SomeTime
In SomeTime video projections covering the whole front of stage are produced live by a small video camera trained on the dancer, who is visible to the audience through the translucent screen, dwarfed by the imagery she is creating. As the musical score progresses, the dancer's video image is processed by the video artist using custom software which records the passage of time as seen by the camera, allowing time-manipulated views of the choreography to be created. SomeTime is an exploration of a different way of looking at movement. Normal filming would show in sequence, complete images seen by a camera at a single time. In this project, we are slicing the images and showing the progress of a single slice all at one time. The camera’s view is a narrow slit of the image and it shows what is seen within that single slice, depicting the history of that one area in a kind of visual score. This process, known as 'Slit-scan', was originally an optical special effect, used most famously in the Stargate sequence of Kubrick's 2001. The use of an interactive tool to generate slit-scan imagery allows improvisation, turning it from a special effects process into a technique for experimentation.
The music takes the form of a forty minute symphony, in four movements, generated by a synthesized orchestra. Time-based synthesis techniques construct the symphony in entirety from fundamentals of frequency and the limits of human hearing. The music thus constructs a depiction of time from first principles, all the way from infinitesimal sounds up to the complete score. The musical score, playing from tape, provides the yardstick to which the other two artists perform the score.
The theme of SomeTime is the deconstruction of time. As the score elapses the dancer's projected representation progresses through abstraction towards a final scene where time is expressed as a construct of human calligraphy, revealed instantaneously as a human sculpture, peeling back the layers of frames recorded over time and allowing the audience to perceive ‘some time’ in a unique way.
Through improvisation with interactive tools, we have explored the point of compromise or communication between human movement in independence, and of the movements that makes the visuals happen. Where is the crossover point, the moment where each equally informs the other? SomeTime is a genuinely experimental collaboration, bringing together intellectual, reductionist disciplines with the praxis of improvisation and physical performance. The result is a kind of 'sacred geometry'- where thoughts are enacted through movement, shapes and spaces changing over time. SomeTime enables the viewer to view the complete history of one slice of space, to see the dance as a evolving sculpture rather than a series of images made through space and time. Taking its initial inspiration from the words contained in the title, the movement is created in two distinct ways – one driven by the visuals and the other remaining independent, but both causing the visual “landscape” to change.
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