Theme Ideas

Artist Image Resource/Troika Ranch/North Allegheny Schools Art Department Collaboration

Submit ideas for the theme of "the impact of new technology on us and society, now and in the future" in the form below. Also submit ideas for staging, dance, music, art, video elements. See the outline for the piece at the bottom of the page. Check out other ideas here.

Name:

Mark Coniglio's Outline for the piece

Here is the outline that we have come up with for the piece with the students. It is of course general, but is designed primarily to give some sense of the energy that we are looking for overall and as a starting place for aural/visual images and movement.

As I think the idea of moving from human touch/contact, to loss of the contact, to some reaffirmation of the importance of touch is an interesting theme that the students (and we) can hang on to.

Structure:

------------------------------------------------------- Part I - The Embrace (2 Minutes)

We begin with two people on opposite sides of the stage, no media. They look at each other for a few moments, then move to the center (gradually or fast?) where they embrace. Probably there an ambient background music begins at this point. There may also be some kind of visual background that appears... something organic.

We let them be, standing in their embrace, for just a bit longer than you might expect. Then several other people (the rest of the cast?) run in from opposite sides of the stage to embrace. We let this sit for a moment longer...

------------------------------------------------------- Part II - Loss of Contact (1 Minute)

We hear the sound of a modem or some other sound that is recognizable as technological. Then there is an explosion of people, sound, image, and light as the couples let loose of each other -- perhaps they begin to look around them, trying to figure out what has happened. Again, there should be loads of information for the audience on all sensory planes.

Sounds: Music made from machines Visual: Super fast edited images of technological and/or machine images Movement: Those who were in the embrace are floating in a void, lost, wondering what happened while others may perform fast moving, "digital" gesture phrases.

------------------------------------------------------- Part III - The History of Touch (9-10 Minutes)

In this section, we will develop a wedge or "bolero", where we fall back to a soft, repetitive music that intensifies over time. (It would be good for the music students to hear Ravel's "Bolero" as an example of this idea.) Accompanying this will be visual and physical (movement) representations of touch that begin with organic physical contact and evolve over time into communication via electronic means, or other ways in which the ability of the performers to make physical contact is inhibited. By the end of this section, we should feel a sense of loss for the initial embrace that we witnessed -- and we should reach a cacophony of sound, image and movement that was predicted by what we saw in Part II.

In general, the progression is from the organic to the electronic, from one of contact to one of distance.

Visual: Images of touch and/or contact from the past (old paintings, cave drawings, old films, body parts shot to make them look like landscapes?) gradually turning into electronic representations of the body, live video of people on stage superimposed on electronic/technological backgrounds. The two polarities of image should range from the organic/corporeal to the electronic/ethereal. This distinction can be shown not only by the image itself, but also with how it is shot/edited.

Sounds: Musical phrase begins simply, with the sounds of traditional instruments (or better yet, real instruments) as well as perhaps the sound of breathing/crying/laughter, but over time and repetition, new sounds are added. Samples of machines substitute for the sounds of instruments -- by the end we have lost all reference to the organic and the music has grown into a "ballet mechanique" of electronic and sampled mechanical sounds.

Movement: We move back to touch at the beginning of this section - Dawn will orchestrate this. The vocabulary will also include things like people doing semaphore (a la sailors in the navy - communication through movement), perhaps people sending morse code messages with lights (again, a la the navy), people walking through the stage on their cell phones. Later the movement will return the "digital" gesture phrase introduced in Part II. We may want to make digital videos of some of the organic movement phrases so that they can be "scratched" (a la a DJ and vinyl records) with the video processing software and be appropriated into the electronic.

------------------------------------------------------- Part IV - The Return

After reaching the peak of part III (a final loud and mechanical moment, a musical unison perhaps though not a movement unison, devoid of touch) everything breaks down for a few moments -- musical phrases are flying around randomly, dancers move without any relation to each other, perhaps the visual image is a grid or some other mathematical image (parabolas?? circle/square/triangle??)

In the center of this two people embrace. There is a set dance phrase that they do with each other, then they break apart and embrace two others, and the phrase repeats. This grows slowly until all of the dancers are performing this embrace/move/split/embrace sequence. The music is persistent but more gentle than before, with a new unison repeating rhythmic figure performed by both natural sounding and electronic sounding instruments. The visual images are of the electronic and the organic combined in someway - either by placing the electronic in natural settings or organic objects in electronic settings (a machine made of dirt? a hand wrapped in wire or metal or tin foil??), in other words, some kind of synthesis of the electronic and the organic.

The piece ends when all of the performers are embracing again and the music draws to a close. Perhaps the students will move out to embrace members of the audience in the final moments.