Encoded

Collaboration across the arts is becoming more common and more and more imaginative. In this production by Stalker Theatre interactive digital technology and 21^st century choreography come together in a creative combination of excitingly different images and movement. The work is equally stunning in its perception and its reality. From the virtual costumes designed by digital artist Alejando Rolandi, to Andrew Johnston’s multi media light show; from Peter Kennard’s sound design to Paul Selwyn Norton’s amazing choreography, this a mesmerizing performance that sustains the synergy that we are coming to expect of contemporary theatre.

Using a dark, “undressed” stage, the program begins with a display of Rolandi’s virtual costumes that emanate from amazingly conceived devices worn and held at arms’ lengths by the dancers. From these lighting ‘hoops’, intricate and constantly changing colourful images are projected on to the bodies of the performers as they move slowly toward the audience. Consider the possibilities of such technology as it is developed even further!

The dancers (Miranda Wheen, Kathryn Puie, Joshua Thomson and Timothy Ohl) return to the stage in a piece of incredible choreography that is reflected in Johnston’s shimmering images that form and dissolve across the wide backdrop of the stage. Waves of light swirl and turn on themselves as the dancers spring into them, then subside as the dancers roll and twist like an ebbing tide, only to rise again twisting elegantly – and seemingly effortlessly and fearlessly – on long suspended ropes hung high above the stage.

With this the light show changes, firstly to ever-changing rods that reach across and back, breaking and stretching as the dancers weave and swing; then to an image that retracts, changing perspective so startlingly that it seems the stage is almost falling away.

Director David Clarkson sees the ‘biggest challenge of working with technology is not to lose the human in the midst of the pixels”. Unlike some other similar collaborations, the “human” in this performance is just as stunning as the technology. The athleticism and flexibility of the dancers, their perfectly timed control and co-ordination are as equally as amazing as the digital backdrop that frames and follows them – and are never lost in their midst.

I first saw a virtual set used in a production of The Woman in White in New York in 2006. It was amazing and effective, but, nevertheless, a relatively static representation of rooms, furniture a garden – nothing really that could herald the possibilities the digital and physical interaction of a production such as Encoded suggests.

Carol Wimmer

Photographer Matthew Syres