For loopdiver’s repetitive dance motions, video plays a key role
Co-founded by choreographer/media artist Dawn Stoppiello and composer/media artist Mark Coniglio, Troika Ranch creates contemporary, hybrid artworks through an ongoing examination of the moving body and its relationship to technology.
Since 2009, the company has been presenting loopdiver, a dance piece pairing repetitive dance motions with loops of projected video. Coniglio is the video designer and composer of this piece. David Tirosh is the LD. They spoke to PLSN about loopdiver’s fusion of artistry with human and digital elements.
PLSN: What was your basic motivation when you started to create loopdiver around the idea of loops?
Mark Coniglio: One of the reasons we love computers is that they do something over and over again and they never complain about it. The notion of looping comes directly out of technology. Starting with this technological idea, we built the relationship between performers and the machine in loopdiver. In Troika Ranch, we have used interactive media and technology in all of our work. In this piece, the media was the loop itself, and this became the central idea of loopdiver.
The basis for the whole piece is a 5-minute long “base material” — a self-contained piece with choreography and music — that was later videotaped and subjected to the looping process using my software Isadora. The creation of this material was strongly informed by our research and experiments over a two-year period. As we experimented, we explored many variations of how to loop movement material. What we immediately discovered was that a rigorous give and take between the exploration of the movement and the demands of the looping technique was required.
In our first experiments, we worked with more “traditional” dance movement. Basically, our first instinct was to have people dance like crazy and to loop that material. Though, when we watched the results, the very dense activity ended up being more like noise than information, and there were other discoveries. For instance, a small pause when no one was doing anything could end up being very long once it was looped. But later, we started working with far more “pedestrian” movement material. These far simpler movements that one might not even categorize as “dance” suddenly became dance when we looped it. As my collaborator, choreographer Dawn Stoppiello said at the time, we took a piece of theater — the initial pedestrian movement — and transformed it into a dance piece through the looping process.
PLSN: Can you tell us the story of those five minutes?
Mark Coniglio: Our dramaturge, Peter C. von Salis, came in with several images of Giacometti’s sculpture Piazza in the early days of the project. In this sculpture, there are five figures on a seemingly checkerboard surface; if you look at their orientation you see that they will never encounter each other. There was something very powerful about this image that stayed with us while we were creating loopdiver. What we were trying to do was the opposite of Giacometti; we wanted our performers to connect. In the final version of the “base material,” the dancers were constantly meeting, though the encounters were very brief. They shook hands, quickly embraced, or just looked at each other for a moment. These simple exchanges themselves are not charged with emotion or content. The emotion strongly appeared when we looped the material. When you repeat human action continuously, you find something in it that you would not normally see. The repetition created a beautiful emotive tension to emerge from a deeply hidden place. Yet, it was only through trial and error with the early dance movement that we came to discover the right material for those five minutes.
David Tirosh: From my point of view, that five-minute base was about “general” and “specific.” For lighting, I had two systems. The first system was made of specific spots with rectangular beams, which highlighted encounters between the dancers. The second system created one big wash that created an imaginary street where all the encounters were taking place. When this wash was visible, audience could choose where to look. This was very different to those scenes where the focused light led them to zero-in on specific actions that seemed frozen in time by the loop. I built my five-minute base around the tension between the specific and the general, between the intimate encounter and the energy of the street. When we imposed the looping structure on my design, it took this very simple story and made it into a whole piece.
PLSN: Could you compare your starting point to the final piece that you created at the end of the two-year process?
Mark Coniglio: The destination that we envisioned at the beginning was quite different than where we ended up. This was mostly because of the demands of the software tool I created, which allowed us to loop the pre-recorded dance, music and lighting material in extremely complex ways. The compositional process was completely different than anything we had done before. It interfered with our regular compositional process, as well as the process of learning and performing the dance. Dawn had to rethink the way that the dancers were organized. The movement and music had to be very carefully considered to accommodate this special way of working. Everybody had to rethink their point of view and process, because this tool forced all of us to take a very different approach.
PLSN: Loopdiver is a piece in which all the aspects of design are highly involved. How was your collaboration with your designers?
Mark Coniglio: In Troika Ranch, Dawn and I really welcome everyone’s input. Each person’s perspective is a part of the entire picture. David brought a lot of insight into this piece. When we performed a work-in-progress version of the piece in France, David came up with the idea of looping the lighting along with the other elements of the piece. I was not sure that it was going to work. But, in fact, it did better than I could have imagined. His choice to do this was one of the major factors that led us towards the end result. What he did worked incredibly well, and further proved that strengthening the loop and making it apparent was the direction that we needed to go. From that point on, we made the loop structure sacrosanct, and letting everything else fall under it became our guiding principle. The set designer Colin Kilian had an equivalent impact. When he showed up with the set piece, I described it as “a bomb going off within the piece.” What he made is such a powerful entity; the presence of this sublime, animated object pushed us even further to open ourselves to the meaning of the piece.
David Tirosh: Both I and Colin were fortunate to join this process way earlier than any lighting and scenery designer traditionally would. When I joined the project, Dawn and Mark had already come up with the looping concept. The theme had been explored, but very little of the evolution of the piece had happened. Getting involved with the project at a very early stage was mainly what allowed me to be a collaborator and contributor as opposed to a facilitator.
PLSN: Can you tell us more about the video content?
Mark Coniglio: Each dancer stands in front of his or her own screen; images of their bodies, doing pedestrian movement which is not really seen in the live performance, are projected on those six screens. In the early moments of the work, the video of the dancers is quite representational. But soon thereafter, these images gradually transform into black-and-white ghostly blurs, and eventually separate into individual squares that start to fracture. The notion of fracturing the image came directly from the focused rectangles in David’s lighting design. His artistic choices were a direct influence on the way that I ended up doing this video. Later, near the end of the piece, the fractured video images coalesce so that dancers’ bodies become whole again. But for the most part the images serve to provide another indication of the loop.
A different story is told by Colin’s set. As the main section of the piece begins, his scenery opens with a shocking, loud sound. This moment, for us, represents a trauma that launches the piece into motion. This surprising moment is strengthened by the fact that it is preceded by a 10-minute section where the dancers walk a rigorously designed pattern around the stage, very much like the Giacometti sculpture, Piazza. But as the David’s rectangular patterns appear, the movement completely changes. So, because of the changes in scenery, lighting and video, the audience sees that the dancers themselves are fracturing and, I think, they begin to hope that the dancers will come back together. Each design element is there to support the process that the dancers are playing out in front of us.
PLSN: Scenery is the only design element which does not loop — but it moves. What was the role of this movement within the whole piece?
Mark Coniglio: For us, the set is a clock. That’s why it doesn’t loop. It explodes at the beginning, and then gradually collapses to its original position. It’s like the hands of the clock that are always moving forward, marking the time that is inexorably passing. Collin ended up using a very light weave black scrim for the projection surfaces built in to the set, making the projected images relatively dim. This is critical, because it lets the dance be the star of the piece, not the video. Dancers can coexist with these images in a successful way, and images do not pull us away from experiencing the choreography. The physical design of the set was crucial in the way that it allowed the performers and the video to co-exist.
David Tirosh: Scenery also became the unifying element for the whole piece. The center of the set is filled with pieces of Plexiglas that suggest shards of broken glass. I tried to expand the set into the space by focusing some of my lights through these shards.
PLSN: Were the dancers able to catch up with the perfectly synchronized sound, lights and video loops?
Mark Coniglio: Isadora controls everything. The video and music were looped in Isadora, as were the DMX commands that control the lights. That’s why those three elements are perfectly synchronized — they are the digitally perfect representation of the loop as we designed it. The dancers have to learn to perform the movement that was defined by the loop structure. But it is impossible for a human to do it perfectly, and that is where the deeper story emerges. The dancers can never be as perfect as the computer controlled elements — even though they are, in fact, very close to perfection. This is essential; if they were any less close, something very important would be lost. For the entire piece, they are in a constant state of failure; they are almost there, but they never really arrive. The inability and struggle to keep up with the machine is what makes the piece powerful, because a struggle towards perfection is an ancient human idea. Additionally, the imperfections themselves make loopdiver a media piece. A conflict emerges between what a computer can do and what a human being can do as the dancers attempt to keep up with machines on stage. The intervention of the loop makes loopdiver the most media-intensive piece we’ve ever made.
David Tirosh: The main struggle in this piece is the technical struggle of the dancers is to remain/exist in the loops. The emotional struggle caused by the inability to do so is the human story that we tell in loopdiver.
PLSN: What were the physical constraints of the space that you faced?
David Tirosh: The piece needs to be experienced, intimately and immediately. Therefore, we insisted on getting the audience on two sides of the stage, very close to and surrounding the dancers. We wanted the audience to intimately experience the sound, movement and sweat of the dancers as they struggled within the loop. Everything else, like the position of speakers and lighting fixtures, was adjusted to accommodate the audience’s experience, which is for us the most important thing of all.
Mark Coniglio: The dancers had a lot of challenges, because they had to navigate often in the dark around the set as it changes its configuration during the course of the piece. The first time we had the run through in the space, we had complete blackouts, which were freaky for them to deal with. There were all these kinds of interventions that we faced in this piece, and I think that’s where a lot of beauty came from.
PLSN: Finally, would you tell about the tools you developed within Isadora — the video editing software for loopdiver — and your approach to the art-technology relationship?
Mark Coniglio: I simply create the things when I need them. Everything that I made in Isadora came from these needs. When I was a student at California Institute of Arts, there was a rule: “No technique before need.” In Troika Ranch, we changed it to “No technology before need.” We want to create technology to express an idea. I would not have made the looping editor in Isadora if I had not done loopdiver. There is some other support software that I developed for this piece in order to render the looped movies, and to capture the DMX so we could loop it. But the looping tool within Isadora was the heart of the technology for this work.
Loopdiver Credits:
Choreography: Dawn Stoppiello in collaboration with the performers
Videography & Music: Mark Coniglio
Dramaturgy: Peter C. von Salis
Lighting Design: David Tirosh
Set Design: Colin Kilian
Production Manager: Jennifer Sherburn
Performers: Morgan Cloud, Jennifer Kovacevich, Johanna Levy, Travis Steele Sisk, Dawn Stoppiello, Lucia Tong.
Video: For loopdiver: The Journey of a Dance, go to:
netnebraska.org/extras/loopdiver
