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DANCE PREVIEW Polar Explorations PPS Danse/Montreal uses technology to find the interface between dance and dreamscapes. BY CATHERINE THOMAS 243-2122 EXT. 353 |
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Pôles Portland State University, Lincoln Performance Hall, 1620 SW Park Ave., 725-3307. 8 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, March 18-21. $20, $10 students Blending dance with virtual reality, Pierre-Paul Savoie and Jeff Hall of PPS Danse/Montreal have produced a surreal and haunting artwork the likes of which you've never seen before--at least not when you've been awake. Pôles, their collaboration with visual technology artists Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon and electro-acoustic composer Ginette Bertrand, uses projected imagery to transcend the limits of space and gravity. The images are similar to holograms, but while holographic images are stationary, PPS's onstage apparitions are not. The performance opens with two dancers emerging onto a dome-shaped stage, one falling, the other rising from the ground. Strangers to their supernatural landscape, they are initially adversaries. Amorphous projected forms materialize, seemingly from the dancers themselves, and engage in battle. The shadow forms merge and wrestle with their living counterparts, transform into organic elements, like fire, then diffuse. The archetypal imagery is multilayered: The two men can represent dual aspects of the individual--one cerebral, the other emotional--or the negotiation of relationships between individuals. Their virtual projections are manifestations of a deeper, invisible core, not always comfortable to witness but inexorably compelling. In a telephone interview, Savoie elaborated from Montreal on the impetus behind his company's foray into this novel performance form. While PPS Danse has a 12-year history as a gymnastic, contact-based contemporary dance company, Savoie explains: "We have never been pure dance. We don't use the language of contemporary dance; it's more interesting to us to create a new language." Why use technology? In describing the collaboration with Lemieux and Pilon, Savoie says: "Introducing a visual element was exciting, because it renewed the theater presentation we were working with. By using their medium, it is more than only dance--it uses dance to go somewhere else with it....It gives more possibility to the human." Savoie describes Pôles as a "merging between cinema and live arts, moving from live to virtual, from one dimension to another. The idea was to go further than the black box, to not only go by kinetics." The movement itself is not purely abstract; Pôles follows a story line inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, which lends narrative and dramatic structure to the visual drama. What was it like working with virtual technology? "In the beginning, it was difficult to overpower," Savoie recounts. He notes, however, that "the technology is not as free as the performer." While Savoie won't divulge any technical secrets, he says that there are three layers to the images. As he puts it, they appear as "three-dimensional projections of our souls, not on a flat surface, but into the space." The stage itself rotates, influencing the dancers' range of movement considerably. In addition, filmed scenes are projected onto tiles to form a visual mosaic. How have audiences reacted to the new art form? Savoie says that some audience members have had hallucinatory reactions. "The spectator has access to the invisible, which is rare. I want to put people into that dimension, where they are questioning what is real.
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