Adelaide Fringe Festival: 3xperimentia: Live Cut
I sit, writing, with disconsolate tears and running nose, belting the keys through obscured sight. I feel that having just broken the heart of the one who I love and felt was to spend my life with and consequently destroying my own heart I am perhaps a little too susceptible to reading into things. I have just returned from 40 minutes of mind junk, I won’t pretend, I know that what I saw was my own. But, it was provoked and intensified by a carefully arranged and beautifully composed experimental piece watched through 3D glasses.
3xperimentia: Live Cut was created by award winning international choreographer, Amanda Phillips and, rising composer and new media artist, Alexander Mitchell. With the support of e-Research South Australia Phillips and Mitchell have worked on the development of this project since mid-2007. 3D film footage of leading Australian dancers Lisa Griffiths, Deon Hastie and Gala Moody are the core imagery of the work. The generated images and audio are stitched together into an exquisitely deep landscape. The mix of filmed dance and audio-visual generative art is edited live and integrates the use of both technology and performance.
My experience of improvised music and performances is that the work tends to be self indulgent, the experiments of bedroom bound artists who somehow leak out through the crack of their door and unleash their mash ups to an unknowing audience who sit their wondering what is it that they are meant to get! Unlike these improvised works, 3xperimentia: Live Cut is born out of improvisation yet evolves between the choreographer, composer and audience.
The attention to aesthetics and composition is refined yet does not look contrived. Phillips says it “is the sense of experience that is most important. [sic] Everyone sees things differently, and the format of 3xperimentia acknowledges that perspective is a shifting concept”.
Acclaimed Australian Dancers, Griffiths, Hastie and Moody writhe on screen and give the appearance that they could be suffering acts of violent pain, as they distort their bodies into contorted figures that silkily flit in stereoscopic pictures. Their squirming bones mimic my insides. The projections are harmonised to a musical score reminiscent of Fripp & Eno’s ambient style, and composer Clint Mansell.
I read into it the narrative of displaced individuals, disconnected and disassociated within society. Images portraying the tears of a young girl, the imagined wedding ring removed from the hand, human anguish, the lost and the obsolete. The deep internal ache, that we can be everything but we aren’t, we’re lost, yet here, the bipolarity of happiness and sadness. Loneliness! The audience is delicately cradled as we look into the mirror of human despair. The neutral subjectivity of the dancers juxtaposes this misery as they touch their wretched boned bodies, by way of proving their corporeal existence.
The theatre remains dark with only the light from the ‘Jumbo Vision’ touch screen and the projected grainy footage. In the dim light accessorised with 3D glasses the audience is taken on a journey. It feels like I’m being inched forward closer and closer to these reeling celestial figures. The haunting build up of the musical score depicts the subject’s imprisonment in a dream world of error and desperation. The climatic build up to the end presents the idea that the illusion is pervious and able to be subsequently overtaken and devastated by reality.
3xperimentia: Live Cut is a live-edit cinema experience where every performance is unique.
One question though – am I the only one who is more intrigued by the blurred images on screen rather than the 3D stereoscopy?
3xperimentia: Live Cut is showing at the Mercury Cinema, 14 Morphett Street Adelaide city from 11-15 & 18-22 March during the 2009 Adelaide Fringe Festival. Tickets range from $10 to $17.75.
