Ariella Vidach returns to the Oriente Occidente Festival after a year, wearing dual hats as both an educator and choreographer. In her role as leader of a workshop spanning about twenty days at the CID Centro Internazionale della Danza Formazione, Produzione e Promozione - which also hosts two other seminars by Michele Di Stefano and Alessandra Sini - Vidach will guide selected students towards a new approach to choreographic composition and the acquisition of what she calls 'bodily intelligence'. This entails the ability to be 'simply present' in a space, reducing gestures to their essential form. Such awareness is crucial for integrating students into the new production project of the Ariella Vidach - A.i.E.P. company titled "Globoremake," slated to debut in spring 2004, and of which Oriente Occidente presents an initial research phase stemming from the workshop conducted in Rovereto.
A unique figure in the Italian scene with an entirely American background rooted in Steve Paxton's contact improvisation and Trisha Brown's abstract dance, Vidach has developed a distinctiveness over the years by integrating new digital technologies into choreographic fabric. For over a decade, she has closely collaborated with virtual reality systems, motion capture, real-time interaction between images, sounds, and movement, exploring the new status of the body imposed by the age of machines and prosthetics we live in, striving for aesthetic results in the balanced dialogue between humans and machines.
The Oriente Occidente audience had the opportunity to witness Vidach's choreographic experimentation in an interactive-sensitive environment during the last edition of the Festival, when the work "Opus #1" for four performers was presented. This year, they will experience firsthand inhabiting a reactive environment. The new work "Globoremake" envisions both dancers and audience members as decisive elements in the performance: the interactive environment extends from the stage to the audience, allowing spectators to initially engage involuntarily and later voluntarily with the dancers (less as executors of predetermined choreography and more as 'permeable interlocutors'), images, and sounds.
The interactive system used allows for the generation and alteration of sounds based on the detection of six colors (red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, and magenta). The performance space, encompassing both audience and performers, is conceived as a single large container continually monitored by multiple cameras. These cameras detect the six colors, either faithfully projecting what they capture or sending images to the computer to be translated into other graphic signs that further modify the sounds. Each dancer-performer is required to adapt choreography and stage presence to real-time (and partly random) sound variations initiated by the audience and other dancers, thus redefining their role.
The preparatory journey towards achieving such results demands significant artistic maturity from the performer, a newfound spatial awareness, and mutual tension and communion among all participants who are part of an 'other' ecosystem, simultaneously real and virtual.
