Blinking is an evening-length dance piece done in collaboration with Providence, Rhode Island-based choreographer Jamie Jewett and his dance company, LOSTWAX. Set in five movements, the piece uses as an artistic conceit the investigation of what happens in the split-second when your eyes are closed while you blink. I wrote the music, served as production designer alongside Jewett and lighting designer Tim Cryan, and developed an elaborate software show-control / media playback system to run the piece.

As a work of media-amplified dance, the work is a technical tour-de-force, using three video projections, computer vision, and robotic lighting armatures to create a performance space wherein the dancers are amplified and embodied through projected light. In the first and fourth movements, two projectors mounted on robotic pan-tilt lighting armatures allow for the use of video as a stand-in for normal theatrical lighting, allowing me to program audio-visual reactive systems that illuminate the performers bodies responsively, based on their motion, position on stage, and what is happening in the music and choreography at that time. The second movement uses generative three- dimensional graphics to provide a real-time visual “score” of the underlying choreography on the cyclorama (proscenium projection scrim). The third movement melds high-definition video of a woman blinking in a car mirror with the motion of a trio of dancers on stage, creating a virtual shadow that follows the dance. The final movement integrates pre-recorded data from a Kinect structured-light camera of one of the main soloists (Shura Baryshnikov) performing her gestures that are then re-animated as fireflies across the screen.

Early sketches for the piece were done at Connecticut College in February 2010, during a one-week dance residency. Beginning in the fall of that year, I was made artist-in- residence at Brown University in the Music and Multimedia Experiments (MEME) program in the Music Department, hosted by Professors Todd Winkler (Music) and Ed Osborne (Visual Arts). During the residency I was accommodated with studio space to work on the software and music production for the work and provided a stipend that covered regular Amtrak tickets to and from Providence. LOSTWAX was, at the same time, the resident dance company at the Perishable Theater, where Jewett was able to develop the choreography with his company of six performers. The piece received enormous technical support from the Digital Media program at the Rhode Island School of Design. It was premiered as a run of five sold-out performances through the Providence FirstWorks presenting program at the Pell-Chafee Performance Center in downtown Providence, with support from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. The work has subsequently been performed at the Boston CyberArts festival, the Merce Cunningham Dance Theater in New York City, and the ATLAS Center in Boulder, Colorado.

project website