push one back into a waking state.
In this piece, electric muscle stimulants create involuntary movements in the dancer’s body during the performance, conveyed through wireless belts. These tics are unpredictable, generated by the sounds themselves, and are part of the improvisation—a borderline between intentional and unexpected, sleep and wakefulness. The sounds are generated on the spot, and alternating high and low tones are filtered and processed real-time to become echoes of each other. Initial collaborations have explored the tensions between stasis and sudden activity.
Parts of Hypnagogia were presented in process at the Brick Theater, Bennington College, and Tanzhaus Zürich. The work at Tanzhaus Zürich was done in collaboration with eminent choreographer Meret Schlegel. Hypnagogia has been staged in solo, duet, and trio, and the wireless belts are easily transportable. A future version involves 8-12 dancers in a museum space.
A barrel roll is a plane nosediving on all axes, it’s a game of Russian Roulette. A music box rolls its barrel on a complete rotation of its only tune.
Barrel Roll is a tiny, self-contained device, made out of a yoga block, a music box, and a stepper motor. This device is given to dancers to generate their own music. Playing with the trope of a music box twirling a porcelain ballerina, the mechanism is exploded out through a contact mike, stepper motor, and motion sensor to create a generative piece that transcends the toy. Inverting the trope, the dancer’s movement literally turns the barrel and creates the sound, which is processed and, in turn, gyrates the dancer and sound design.
The piece has been presented in performance with solo dancers, as well as interactive installation, inviting the audience in.
Improv with Martin Lanz, Martha Hill Dance Theater
Heterodyne unearths the story of a forgotten mechanism, and tries to reconstruct it, creating a meditation on absence and surveillance. The piece can be used in live performance or installation. In 1932, Leon Theremin adapted his eponymous instrument into a dance platform, for his newlywed partner, choreographer Lavinia Williams. An enormous metal plate, the so-called terpsitone was by all reports a crude sensor of movement. In 1936, he ported the mechanism up to Bennington College for a demonstration, but only 2 years later Theremin vanished into thin air—by some accounts, whisked away by the KGB. Only decades later, Theremin was discovered alive in Moscow, working clandestinely on devices such as The Thing, a surveillance device housed in the Great Seal of America. All original copies of the Terpsitone were destroyed.
Heterodyning is a process where one wave is used to “read” another, like how a medium senses spirits. In radio, it’s how long-distance waves are translated into our hearing range. In early spy devices, it was a way to decode messages. Heterodyning is the principle of the theremin. Heterodyne tries to reconstruct the Terpsitone, but like the artist Sophie Calle, deals with its absence rather than exact physicality. A shaft of light--the approximate size of the Terpsitone--feeds back on itself, sensing people through a technology called blob tracking, and gathering info on gesture, movement, and body structure. These translate into waves depending on a person’s proximity with their doppelganger.
Draft run, Jennings Building Bennington College