LONDON – For Wayne McGregor’s Tetractys: The Art of Fugue, a ballet for 12 dancers set to Bach that was performed at London’s Royal Opera House in February, set and costume designer Tauba Auerbach worked with programmer Florian Baeumler and the venue’s newly-acquired Hippotizer Rackoon for an assist with the visual design, which paired live performers with geometric graphics.
More details from Green Hippo (www.greenhippo.com):
This February, the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, introduced, for the first time into its theatre, a Hippotizer Rackoon, the new 6 layered HD Rackmount, to provide video control on a Royal Ballet production. With video production by Florian Baeumler, Programmer, the Rackoon was chosen for its wide range of capabilities with PixelMapper and ease of use in a 1U Rackmount.
Tectractys- the Art of Fugue received four performances as part of a mixed program of work bringing an exhilarating fusion of contemporary ballet and baroque music to the stage.
Using PixelMapper, set and costume designer Tauba Auerbach, worked with Florian Baeumler to create pixel-mapped shapes using lines and colours providing a very simple and contemporary sculpture design as a backdrop to the production.
Using 6 layers of the Rackoon, Florian was able to pixel map 7 different shapes over 7 universes with custom made content applying gradients and colours with RBG 16 bit. Each of the 7 sculptures ranged in complexity from simple zig zag shapes into more layered design of which Florian was able to utilise the live mask feature to create the effect of interchanging designs on each map matching gradients with block colors for the pixels.
“From previous opportunities to use a Hippo Media server going back all the way to V2, I was very confident that the new Rackoon was the perfect match,” said Baeumler. “The ease of use of the Pixmapper module and together with the possibility of “on-the-fly” adjusting of the maps saved a lot of time and made reacting to the Artists wishes a lot easier and faster. The Live Mask function is also an extremely valuable tool that saves time and makes reacting to changes in the design even easier.” The support we received from Green hippo was outstanding. Tech support checked in with me late at night, to see if we were ok and running after having few minor issues in the morning.”
The show continues on the road with the Hippotizer Rackoon making its way to Moscow.
