Unique in the landscape of contemporary Italian dance, the Ariella Vidach Company has been dedicated since 1988 to creating performances focused on the relationship between dance and new technologies. In an increasing crescendo of experimentation that moves from the integration of video into performances, to the use of real-time computer technology, and sophisticated virtual reality and motion capture systems that have characterized recent performances, the group has developed a poetics of integrating new digital technologies into the fabric of contemporary dance.
This research is never an end in itself but serves the artistic and spectacular result, with deeply current content such as the perception of the body in confrontation with the artificial technological environment. If the works from the early 1990s emphasized a certain autonomy between image (video insertions) and body, over time, the interferences have become more subtle and the research horizons increasingly complex. "Elicon Silicon" (1993) represented an initial reflection on the dichotomy of natural body and artificial body, real body-replicated body, which was then developed in subsequent works, particularly in "Exp Interactive Dance Performance" (1996), a work based on a virtual reality system, and "Mandala System," where the bodies of the three dancers on stage become real-time creators of all the visual and sound changes of the performance. A spectacular experience that asks the audience to immerse themselves in the interplay of relationships that are established not only among the dancers on stage but in relation to their virtual icons and their role as generators of sound events. A new form of sensitive interaction that does not seem so far from Vidach's background, centered on the American experience of contact improvisation: in her technological performances, she develops the same sensitivity to listening that a contact dancer must have towards their partner, continuously subject to an action-reaction relationship in the improvisational play.
"Opus #1" is the latest production of the Company, created in the summer of 2001 after a long journey of research and development of interactive software. It is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Library of Babel" and stages an imaginary world in which four anthropomorphic beings discover themselves and relate to the surrounding interactive space. A camera's eye detects the red color worn by the dancers and transmits data about their movements in space to an original combination of software (Big Eye, Max/Msp, Director), translating the body's gestures into writing, the speed of movement into dynamic sound excursions, and the musical sensitivity of the performers into elaborations of text and images. "Opus #1," says Ariella Vidach, "is a metaphor for the world: it contains order and chaos, imperfect librarians constantly searching for the fundamental mysteries of existence and humanity. No certainties, but many discoveries: relationships with others, with space, with onomatopoeic sounds, with the rudiments of language, with images. A universe of signs that attempts to transform into writing. The language of the body that becomes word and emotion."
