RESEARCH General Arts

ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY
History of dance project weaves live performances with film

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

5/1/02

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

That may not be the official slogan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Fine and Applied Arts, but at a university that’s internationally known as a hotbed of high tech, both faculty and student artists have learned that one of the best ways to avoid being upstaged by the techies is to embrace them – and their latest technologies – and seek ways to construct amazing new avenues for mutual creative exploration.

Springing from this institutionally supported push for cooperation and collaboration between the arts and technology is a new project initiated by dance professor Cynthia Pipkin-Doyle and Yu Hasegawa-Johnson, a visiting scholar at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Study and Technology. The collaboration started with Pipkin-Doyle’s desire to explore 300 years of dance history, from the female perspective. Although she envisioned a program of live, solo dance, Pipkin-Doyle became intrigued by the idea of introducing a virtual partner of sorts: film. To bring both together on stage, she enlisted the aid of Hasegawa-Johnson, a filmmaker and online film-space developer, who will serve as co-cinematographer with Dan Merlo.

The resulting program, "Les Femmes," features performances by Pipkin-Doyle juxtaposed and interspersed with film by Hasegawa-Johnson and Merlo. The show premieres May 30 at the Station Theater in Urbana, Ill., and continues through June 1; it will be restaged this fall at Illinois.
Pipkin-Doyle describes the production as "a suite of dance solos that explores and preserves the outstanding works of famous female dancers/choreographers throughout history." Further, she said, "the pieces collectively examine the spirit of feminine resilience and seductiveness."

Content includes a reconstructed Baroque court dance; Fanny Elssler’s "La Cachucha" (1836); and "Incense" (1906) and "White Palace Nautch," (1906) by modern dance founder Ruth St. Denis. The program also showcases a trio of theatrical dances by Beverly Blossom, former principal dancer with the Alwin Nikolais Dance Theater, whom Pipkin-Doyle first worked with when Blossom was on the Illinois dance faculty. Pipkin-Doyle will perform her choreography as well, including a show opener, which, she said, features "a film noir-like femme fatale who seduces the audience to enter into an altered world of 3-dimensional holographic images."

The connecting thread of "Les Femmes," she said, is "the interplay between film and dance."
"The film images will sustain the momentum of the audience as they travel through this production, and will offer me time to change costumes between pieces," Pipkin-Doyle said. "I am fascinated with the idea that film is my partner. Film becomes the interaction between dances, and the interaction between technology and the notion of seduction."