M SOLO

Choreography: Siân Hopkins in collaboration with Maggie Ball

Dancer: Maggie Ball

Music: I Reason, Earth Is Short by Emily Dickinson - read by Julie Harris
iTMOi (In the Mind of Igor): Sacrifice - Jocelyn Pook, Nitin Sawhney, Ben Frost
Introduction - Georges Brasens, La Palatine

Lighting: Mikkel Svak
Costume: Aylin Altinelli

Length: 8 minS

Exploring creating meaning and intent together through movement. Discovering themes and expression through collaborative creation.
Maggie and I challenged each other through our different perspectives and experiences of dancing and creating. Using improvisation, creative tasks and setting material to work on, this solo was crafted collaboratively with the aim of creating a challenging, expressive and satisfying final year performance piece for Maggie.

CHOREOGRAPHER

Siân Hopkins, BA Dance Programme Leader at Middlesex University, is a performer, creator and teacher. She was principal artist and rehearsal director for Moving Visions Dance Theatre (2006-2018), and has danced with Inland Pacific Ballet in California, Peter McCoy Dance Company in Munich and various other projects and independent artists near and far. Siân has taught at dance institutions around the UK as well as in Japan, SIngapore, Vietnam and Canada. Choreographic commissions include site-specific and cathedral-based projects, Cantata Dramatica's choral dramatisations and collaborative screendance and theatre productions.

Utilising lighting outside the theatre

The Hippotizer by company Green Hippo is a media server, often used for playback and generation of video content for large projections and LED walls on stage; but it can do a lot more than simply play back video content on screens. For this production I am using its ‘pixel mapping’ function – a method whereby video content can be ‘shown’ on regular stage lights by ‘mapping’ each light to one or more pixels within the video image.

For 'Distortion of Beauty' I am using a live feed from a camera placed in the auditorium as my video content, creating a live video image of the dancers as they move around the stage. By creating a pixel map that consists of the 24 lanterns used to sidelight the stage, a very low resolution ‘screen’ of 3 x 24 pixels is created; each pixel made up by one sidelight. As the live image of the dancers overlap with a pixel mapped to one of the sidelights, that light in turn will output the colour and brightness matching the video image of the dancers’ costume or body at that point.

The majority of the lighting used in the first and last sections of 'Distortion of Beauty' is controlled this way, with the brightness and colour of the sidelight a direct result of the positions of the dancers and the colours of their costumes. When a dancer moves fast across the stage, the sidelight will change in brightness and colour to mirror that movement.

- Mikkel Svak (Lighting Designer)

CAST

Georgina Barnard

year 3
Oné Hart

year 3
Olivia Litenstone

year 3

M SOLO

Utilising lighting outside the theatre

Georgina Barnard

Oné Hart

Olivia Litenstone