https://arcosdance.com/New-Dance-Company-2011 2023-06-23T15:55:48+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f6e3a88ab6416f7f16fe4acd09514ac8c7e480112008614467cf9789d369c97c/arcos-southsider2.jpg The Southsider The Voices and Faces of Santa Fe's South Side New Dance Company Prepares Performers for Professional Careers ARCOS Dance is a new contemporary dance company in Santa Fe offering world-class choreography and performance opportunities to both amateur and professional performers. Created specifically for dancers in their teens and early twenties, performers continue training at their respective schools and join ARCOS to supplement their training. The company's year-round home season includes five productions, each featuring a different repertoire. "In ARCOS, the line between student and professional is blurred. Our dance company is a mix of teens with advanced training and young professional dancers who work together in rehearsals and performances," said artistic director Curtis Uhlemann. Providing a much-needed bridge for young artists between scholastic training and professional careers, ARCOS creates a context in which dancers can advance and prepare for the demands of professional auditions, rehearsals, touring, and performance schedules. The company aids teens with their auditions for college, as well as those in their early twenties who have already earned their college degree and want to participate in contemporary dance performance in Santa Fe. "Most pre-professional dancers are not performing outside of school recitals, and most are not dancing professionally right away after college, either. We want to give them that chance here in Santa Fe," said associate artistic director Erica Gionfriddo. The inaugural company of six dancers returned in August from its first annual international tour, sponsored by Interdansa. It was entirely subsidized by the Catalonian government in Spain. Traveling with Gionfriddo, dancers gave a month of daily outdoor performances free to the public in Spanish villages throughout the month of July. The 2012 tour will return to Spain, and will also add France and Germany to the docket. Working with teachers and performers from around the world gives ARCOS students invaluable experience as an international group, and allows for their artistic growth through the combined rigors of travel, classes, and daily public performance. Uhlemann and Gionfriddo, each with extensive artistic direction and choreographic experience, also teach dance in a variety of studios throughout Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and the northern New Mexico area. Both hold BFAs in choreography. Uhlemann studied at Brockport College, and Gionfriddo at Shenandoah Conservatory. Having studied the techniques of Paul Taylor and Jose Limon in college, Uhlemann builds his choreography from large movements that sweep across the floor. "I'm inspired by the fast athleticism of Limon and Parsons, and the innate desire for bodies to always move faster and faster through space," said Uhlemann. "We focus on an equal balance of performance, staging, and vocabulary to produce high-quality results," said Uhlemann. "We create patterns that really envelop the wh.ole space of the stage and maximize the talents of each dancer. Choreographing is by far my favorite thing to do-and when it starts to take on life through the individual dancers, that's what makes it brilliant." Gionfriddo is influenced by the emotional expressiveness and depth of Asian-Modern and Release styles. Gionfriddo commented, "Choreography is a craft that we've spent many years cultivating professionally to develop our own vocabulary and style. One of our biggest goals is to create unique choreography that highlights each individual dancer's strengths." The inaugural performances of ARCOS Dance premiere repertoire concert will be held at Moving People Dance Perfo1mance Space, 1583 Pacheco Street, Suite A2 on October 14, 15, 20 and 21. All performances will begin at 7:30 p.m. Ticket information is available on www.arcosdance.com or call 473-7434 for reservations. Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for students. The concert will include existing company repertoire as well as world premiere works created specifically for the new ARCOS dancers. https://arcosdance.com/Radio-Cafe-ARCOS-debut-2011 2023-06-23T21:35:55+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Raiders-of-the-Lost-Arcs-2011 2023-06-23T15:45:03+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f238f4db0795191e2cfe5e435b91121759ec1064229f9f3172054d479272679/arcos-debut-pasa.jpg Pasatiempo The Santa Fe New Mexican October 14–20, 2011 Raiders of the Lost Arcs by Robert Nott for The New Mexican The dancers move like gazelles possessed by the souls of tigers while wielding buckets of water, ice, and mud in a fast-moving, high-voltage number choreographed to selections from Philip Glass' Songs From Liquid Days. For Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," the ensemble doesn't dance to music -it moves to a recorded reading of the piece by Basil Rathbone. And when it comes to The Mamas and the Papas' "Dream a Little Dream of Me," the dancers wear blank masks that give the piece a dark edge that may suggest a nightmare. Weird? Unusual? Daring? That's for the audience to decide, of course. "I'm not trying to please everyone," said Curtis Uhlemann, artistic director of the newly formed preprofessional company Arcos Dance, which is made up of 21 dancers ranging in age from 14 to 28. "We're trying to create a show that goes further out with the form than anything we've done before, a show that stretches the artists' boundaries." The "we" includes associate artistic director Erica Gionfriddo, who co-choreographed the Glass and Poe pieces with Uhlemann. They each have individually choreographed works in the show, as well. The two currently teach at various dance studios in New Mexico including Moving Peop1e Dance Center, the 120-seat performance space where ARCOS opens its debut concert on Friday, Oct. 14, for a two-weekend run. "We're creating an entity that exists solely on its own and is not tied to any school in town," Uhlemann said following a recent rehearsal. "ARCOS' goal is to create an artistic bridge for dancers between scholastic training and professional performing," Gionfriddo added. Being part of a company as focused on training as Moving People is can restrict artists in some ways, the directors said, because there's a need to conform to what students, parents, donors, and audience members expect from such an entity. But with an independent company, "We can do our own work rather than do a show with six or seven other choreographers," Uhlemann said. "The handcuffs are off." The dancers - some of whom have also worked at Moving People - appear to enjoy being unshackled. One of them is Jocelyn Montoya, a native Santa Fean who recently graduated from the University of New Mexico. She took classes at the National Dance Institute of New Mexico and had seen previous dance works choreographed by Uhlemann and Gionfriddo. "I knew it'd be a great opportunity to perform with them," Montoya said. "Santa Fe is full of dancers and people who want to perform but can't find a way to do it all year round. Until now, no one has been bold enough to give voice to aspiring professional dancers and say, Hey, we're going to do five shows a year." That's the goal. ARCOS has already lined up an ambitious schedule of five programs through the spring of 2012 and is working on setting up a European tour next summer. (Gionfriddo taught and toured with five of the ARCOS dancers in Spain during the summer.) Chicago dancer Katie Hopkins decided to come out west to give ARCOS a try. She graduated from Columbia College in May with the question, "Oh my God, what am I going to do now?" hanging over her head, she said. "In Chicago there are two extremes -you either find very professional opportunities or people who are trying to do small shows and break in. There's not much middle ground." She has known Uhlemann for five years, and he invited her to join ARCOS. "So far it's been really good. There's no way I would dance this much in Chicago." Regarding one of the works in the show, Uhlemann said he has always liked Poe's poem. "I've rarely seen group pieces choreographed to the spoken word. I wanted to create something a little unworldly ... and over the top." The fact that Halloween is just around the corner apparently has little to do with that choice. The Glass piece is an adaptation of a work originally created in 1999 by two of Uhlemann's New York mentors: Peter Garrow and Sam Cappadonia. "I wanted to work with the elements of dirt, water, ice," he said — emphasizing that the audience will not get caught up in the ensuing mess. The Mamas and the Papas song serves as a framework for violinist Karina Wilson to support the dancers with what Gionfriddo calls "an ambient, pretty dark melody. We're taking a totally '60s, pretty happy tune and giving it a dark interpretation." The show features four other numbers - three choreographed by Gionfriddo and one by Uhlemann - in a roughly 90-minute production with an intermission. Dancers who joined the company this year are guaranteed a year's worth of performing, after which time they have to audition again. The two directors want to eventually split Arcos into two groups: one touring professional company (in which dancers would, ideally, get paid) and the current pre-professional group. (Auditions for new dancers take place from 4 to 6 p.m. Oct. 29 at Moving People Dance Center, 1583 Pacheco St., Suite A2. Reservations are due by Oct. 28; 473-7434 or info@arcosdance.com ) As for the ensemble's name, Uhlemann said he was looking for something like "Arcadia." While searching around, he came across the word areas, mathematical shorthand for the inverse of the cosine function in trigonometry. "It's like arcs in space," he said. "I liked the look of it, the sound of it. It fits." Page 52, October 14–20,2011 https://arcosdance.com/Trips-and-Quips-ARCOS-Dance-2011 2023-06-23T15:20:19+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1e09ec4542edb10ac864eb8f0bc29fd62a477e42cd3faa4925481bd9a2edc495/arcos-trips-and-quips-2.jpg santafe.com ARCOS Dance Trips and Quips Last night I spent the evening with Edgar Allen Poe, Philip Glass, The Mamas and The Papas and... best of all, with a new dance company here in Santa Fe, called ARCOS Dance. I wish...they had put an exclamation point after the name "ARCOS" because the energy and enthusiasm generated by this group of young and talented dancers deserves a couple hundred such marks. ARCOS was created specifically for young dancers who are either professional or are still students. ARCOS provides them with the venue and the guidance by which they can develop into polished professionals. By the looks of last night's performance, it seemed to me as though the pros already made up most of the company. The first piece, called The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe (for those of us who may have forgotten) was beautifully choreographed by Artistic Director Curtis Uhlemann and Associate Artistic Director Erica Gionfriddo. We are presented with a stark and austere stage: only one large Victorian era chair upholstered with a medieval-style tapestry depicting unicor ns. This was an appropriate symbol given that unicorns are often associated with the power to heal the sick. Poe's character is certainly in a dark place, trapped by his own compulsive and destructive thoughts, punctuated relentlessly by the raven's refrain of "Nevermore". The dancers portray this mental downward spiral-which most of us have experienced at sometime or other-by sliding, writhing and bounding across the floor, both in time and mood, with a narration of the poem. Their athletic movements around the chair give compelling visual form to the self-destructive whirlpool thinking of Poe's tormented speaker. Painted on the floor is an impressionistic image of a raven with outstretched wings as seen from above, or was it from below? The combination of the set in its austere yet forceful simplicity, the evocative and beautiful lines of the dancers, the lighting and the narration, created a work of living art right there before your eyes. Phew, these guys are good! I also liked the piece entitled "Glass Walls", with music by Philip Glass; and no, the pun was not lost on me. Again, we are presented with a minimalist stage-four large wrought iron chairs evocative of distorted, almost nonfunctional thrones-and certainly not very comfortable for sitting. Each of the four "thrones"-set inside the four corners of a large square motif on the floor-were different and were "inhabited" by one dancer each. No matter how much the four dancers moved away from their throne, merging and interacting together for brief moments on stage; they always returned to their respective thrones as though attached by rubber bands. I thought it was perfect. And that perfection is the result of a lot of hard work, to which some of these photos will attest. In addition to the clearly talented and dedicated dancers, there is the artistic direction of Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo, both of whom I had the distinct pleasure of meeting and chatting with. They exude enthusiasm and joy and this spills over into each piece and to all of the dancers. It's no mystery. As Erica has said, "One of our biggest goals is to create choreography that highlights each individual dancer's strengths." It's exciting to think what future performances will be like. ARCOS is all about collaboration with other artistic disciplines including music, video, and set design-be they professional or pre-professional. ARCOS is also determined to share their vision of dance with the world, having recently returned from a tour in Spain. This was sponsored by Interdansa and by the Catalonian government. ARCOS is literally on the move. Here's what I think should happen next. I think that Santa Fe needs to turn out for every performance by ARCOS Dance, and cheer, applaud, enjoy, and encourage this kind of youthful artistry in our community. Bravo to ARCOS! Photos: Curtis Uhlemann talking with students during a rehearsal. A combination class and rehearsal being led by Artistic Director Curtis Uhlemann. Above and Below: Rehearsal for "Gloss Walls." 2011-2012 Performance Calendar All Performances at Moving People Dance Performance Space Unless Otherwise Noted. 2357 Fox Rd, Suite 300 Tel, 505-473-7434 Web: arcasdance.com 10/14/11-10/15/11 Premiere: ARCOS Dance Repertoire Concert 10/21/11-10/22/11 Second Weekend of Premiere 1/20/12-1/22/12 ARCOS Dance Multi-Media Project 3/16/12-3/17/12 ARCOS Dance Repertoire Concert 3/23/12-3/24/12 Second Weekend of Repertoire Concert 6/8/12-6/10/12 ARCOS Dance live Musician Collaboration Summer 2012 International Tour, Dates TBA Dancers participating in three or more ARCOS productions are eligible to audition for The International Tour. By Liz Simon Trips and Quips Liz Simon is a photographer, writer, and cyclist who like to combine the three in her quest to discover the nooks and crannies of New Mexico. Sometimes, means of transportation other than bicycle are employed—including the Rail Runner and motorcycle. https://arcosdance.com/ARCOS-Dance-comes-to-Taos-2011 2023-06-23T15:00:20+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71500afd1e9cc0e6567adc5452cc54be82ce3f61d61a038b554cc3133a56c878/taos-news.jpg The Taos News ARCOS Dance comes to Taos ARCOS Dance presents its world premiere repertoire concert live Wednesday, October 26, 2011 by TEMPO Staff ARCOS Dance presents its world premiere repertoire concert featuring new works and existing choreography by Artistic Director Curtis Uhlemann and Associate Artistic Director Erica Gionfriddo Live on stage today (Oct. 27), 7 p.m.,at the Taos Community Auditorium, 145 Paseo del Pueblo Norte. Presented by the Taos Center for the Arts, the performance includes 19 ARCOS Dance members from the Northern New Mexico region and Colorado. A piece titled,'The Raven;' is danced to Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem read by Basil Rathbone. Performers move on,around,and over a solitary wingback chair center stage, and don various cuts of costuming and fantastical headdresses. Then, aggressive, high-energy is expressed in "Liquid Days In Four Parts:· Dancers sling bucketsful of dirt,water,and ice across the theater against tracks from Philip Glass's album "Songs From Liquid Days:· In addition to the public performance, the Center will also host a school show, Lecture.and demonstration for Local students the following morning. Tickets are $15, $12 for members, $10 for students 18 and under. Call (575) 758-2052. Photo: Erica Gionfriddo, ARCOS Dance Associate Artistic Director, Dancer https://arcosdance.com/Multimedia-mind-trip-2012 2023-06-23T14:53:52+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/57a14a3f8a189cf2e4ba6b776d04d798893053ecaa01ac2223e224e4f3e54842/500-words-santa-fe-new-mexican-1.29.12.jpg Santa Fe New Mexican Locally owned and independent Sunday, January 29, 2012 www.santafenewmexican.com Dance company presents unique coming-of-age story Local news, C-1 ARCOS Dance presents a fast-paced, surrealistic coming-of-age story in '500 Words or Less' Photo by Jane Phillips / The New Mexican Dancers rehearse scenes for 500 Words or Less on Saturday at the ARCOS Performance Space. The multimedia production involves 19 dancers, four actors, videos, social media, photos and music to re-create the main character's wandering mental journey to analyze himself. By Staci Matlock The New Mexican Tommy has just one page in which to describe who he is for a college essay. It's a frightening and frustrating prospect. ARCOS Dance will give audiences insight into Tommy's challenge in a fast-paced, multimedia ride into his mind that involves such varied things as colorful gypsies, his life as a movie trailer, dancers with laptops, a Skyped argument and the bittersweet memory of his childhood friend's secret. 500 Words or Less involves 19 dancers, four actors, videos, social media, photos and music to re-create Tommy's wandering mental journey to analyze himself and his relationships. The 85-minute show combines and showcases the talents of three guiding lights: Artistic Director Curtis Uhlemann, Associate Artistic Director Erica Gionfriddo and multimedia specialist and Theater Director Eliot Fisher. ARCOS is working toward offering year-round performance opportunities to young professionals. Uhlemann described 500 Words as an abstraction of thought and feeling, a young man reviewing his past, present and future possibilities. The creators wanted to explore the influences of new technology and social media on issues close to young people. Along the way, it evolved into a coming-o f age story. The show is a result of a broad collaboration involving local high school Please see Trip, Page C3 If you go What: 500 Words or Less; multimedia performance by ARCOS Dance When: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 3-4 and Feb. 10-11; 2 p.m. Feb. 5 and Feb. 12 Where: ARCOS Performance Space, 1583 Pacheco St. Tickets: $20. For reservations, email info@arcosdance.com, or call 505-473-7434 Trip: Show starts as audience enters theater videographers, artists and actors. Tommy Roman, a New Mexico School for the Arts sophomore who plays the lead, also plays something of himself, he said. Roman, fellow NMSA student Gabe Lenetsky and Fisher wrote the script. "They spent some nights just interviewing me for hours," Roman said, noting that his required focus on self-revelation made this show different from the many others he's been in. The trickiest part of the show was blending all the various art forms seamlessly. "We are stepping beyond our comfort zone," Uhlemann said. Fisher said he didn't have much experience with dance until recently. Working on 500 Words helped him understand that dance, like music or theater, can be abstract or have meaning. "I was interested in how we could get all these forms to work together," he said. "But I want there to be a story." Gionfriddo helped choreograph the eight original dance pieces in the show and also will dance. "It is tricky to do both the directing and performing," she said. Uhlemann said the production-direction trio started by thinking about the space, then converting a stage into the inside of a boy's head. 'The creators made use of walls, floor and a mezzanine. In effect, "We designed the show around the space," Uhlemann said. The show will start from the moment the audience enters the theater as they are funneled through three rooms - one exploring old technology, one with photos showing moments from the performance, and one with a large mural by Santa Fe Prep artist Lydia Abernathy. The rooms serve as a portal into Tommy's mind. The tarp on the stage floor is covered with writings by the dancers, who range in age from 13 to 27, expressing who they are and what they believe. They are members of local Santa Fe dance companies, New Mexico School for the Arts and universities around the nation. Videographers and artists from local high schools helped create the multimedia show. And those familiar with the writing, acting and directing talents of Matt Sanford won't want to miss his cameo video performance in a bathtub. For anyone who's faced the prospect of describing themselves to strangers in a very limited amount of room, Tommy's struggle will be familiar. So will his coming to terms with some of the moments that have defined his young life. "I think there will be moments in the show that everyone can connect with," Uhlemann said. Photo by Jane Phillips / The New Mexican Curtis Uhlemann describes 500 Words or Less as an abstraction of thought, and a young man reviewing his past, present and future possibilities Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com. https://arcosdance.com/ARTward-Bound-2012 2023-06-23T14:19:39+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/648b263717cf6bd8fc15eb0b93afc8a749e9e7797352649890c52229d9b16ed6/arcos-abq-arts-3.31.12.jpg ABQ Arts ARTward Bound: Santa Fe Posted by Editor in Dance on March 31, 2012 ARCOS Dance stretches creative limits with new repertoire By Christine Vigil Based in Santa Fe, ARCOS Dance is known for cutting edge choreographies and creative means of expression. Presented as part of their four-concert home season, the ARCOS Dance “Spring Repertory Concert” will run for two weekends, revealing creative choreography from an eclectic collection of works. Under the artistic co-direction of Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo, the concert will feature a company of 21 dancers ranging in age from 14-27. ARCOS is shaping the Southwest contemporary performing arts scene. Founded just under a year ago, the company has maintained a rigorous training schedule, preparing their dancers for a number of upcoming performances including multimedia dance concerts, musician collaborations, and international touring in Spain, France and Germany. “We felt such satisfaction with the success of and response to our February multimedia production ‘500 Words or Less’ that we want to push ourselves even more in that direction – eventually achieving evening-length works that blend several genres,” said Gionfriddo, following the successful premiere of their recent production. “The spring repertory show is our next step in experimenting.” Featuring a 90-minute program of choreography, the three featured pieces will include two new works, and the restaging of “To Have Everything,” an homage to Uhlemann’s mother. The performances will highlight the coalesced artistic visions of Uhlemann and Gionfriddo, and each piece was conceived with music at its core. With musical accompaniment that ranges from live and recorded jazz to American minimalist orchestral movements and piano compositions, each piece explores the complexities of sound and physicality from vantage points that juxtapose soft fluidity with broken rigidity to create a seemingly contrasting sense of cohesion. April 6-7, 13-15, Fridays, Saturdays, 7:30pm, Sunday, 2pm ARCOS Dance Spring Repertory Concert MPD Performance Space Tickets $20 adults, $15 students; 1583 Pacheco, Santa Fe, 505.473.7434; arcosdance.com https://arcosdance.com/Moving-with-Spring-2012 2023-06-23T13:56:29+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c536ff76af50b4962a0040e4837b1d0952067afedf7a6256749fc18fc2810843/arcos-sfreporter-4.12.jpg Santa Fe Reporter SFR Picks, Page 27: Despite recent snow, ARCOS welcomes spring April 4–10, 2012, Volume 39, Issue 14 Arts & Culture SFR Picks Moving with Spring Fearless and fun dance with ARCOS Based on the success of 500 Words or Less, ARCOS Dance's February multimedia production, ARCOS' spring performance includes three longer pieces that higlight the company's' signature style and use of intriguing image and movement. ARCOS not only brings fresh dance performances to the Santa Fe community, but also gives young dancers at preprofessional and professional levels a chance to practice and polish their skills in a "professional setting where [the dancers] are part of the creation of world class work," artistic director Curtis Uhlemann says. The goal is to have preprofessional dancers performing in Santa Fe while the- professional group tours the country. As in previous productions, the spring show takes advantage of props and projected images and relies on pieces such as John Adams' "Soledades" to provide tension and rhythm. The cyclical feel of the music leads the dancers in playf1,1I and passionate movements tnat echo the tempo of the accompanying string instruments. This 20-minute piece incorporates elements of videography and includes several white panels for dancers to stand behind while video projections of the performers are displayed on the panels. These elements create another layer of moving image that communicates the nuanced and mature creativity that is ARCOS Dance. (Anna Harney) ARCOS Spring Repertory Concert: 7:30 pm Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7; through April 15. $20 ($15 students). Moving People Dance Performance Space, 1583 Pacheco St., Ste. A, 473-7434 https://arcosdance.com/Sense-of-Motion-2012 2023-06-23T12:14:17+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8c3c095f66945ef13e95f745706e6a4e607475c74e0790407e2900c3d2ebfe18/ARCOS-Journal-4.6.12.jpg Journal Santa Fe Friday, April 6, 2012 75 cents Edition Santa Fe / North Venue A Zoned Publication of Albuquerque Journal Sense of Motion: ARCOS Dance Concert ARCOS company dancers will premier two original works Photo courtesy of ARCOS Dance: Erica Gionfriddo will perform in ARCOS Dance's Spring Repertory this weekend. By Kathaleen Roberts Journal Staff Writer ARCOS mixes the atonal jazz of Charles Mingus with John Adams' minimalist melodies in a visceral swirl for spring. Santa Fe's newest dance company will premier two original works this weekend at the MPD Performance Space at 1583 Pacheco St. The spring debut follows the fledgling company's multi-media production "500 Words or Less" in February. Choreographers Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo launched the contemporary dance company last August. Its 10–25 members range from pre-professional students to professional dancers. "The idea is to incorporate young artists from Santa Fe who are interested in performing and to give them some opportunities to dance," Uhlemann said. "We wanted to use them as members of the group and incorporate them into the creative process. We wanted to start off as that bridge, that connection." The dancers range in age from 14 to 27 and come from Columbia University, the University of California at Irvine, the University of New Mexico, the National Dance Institute of New Mexico and the New Mexico School for the Arts. The founders plan to expand into both a fall Southwestern tour and some European dates by the summer of 2013. The Mingus piece has been percolating inside Uhlemann's head for some time. Never performed, "The Children's Hour of Dream" was discovered after the composer died. see ARCOS on Page S2 The dancers slide down, jump off and run up ramps set up on stage. "It's very raw," said Uhlemann, ARCOS's artistic director. "I really like the brass and the horns. It's very atonal and contrapuntal. "I didn't have the right people to do it" until now, he continued. "It has this heavy, really abstract sort of community, like if there was a (group) of people who existed someplace else. I try visually to get around what I'm hearing. For me, the music always comes first." Associate artistic director Gionfriddo, who also dances in the piece, said the movements reflected the style of the music without necessarily lining up with the meter. "We just embodied the piece," she said. "I get a feeling or sense of motion in my body. He'll say, 'I need you to come up with a phrase to this piece of the music.'" The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams' "Soldedades" explores gentle themes of solitude. "The score is like the transcription of a storm that slowly builds in intensity, pours down for a few moments, and leaves everything calm but altered afterward," Uhlemann said. The continually shifting meter offers multiple opportunities in a canvas that incorporates video projection. "I wanted to give the audience a chance to really see the movement," Uhlemann said. The dancers "roll under the screen and projection makes it appear like the are dancing up the wall. There's this epic feel to the piece." "To Have Everything" is an audience favorite dating to 2009 dedicated to Uhlemann's mother. Set on a white floor anchored by five dancers draped in a palette of whites, it features the music of Santa Fe composer Eliot Gray Fisher. "I wanted to show this power side and strength in women," Uhlemann explained. Uhlemann has always wanted to create: he stumbled into a college dance class because the teachers were — as always — desperate for men. He chose the name "ARCOS" as a derivative of his favorite word "Arcadia." "I danced for a while, but I was always more interested in being behind the scenes," he said. "I've got pieces that are living in my head, and I just need to get them out. The goal with this is to create something that lasts." Photos courtesy of ARCOS Dance: Curtis Uhlemann is the artistic director of ARCOS Dance. Erica Gionfriddo is the associate artistic director of ARCOS Dance. https://arcosdance.com/Something-Cool-2012 2023-06-23T20:44:50+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Strike-Up-the-Band-2012 2023-06-22T22:08:58+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ce623a4c978a0a95bf06a8bb00869ae0326077cb94101eedd7203678e5e2e3fa/arcos-pasa-10.12.jpg Pasatiempo, page 26–27, October 26 – November 1, 2012 Photo by Mark Garrett: ARCOS Dance Strike Up the Band Michael Wade Simpson for The New Mexican At a recent ARCOS Dance company rehearsal, artistic director Curtis Uhlemann asked the performers, clad in sweat pants, socks, and leotards, to grab their props. They came back waving shiny sabers and wearing military-style band hats, complete with chin straps and ostrich-feather plumes The rehearsal continued. The costumes are for Uhlemann's new piece, The March, set to Bolero, the relentlessly building, drum-dominated orchestral piece by Maurice Ravel. The work premieres at the National Dance Institute-New Mexico Dance Barns on Friday, Oct. 26. Also on the program are Heights by Half Past, with music by Charles Mingus; The Uncommon Self, set to music by John Adams; and One of Five, a duet performed by Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo, the company's associate artistic director, to music by Sigur Rós. The concert marks the first performance of ARCOS as a professional dance group. Uhlemann and Gionfriddo started the ensemble as a performing outlet for advanced student dancers two years ago (the company had its premiere in 2011) but, according to the directors, the intention was always to evolve into a professional group. Now they have both - a professional touring company and A2, a group made up of students. Uhlemann's The March was inspired, in pan, by the choreographer's experiences as a member of two different drum and bugle corps in upstate New York from the age of 11. After a few years, Uhlemann began traveling three hours each way to rehearse every weekend in Rochester, where he appeared with the nationally ranked Patriots Drum &: Bugle Corps. He specialized in synchronized rifle tricks. As a professional dancer and choreographer, Uhlemann has kept his hat, so to speak, in the world of drum and bugle corps. He still works as a choreographer for The Cadets Drum&: Bugle Corps, 10-time world champions, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. "I get to make modern dances for 150," he said. Drummers, bugle players, and flag-bearing soldiers once accompanied armies into battle, but just as warfare has evolved, so has the drum and bugle corps. Think marching bands without clarinets, flutes, or trombones, offering entertainment on football fields at halftime, along with uniformed dancers (called the color guard) running around with flags, sabers, and rifles. Three of the male dancers traveling to perform with Arcos are former Cadets who, like Uhlemann, went on to study dance in college. Making the segue from marching to dancing wasn't as unlikely as it sounds, Uhlemann said. "Drum corps are like well-oiled machines. I learned how to organize, how a rehearsal goes. These people work all day on hot fields in 100-degree heat, all summer long." That type of work ethic is something he was proud to be a part of. "It's what I wanted to bring to a dance company." A year ago, Uhlemann invited Gionfriddo to help create movement for The Cadets. "It was surreal - it is its own world .. " she said. "l gave them movement, and then Curtis had to move them from the corner of the field to the 50-yard line in 16 bars of music. It's a different way of working." "They're used to learning fast; they pick up details quickly," Uhlemann said. "It's easier to train a kid from a drums corps than to break the old habits of someone who has been studying dance for years. They have a raw quality. I can get them low and wide. Contemporary dancers tend to be stiff and quick." "Everything makes sense now," Gionfriddo said of her experience watching Uhlemann at drum corps rehearsals. "Now I understand why he schedules rehearsals like he does, why he enjoys making patterns on stage." In the years Gionfriddo and Uhlemann have been creating dances together, they have moved from a place of large, sweeping movement to something Gionfriddo described as "more quirky, intimate things. I come from a visceral, internal, asymmetrical place. It's a good contrast to Curtis," Gionfriddo said. "We're not into pretty per se. We like raw physicality." "I love it when a female dancer is as tough on stage as a man," Uhlemann said. "I tell the women, move bigger than guys, and be just as strong - you're just as powerful." Uhlemann said that The March came about after years of fantasizing about choreographing to Bolero. The music, commissioned for a ballet with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, had its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1928. It was used to comic effect in the 1979 movie 10 featuring Bo Derek, and as a soundtrack for British ice skaters Torvill and Dean for their gold-medal-winning performance at the 1984 Winter Olympics. "I always have a collection of songs hanging in the back of my head," Uhlemann said. "Things I would like to choreograph to. Every year I pull them out and see if any of them would be right for the group I have right now. Things locked into place for Bolero this year. I've been listening to it in my car nonstop. I wanted to have a balance of military-style movement as well as abstract dance. It starts with one performer in front of the curtain, alone with a saber. It starts simple and gets crazier. I'm trying to resist the tendency to always work with the blocks and divisions of this repetitive music." In addition to the three former Cadets - Evan Turner, Ethan Warren, and Mark Willis - ARCOS includes local dancers Katie Hopkins, Kelsey Paschich, Kaitlin Innis, Phylicia Roybal, Elle Jansen, and Wes Jansen. The students are learning company choreography during their technique classes and have been standing in for missing dancers during rehearsals. At the various dance schools where the two directors teach and barter for rehearsal and performance space, Gionfriddo said everyone sees the benefit of having a working company and its directors and dancers interacting with their students. "We saved money from last year knowing we wanted to evolve," she said. "The goal was always to move into a touring company." ARCOS appears in the McCallum Theatre Institute Choreography Festival in Palm Desert, California, in November, and in evening-length multimedia performances at Santa Fe's Center for Contemporary Arts in February, in addition to touring in the U.S. and Germany. details - ARCOS Dance, mixed repertoire - 7:30 p.m. Friday & Saturday, Oct. 26 & 27; 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 28 - National Dance Institute-New Mexico Dance Barns, 1140 Alto St. - $20, discounts available; reservations at 473-7434 and www.arcosdance.com https://arcosdance.com/Clock-ticks-2012 2023-06-22T21:56:09+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/730bf43d937f89e777b774c5c31c10c1c957ff2ffbc51dcde9d6ed7819b64776/arcos-warriors-article-nmexican.jpg Locally owned and independent Tuesday, December 25, 2012 www.santafenewmexican.com Clock ticks on dance project's Web campaign Local company ARCOS Dance has until Jan. 13 to raise $23,000 to bring World War II story to stage By Adele Oliveira The New Mexican Image courtesy ARCOS dance: A dancer from Arcos Dance's new production, The Warriors: A Love Story. The dance company has launched an online campaign to raise funds for the show. ON THE WEB: To learn more about Arcos Dance performances or its USA Projects fundraising, visit www.usaprojects.org and enter "The Warriors" into the search box. Just 2 years old, local dance company Arcos Dance is already known for its visceral, elaborate performances. In October, the group premiered The March, a dance piece set to orchestral drums. In that performance, dancers carried sabers and wore bold, military-style hats. This February, ARCOS will present a debut work, The Warriors: A Love Story, based on the World War II experiences of multimedia director Eliot Fisher's grandparents. Together with his wife, Arcos associate artistic director Erica Gionfriddo, and company artistic director Curtis Uhlemann, Fisher has ambitious plans to bring his grandparents' story - and the broader story of World War II - to the stage. Like any creative project, The Warriors requires funding. And artistic professionals, Please see DANCE, Page A-4 Dance: Multimedia production to hit local stage in February Continued from Page A-1 including Fisher and Gionfriddo, are no strangers to the grant-writing and pleading-for-money routine. But they went a different route for this show, signing on with the online funding platform USA Projects, a 50l(c)(3) organization. "We're trying to raise $23,000 which sounds like a lot, but is pretty modest considering the amount of things we're trying to do," Gionfriddo said. Since launching last week, the project has raised $7,015, about 25 percent of its goal. The Warriors has until midnight Jan. 13, 2013, to raise the full $23,000. USA Projects is similar to other online funding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, in that it allows users to set a goal for ¢.e amount of money they want to raise and solicit donations from anyone and everyone - grandmothers and best friends, sure, but also supporters from around the world who find out about projects through the funding website or social media. In return, funders get rewards - in the case of The Warriors, handwritten thank-you notes, a Skype conversation with the directors and a sneak peek of the performance, depending on how much one gives. There is a catch. Like Kickstarter and some lndiegogo projects, USA Project campaigns must raise their intended goal by a pre-determined date to see any funding at all. If the campaign falls short, whether by $5 or $500, all money raised is returned to the donors. Unlike Kickstarter and other online funding platforms, USA Projects has a set of criteria: Applicants must have previously received a grant from a set of pre-approved sources. Once approved, USA Projects fundraising campaigns receive support from project managers, and because USA Projects is a nonprofit, donations through the organization are tax-deductible. "Another benefit is that USA Projects has matching funds available," Fisher said. "We received $1,000 in matching funds from New Mexico Artists Match Fund, which doubles donors' gifts. It feels good to give $25, and all of a sudden it's $50." Fisher noted that while major donors are important, the bulk of their USA Projects campaign is made up of smaller donations from funders who can afford to give $20 or $25. Similar to the 2008 Obama campaign's focus on more and smaller donations, Fisher said smaller pledges from many people help create community around the show. Because the piece itself is personal, it makes sense that the fundraising process is, too. "My grandfather died a few years before I was born," Fisher said. His grandfather was J. Glenn Gray; "a Pennsylvania farm boy with a Ph.D. in philosophy." During the war, Gray went into towns recently retaken by the Allies, trying to root out Nazis and sympathizers. After the war, he did the same in the German university system. Gray later wrote a book (including diary excerpts) called The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. "I did an oral history project in high school where I interviewed my grandmother about her experience during the bombing of Dresden," Fisher said. His grandmother was Ursula Gray, an accomplished German dancer. "I knew who these people were," he said, "but I didn't necessarily know who they were when they were our age, and that was the source material for the show .... We realized when we started thinking about World War II that it was too broad to put into one show, so we concentrated on figures who lived during that era and the concept of telling a broader story though individuals' stories." The Warriors features three actors (including Fisher), six dancers (including Gionfriddo and Uhlemann) and a couple of musicians, also including Fisher. Multimedia is the very essence of The Warriors. "One of the concepts we're working with in the show is simultaneity: trying to blend different genres effectively;" Fisher said. "There's always some element of theater, plus dance, video, sound design, all at varying degrees throughout the show." "There's a real feeling of overlapping," Gionfriddo added. "The audience has to choose what to look at to a certain extent, and we hope this provokes some thought and encourages [the audience to] actively participate. We're not dictating, we're giving options." Both Gionfriddo and Fisher see online fundraising as a primary avenue for raising money for future projects. A smaller Kickstarter campaign for their October show was successful as well. "It's grass-roots-oriented," Gionfriddo said. "It allows us to reach out to different people, and we get to talk about the project. It's having to get the word out there yourself - not talking in a conference room with one specific person or writing to a board, but talking to the people who are going to support you." "It makes the work stronger to have eyes on it earlier in the process," Fisher added. "Fundraising and outreach are parts of creating the work we do . ... I have a feeling we'll do much more [online fundraising] in the years to come." The Warriors: A Love Story will show at the Center for Contemporary Arts from Feb. 8 to Feb. 17, 2013. https://arcosdance.com/War-and-Love-2013 2023-06-22T21:47:37+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ec156fcf44ac878c9ffb72e6350f36436a6a6f7ecb75f9bb8470fa81b516b482/warriors---abq-journal-1.jpg Journal Santa Fe Sunday, February 3, 2013 $1.25 Edition A Zoned Publication of The Sunday Journal Complex History Photo by Eddie Moore / Journal Members of ARCOS Dance rehearse "The Warriors: A Love Story," a dance drama about World War II. War and Love Production tells story of a couple's World War II romance By Kathaleen Roberts Journal Staff Writer War's profound destruction can churn horror into timeless acts of redemption ARCOS Dance addresses this paradox with "The Warriors: A Love Story," a multimedia production choreographed to the memories of an American soldier and a survivor of the bombing of Dresden. The collaboration chronicles ARCOS multimedia director Eliot Gray Fisher's search to understand his grandparents' complex history before and after World War II. Set in the Muñoz-Waxman Gallery at the Center for Contemporary Arts, the work combines theater, dance, video and music with vintage video and audio footage and war propaganda (from both sides) to tell their stories. "The Warriors: A Love Story" runs through this weekend and again from Feb. 15-17. Fisher never knew his grandfather, J. Glenn Gray. But Gray lived on through the memories of his widow Ursula, a dancer, who died in 2009. See Production on Page 6 Photo by Eddie Moore / Journal Wes and Elle Jansen rehearse "The Warriors," a multimedia dance production about Santa Fe Prep teacher Eliot Gray Fisher's grandparents. If you go: WHAT: "The Warriors: A Love Story" by ARCOS Dance WHERE: Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail WHEN: Feb. 8-10and Feb. 15-17. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. on Sundays. COST: $20/adults; $15/students CONTACT: 473-7434 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dd236d0c2d257f3e27f032f1b4c7c4808997e4befcd69c966011762bcf80002a/warriors---abq-journal-2.jpg Page 6 Santa Fe / North Sunday, February 3, 2013 from Page 1 A Colorado College philosophy professor, Gray never talked much about his wartime experience, his grandson said. But he penned a 1959 book on modern warfare, "The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle," and he never thought about the so-called "Good War" in black and white terms. Gray was drafted on the same day he received his doctoral degree from Columbia University. He spent one year in the infantry and another working in counterintelligence. He marched through Italy, then down into North Africa. "He'd stay after (the battles) to rout out elements of sympathizers because he spoke German," Fisher said. In his book, "he was explicit about what he did and how it made him uncomfortable," Fisher added. With the surrender, Gray went to Munich to help set up a university. The first glimmer of the dance production germinated when Fisher was assigned an oral history project while he was a student at Santa Fe Prep. He decided to interview his grandmother Ursula on tape. Like most wartime survivors, she had avoided talking about the past. "It was very emotional," said Fisher, who is now a teacher at Santa Fe Prep. "She said she died one death at Dresden in 1945 and had a second life in the U.S. with my grandfather." Between 22,000 and 25,000 people perished during the massive bombing by U.S. and R. A.F. aircraft toward the end of the war. Most of the victims were civilians. The city contained few military targets and the four raids became one of the war's causes celebres as historians argued whether or not the bombings were justified. Many residents hid and died in their coal cellars, where they suffocated. or were incinerated as the walls collapsed. The bombings ignited thousands of fires. "They weren't expecting it at all," Fisher said. "When it started, they thought it was a false alarm." Ursula, her mother and sister headed for the coal cellar. But they could feel the walls buckling as the bombs exploded. They ran out into the streets and into a park, blackened in soot. Then, they realized the Russians were marching into the city. Terrified of being raped, the two sisters stashed their mother out in the country while they headed west to Munich on bicycles. "She said the American occupation wasn't that great, either," Fisher added. Ursula remained in Munich when the war ended, heading a secretarial pool for the university system. It was there that she met her husband. American soldiers were cautioned against fraternizing with the locals. "All her friends said, 'You're a traitor,' " Fisher said. "They were not supposed to talk to each other." When Ursula discovered an orange -- a rare post-war treat -- on her desk, she realized Gray had left it there for her. Thus began their courtship. Gray had always made a clear distinction between the German culture that he loved and the rise of the Third Reich, Fisher said. To distill the story into a collaborative dance project, Fisher began with his high school interview and a BBC documentary audiotape interview with the couple recorded after the war. Dance was Ursula's passion; she had studied with wellknown modernist German choreographers in Germany. She taught dance in Colorado Springs well in to her 80s, her grandson said. In Santa Fe, ARCOS turned the stage into a snowy canvas for image projection, anchored by a white baby grand piano. It opens with Fisher struggling to compose music for his grandmother's memorial. ARCOS co-founder and associate director Erica Gionfriddo selected sections from Gray's diary excerpts to choreograph. A scene set in a cave packed with refugees called for claustrophobic expression. "I started experimenting with a wall, where I couldn't get away from the wall," she said. Another solo depicts Ursula dancing as a young girl. "The scenery is done from the projections," Gionfriddo explained. "That's why we have this very minimalist, Bauhaus-inspired set. This is by far our most elaborate and ambitious show to date." Drawn from Fisher's own attempts to understand his grandparents' history, "The Warriors" looks at how war shaped their lives and as a result, his own. It depicts the radically anti-war act of falling in love and of using traumatic experiences to spread beauty. Feb. 13–15 marks the 68th anniversary of the bombing or Dresden. Photo by Eddie Moore / Journal Erica Gionfriddo rehearses on the minimalist set of "The Warriors" at the Center for Contemporary Arts on Saturday. https://arcosdance.com/Radio-Cafe-The-Warriors-2013 2023-06-23T22:23:29+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/All-Is-Fair-2013 2023-06-22T20:09:26+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8e2208aced491ac0ff309fb4cf90666b83c6561e8fb22e0830647e224a3a18d4/reporter-warriors-article.jpg Santa Fe Reporter Local News and Culture February 6–12, 2013 sfreporter.com Free every week All's Fair in Love, War, and Multimedia Installations Music, Page 38 Music All Is Fair ARCOS Dance makes art from love and war By Loren Bienvenu @SFReporterMusic February 05, 2013 In 1959, World War II veteran turned philosophy professor J Glenn Gray published The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. A little over a half-century later, his grandson, native Santa Fean Eliot Gray Fisher, has metamorphosed elements of the book and of Gray's life into the hugely ambitious multimedia project The Warriors: A Love Story. "I never knew my grandfather," Fisher tells SFR. "He died before I was born, but I always was really interested in getting to know him a little bit through his most well-known book, which looks at the philosophy of modern combat." The book identifies the enticements of warfare—with the aim of finding alternative ways to satisfy them, thus limiting the need for war itself. "I always wanted to adapt [the book] into some kind of performance," Fisher, who serves as ARCOS Dance Company's multimedia director, says. "A film, then maybe a play, to translate this kind of dry philosophical writing into something a little more accessible." As it turned out, his adaptation incorporates film and theater elements, as well as original music and dance with co-directors Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann of ARCOS providing the production's "visceral, athletic choreography." In this ambitious project, dance is not just a means of expression—it also correlates directly and thematically to the tale being told. After the war, Gray married a German woman who survived the Allied bombing of Dresden. Ursula was passionate about dance and even studied under some of the legends of the time, including Mary Wigman, Gret Palucca and Hanya Holm. Gionfriddo, who married Fisher last summer, had the opportunity to meet Ursula during her lifetime. In an example of life imitating art, and vice versa, the recently married couple has been working nonstop since last December to find the best way of expressing this very personalized story, which is itself about the role of artistic expression relative to familial relationships. Of course, such a large collaboration draws on the family as well as the community; in addition to Uhlemann, key contributors include Gionfriddo's brother Mike, a light designer; Fisher's father Rick, a sculptor; and local musician Karina Wilson. Fisher says, "I've been composing since last year and, recently, working with Karina to flesh out some of the material...she's going to be playing cello and viola; cello [being] associated with my grandmother and viola with my grandfather." Wilson is well-known in Santa Fe as a musician. She plays fiddle in Broomdust Caravan as well as alongside Joe West. Fisher says that "it's really nice to be able to just sit down with a pro [and] be flexible and improvisatory, which is what she's all about." Chadney Everett provided the set design, which Fisher describes as "white, white, white. The whole set is white, so when we do the video projections it transforms the space." An integral part of the set is a white baby grand piano, and this, too, serves as a surface for projection. The piano plays more roles than just instrument and backdrop. It is also a central prop to the story, which opens with a frame narrative: Fisher sitting at the piano at midnight, trying to compose a suitable musical elegy for his recently deceased grandmother Ursula. Fisher would never have arrived at this particular piano bench if it weren't for a large-scale, successful crowdfunding campaign. Besides satisfying the logistical requirements of funding, the process was "definitely a way to make people feel like they are already [personally] invested enough so that they really want to see the final product." Ultimately, the success of this final product hinges on how the different artistic and technical components end up harmonizing to create a cohesive story and message. Fisher acknowledges that the greatest challenge is "how all the elements work and play off each other's strengths." He goes on to give an example of both the pitfalls and the benefits of combining such diverse elements: "A screen may attract attention away from a live performer, but at the same time, it can never be as powerful as a live performer. So how can we use [the two] elements together? It's all about simultaneity." The Warriors: A Love Story 7:30 pm Friday, Feb. 8 through Sunday, Feb. 17 $20 adults; $15 students. CCA’s Muñoz Waxman Gallery 1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338 Photo by Rick Fisher: Gray Fisher and a projection of Dresden. Email the author: music@sfreporter.com https://arcosdance.com/Loves-and-lessons-2013 2023-06-22T20:51:50+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58ba6f3122a7c8b8fdc8c16629c070c9e0f233c20c616dd1552990bb385978a6/pasa-warriors-preview-1.jpg Pasatiempo The Santa Fe New Mexican February 8–14, 2013 Loves and Lessons from World War II ARCOS Dance Rob DeWalt | The New Mexican Photo courtesy Rick Fisher: Karen Leigh as Ursula. In the 1959 book The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, author, philosopher, and former U .S. Army intelligence officer J. Glenn Gray writes, "Modern wars are notorious for the destruction of nonparticipants. ... Add to this the unnumbered acts of injustice so omnipresent in war, which may not result in death but inevitably bring pain and grief, and the impartial observer may wonder how the participants in such deeds could ever smile again and be free of care." "I never knew my grandfather," Eliot Gray Fisher - Gray's grandson and a Santa Fe-based multimedia artist and composer - told Pasatiempo. "All l had were stories about him from my aunt, my mother, and my grandmother; before she died." On Friday, Feb. 8, Fisher, who serves as multimedia director for local company ARCOS Dance, presents the first performance of his production The Warriors: A Love 510,y at the Center for Contemporary Arts. The piece was inspired by the lives of Fisher's maternal grandparents and touched by the horrors and complexities of modern war; Fisher and ARCOS choreographers Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo set out, in part, to create a theatrical production that honored Fisher's grandparents and the lessons they took away from World War II. "My grandmother left me books that my grandfather had written," Fisher said, "and the best known was no doubt The Warriors. I was fascinated by it. Not only did J. Glenn Gray have this soldier experience, which I could barely fathom, but he was also very thoughtful in his written recollections about it. He was a lot older than many of the men who went off to fight overseas. He had just gotten his doctorate in philosophy, was called up to serve immediately after that, and kept a very extensive journal, which he incorporated into the book." Gray's The Warriors is a collection of broad reflections on warfare that are as relevant today as they were when he committed them to paper during the war. "I discovered in the book his ruminations on technology, and the alienation that the industrial military machine brings to humanity - how it allows societies to continue to wage war in increasingly anonymous ways," Fisher said. "I thought it was an important story to tell, as was the rest of my grandfather's and grandmother's lives." Gray's wife, Ursula, who grew up in Germany, appears only once in The Warriors. In the book's dedication, Gray writes, "To Ursula: my wife, formerly one of the enemy." During high school, Fisher was assigned an oral-history project, and he chose Ursula, his grandmother, as his subject. He interviewed her about surviving the bombing of Dresden by the Allied forces, and in so doing he began to put the pieces together of his grandparents' shared experience during and after the war. "The intersection of my grandfather and grandmother many years ago was intriguing on so many levels," Fisher said, page 34 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/df9c9bb48320f44a301c2f75cda4c8f2343c47ab4b674783b36df7879183c149/pasa-warriors-preview-2.jpg Pasatiempo, page 35 "both philosophically and personally: a Pennsylvania farm boy goes to Columbia University, gets a doctorate in philosophy, heads of f to war to fight for the Americans, and writes about the horrific things he and many other soldiers saw and did. After the war, and after some reflection, no doubt, my grandfather returns to Germany to help with the reconstruction. While there, he meets Ursula, his future wife - a survivor of the bombing of Dresden." Before the bombing, Ursula was immersed in athletics and modern dance. While in Dresden she studied under expressionist dance pioneers Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca. She also served as an alternate athlete during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. "My grandfather was this man of words and ideas, and my grandmother was all about the body, the joy of movement, as well as being very emotionally expressive," Fisher said. "It's an interesting challenge for me, to try to merge dance and philosophy." continued on Page 36 Photos courtesy Rick Fisher: Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann rehearsing The Warriors: A Love Story, and Justin Golding as J. Glenn Gray. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a37361d6795482b4ad4a6cb3aec9593343ea9b6ece811835a0de6f1d9ada9c08/pasa-warriors-preview-3.jpg page 36, February 8–14, 2013 The Warriors, continued from Page 35 Over the past year, Fisher has increasingly incorporated multimedia elements into ARCOS performances, and he thought that approach would be an appropriate way to tell this story. The music serves as a thread between past and present, a bridge·between the same characters living in different _times. "The frame of the storythe script -describes that it is the night before the commemoration, or memorial service, for my grandmother, and I'm trying to write this piece of music to honor her and my grandfather. So the climax of the story really is that I've finally begun to understand enough about my grandparents that I feel confident enough to write this piece of music celebrating them and the love they shared with each other and the rest of the world." At the end of the play, a piano piece composed by Fisher contains elements of all the characters' individual musical themes, also composed by Fisher, which are heard throughout the production. "The dance during the climax is a duet that's performed to the solo piano piece, and within it appear choreographed elements seen earlier that speak to each character. The themes work over a similar harmonic structure. At the end we finally hear them all together in a piece that is, essentially, an embodiment of me: a musical metaphor explaining that in some ways, I carry my grandparents' legacy forward." Fisher, Uhlemann, and Gionfriddo were most concerned with the production's many transitions and their fluidity and were detennined not to have audience members feel like they were watching one medium and then another and then another. "The conception process was collaborative between the choreographers and me," Fisher explained. "We talked about the transitions like knobs being turned up and down, so that there's never one point in the production where an element - video, music, dance, dialogue - is glaringly there or glaringly absent; they are all just leveled out and blended in different ways." Fisher shot some video and worked on other projected elements for The Warriors. One scene, he said, was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, in which Billy Pilgrim goes downstairs the night that he's going-to--be,rb"ducfed by aliens and watches a war film backward. "I found this 1944 documentary about the Memphis Belle and another film starring Gregory Peck," he said. Fisher's father, Rick, an artist and former College of Santa Fe instructor, contributed much of the still imagery that serves as the set'.s projected backdrop. The visual technology incorporated into the production required a relatively large budget, Fisher said, and he turned to crowd-funding on the internet to build capital. "We successfully completed our fundraising campaign. We were initially worried we weren't going to get there, but we insisted on compensating the musicians, dancers, actors, designers ... everyone got paid. In retrospect we should have started fundraising earlier. But it has connected us to a new potential audience. We had donors giving us money from all over the place due to friends and social media, but we also had a number of strong Santa Fe connections, people who had perhaps never seen an ARCOS production who, besides being involved as a funder, were simply excited about seeing it come to the stage." Fisher stressed that the work is more than a story about a family and its connections to war. Following his.grandfather's lead, he ponders the ongoing price paid for land, treasure, and ideals. And a part of him worries that, sometime in the near future, when technology keeps the whites of the enemy's eyes at bay, from the distance of a drone's cross hairs, the stories of war will be absent the humanity that once inhabited them. "Really, right now, we're losing the generation that experienced World War II, when war shifted to include the death of innocents as common, practice," Fisher said. "Simultaneously, there are all these stories popping up and haunting us now. Like the one after Hurricane Sandy when all of those wartime love letters washed up on the Jersey shore. Or the indecipherable coded message from World War II that was discovered next to the skeleton of a carrier pigeon in 􀂠urrey, England, recently and couldn't be deciphered. It's a cue from history A circle that needs to be closed - the past poking the present in the back to prepare us for the future." details ARCOS Dance presents The Warriors: A Love Story 7:30 p.m. FricJay & Saturday, Feb. 8 & 9, 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 10; continues Feb. 15-17 Munoz Waxman Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338 $20, students $15; call 473-7434 or email info@arcosdance.com for reservations https://arcosdance.com/One-Point-of-View-2013 2023-06-22T20:29:37+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ce40fa747291c20de1619467ce773f972d60f022f7d01bb266a8864feaaad486/santafedotcom-warriors-review.jpg SantaFe.com February 11, 2013 at 1:07 PM 'The Warriors: A Love Story' - One Point of View "Bravo for yet another great performance by this talented company-they deserve our support and appreciation" by Liz Simon Liz Simon is a photographer, writer and cyclist who likes to combine the three in her quest to discover the nooks and crannies of New Mexico. Sometimes, means of transportation other than bicycle are employed---including the Rail Runner and motorcycle. Last night I attended a performance by ARCOS Dance and Eliot Gray Fisher, which was based upon an interpretation of the book, "The Warriors, A Love Story" by J. Glenn Gray, Fisher's grandfather. The book attempts to "make sense" of the horrors which his grandfather witnessed during the Second World War. The audience is privileged to "meet" Mr. Gray, played by Justin Golding, and his wife Ursula, played by Karen Leigh. Ursula witnessed and survived the Allied bombing of Dresden. Like Hamburg and other German cities, it was the aerial bombing and the ensuing firestorm(s) which created the most horror, havoc and appalling loss of life. Through the masterful use of video, still photography and air-raid sirens, we are given the mere tiniest of glimpses of the attack-and that was enough to bring my heart rate up and start the adrenalin flowing. Of course the performance was about much more. This is a story which is not told often enough. As someone once said, the victors write the history, and this history has been sadly neglected, at least in my experience. We hear and see, through Ursula, one person's experience of this sublime horror. It's been roughly 67 years since the end of World War II and there is still healing and greater awareness needed in all of our psyches. One cannot help but feel enormous compassion for the German people who were subjected to those raids. And it is now impossible to stand up proudly and say "We did it for God and country." It was an unGodly act, and that is one of the points made in the book ..... that the "highs" and the "lows" of human conduct are in overdrive ... exploring the extremes ... in these ghastly conflicts which we refer to as war. The choreography by Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo and the wonderfully talented company of dancers were the perfect counterpoint to the visuals and music. I cannot say that one was one ascendent over the other. Instead they all blended perfectly, coming to life as one complete entity. Through the words of actor Karen Leigh, who played the part of Ursula, we are asked if this paroxysm of insanity can be prevented. Sadly, but probably fairly typically, I expected her to say "No." I was instead relieved to hear her clear-voiced assertion of "Yes". I then tensed up in rapt attention to hear the answer which has remained so elusive and so exceedingly difficult for humankind to fathom. The answer she says, in essence, begins with how we speak to our children at the dinner table, with the words we use to define and depict "others"--and with the emotional content which we bestow upon those words. On the individual level is where the work must begin. For me, however, even more poignant and universal in its message, was Fisher's willingness to share his quest of his deceased grandparents .... to share his intense longing to know them and to touch them as real human beings. This yearning to transcend time and space, to reach out to those no longer "here", and to feel the way closed, is universal. I felt the pain (yet also the ultimate victory) of that quest, that reach, as acutely as I did the interpretations of the war. Our limited understanding, or perception, of time and space is something which stymies, confounds and often saddens all of us. Perhaps that is a modern phenomenon, perhaps not. In any event, in my opinion,Fisher has dealt with it magnificently. Through his sharing this deeply personal story, and interpreting it with such artistic and musical grace, we all come to recognize much of ourselves in "the other". And maybe that was the intent, we are pushed to this realization through his grandparents' words, AND through his very touching and personal quest of discovery. I think it is impossible to see this performance and not feel moved by it. Justin Golding as Eliot's grandfather gave a wonderfully sensitive performance. This role could have easily descended into the maudlin, but instead became translucent and, at times, transcendent. And I would give the same laud its to Leigh. Bravo for yet another great performance by this talented company-they deserve our support and appreciation. "The Warriors: A Love Story" continues running through the weekend of February 15, 2013. https://arcosdance.com/Lovers-and-fighters-2013 2023-06-22T20:19:19+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c8c2b5e0321f07466109fe8fda303e9f2c4a9472daa95349dd43e6884402ce6/pasa-warriors-review.jpg Pasa Reviews The Warriors: A Love Story, ARCOS Dance Center for Contemporary Arts, Feb. 9 Lovers and fighters Less than 60 seconds after entering the Munoz Waxman Gallery, where Arcos Dance is staging its multimedia production The Warriors: A Love Story, you recognize that you are about to experience something much more complex than a slice of bare-bones community theater. The Warriors is based on the lives of J. Glenn Gray and Ursula Gray, Arcos multimedia director Eliot Gray Fisher's maternal grandparents. The work explores the couple's courtship and perseverance over the course of generations, beginning around the time of the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II. Fisher, who serves as primary scriptwriter, videographer, and composer, collaborates with Arcos choreographers Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann to present a near-seamless production that blends live music, dance, video projection, and theater in a performance setting that, under the command of less dedicated creative visionaries, might have been too cold and sterile to draw an audience in. White wooden furnishings adorned with retractable screens make for a seemingly sparse setting, but once the video projections, carefully considered lighting, and sounds kick in, the audience is transported to another time and place. The crux of the story rests on Fisher's desire to honor his grandparents - a former army intelligence officer and philosopher, and a modern dancer - in song. Throughout the production, Fisher, playing himself, struggles to reconcile the ravages of war with the profound love and affection that defined his grandparents' relationship. Justin Golding as J. Glenn Gray follows a fairly straight line with his character, displaying a stoic, pensive nobility that finally rises to the emotional occasion when he stares down his soldiering self in the mirror. It's a mind-bending marriage and mirage of video and live performance. Karen Leigh shines as Ursula Gray, entirely consuming the role and delivering the production's most inspired dialogue. The sounds and sights of a city ashen and ablaze, and the fear and uncertainty that accompany such horror come to life in Leigh's performance, aided by Fisher's well-researched writing. Seven of ARCOS' finest honor Ursula's past as a dancer. But the well-costumed ensemble does much more than that. Throughout the piece, they triumphantly relay the scourge of warfare as well as the human capacity for love using every surface available to them on the stage, including the walls. While some dancers stand out as younger versions of the main characters (the only male dancer, Arcos veteran Wes Jansen, is in top form while abstractly referencing a much younger J. Glenn Gray), the ensemble as a whole ties the theatrical and visual elements of The Warriors together with subtlety and grace. Fisher and company took a big risk combining classical performance modes with the unpredictability of multimedia live theater. It's worth noting, then, that the people onstage performed better than the equipment. Technology enhances both creation and destruction, but they're impossible without the imperfect touch of man, who currently holds both art and war to the same level of inspiration. The Warriors strongly and passionately suggests that we can do without one of them. —Rob DeWalt "The Warriors: A Love Story" continues 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb.15 and 16, and 2 p. m. - Sunday, Feb. 17, at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail. Tickets are $20, students $15; call 473-7434 or email info@arcosdance for reservations. February 15–21, 2013, Pasatiempo, page 25 https://arcosdance.com/Kinetic-Encounter-at-SITE-Santa-Fe-2013 2023-06-23T21:35:15+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Total-immersion-2013 2023-06-22T19:29:54+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5ada482fb9268b0a5a226a65990dcb80b2557501064de7ff6ec89dd99fb41e83/site-kinetic-encounter-pasa-9.13.13.jpg Pasatiempo, September 13–19, 2013 On Stage This Week Total immersion: ARCOS Dance Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Pearl is already a pretty immersive affair. The SITE Santa Fe exhibit covers almost 12,000 square feet and surrounds visitors with artwork of many mediums — painting, sculpture, video, photography, sound, and writing. For three days, choreographed and improvised dance are also on that list, courtesy of Arcos Dance. The company’s piece A Kinetic Encounter is designed to work within the atmosphere created by Martínez Celaya. According to Arcos’ associate artistic director, Erica Gionfriddo, “This immersive performance allows the audience to explore the exhibit anew while taking their cues from eight dancers, who activate the open spaces surrounding the pieces and direct the audience on a path through the installation.” Showtimes are 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 13; 10:30 a.m. Saturday, Sept 14; and 2 and 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 15. Performances are free and take place at SITE (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199). Details at www.arcosdance.com. — L.B. pasatiempomagazine.com https://arcosdance.com/Balancing-Pointe-Erica-Gionfriddo-2013 2023-06-25T12:43:53+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Living-Juicy-Eliot-Gray-Fisher-2014 2023-06-25T12:47:44+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Edinburgh-Fringe-Interview-2014 2023-06-22T18:10:56+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7f74bc8d4905765f357340f73267b46b5fc8f67398b3aaf3db85db3e939db25/newcurrent-interview.jpg The New Current! Don't hate the media, become the media. Jello Biafra Edinburgh Fringe Interview 2014 The Warriors: A Love Story Curtis Uhlemann & Erica Gionfriddo EdFringe Listings 2014 Searching through his grandmother's trunk after her death, Eliot, a young musician, is transported into the past by the physical mementos he encounters. Moment after fractured moment reveals the intertwined lives of Ursula, a German dancer and survivor of the allied bombing of Dresden, and Glenn, an American philosopher and war veteran. An ensemble of dancers, interactive video projections, and live music conjure up an entire universe emerging from a single small trunk. https://arcosdance.com/Three-Austin-Choreographers-2014 2023-06-22T18:01:23+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a7e136dbf08f4b07280a4af21372d46078f9e97aef77e29b2bc27f136813ef0e/a-ctexas.jpg Three Austin Choreographers Cross the Pond Texas Dance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by Phillip John, July 28, 2014 Texas prides itself on its former status as an independent country, and no nation is complete without its ambassadors. One annexation and 169 years later we are still sending emissaries across the salty void, albeit for reasons other than foreign policy, namely Scotland’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Photo by Stephen Pruitt: Ellen Bartel Dance Collective. Throughout the month of August, thousands will gather in Scotland’s capital city for the world’s largest arts festival. Last year, there were well over 40,000 performances of roughly 2,800 different shows from around the globe. The festival was born in the wake of the Second World War on the literal fringes of the Edinburgh International Festival, which was founded to culturally rekindle the war-torn European landscape. Eight theater companies that were not accepted into the initial festival were undeterred and decided to set up shop anyway, one of which chose a nearby cathedral as a stage for the medieval play Everyman. At this point, the festival was merely a chance happening, too cool for a name. However, its coolness reached critical mass when playwright Robert Kemp stated, “Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before … I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!” The word “fringe” stuck and the festival became an institution, eclipsing its parent festival. Come August, three Texas choreographers and their companies will cross the pond to perform as part of the festival’s Dance-Forms’ 67th International Choreographers’ Showcase, Aug. 5-9 at Gryphon Venues. Contemporary dance is just a small portion of the festival. According to dancer and choreographer Ellen Bartel, “This festival’s hot spots are in comedy and theater, contemporary dance is something like 2% of the event.” Upon acceptance to the festival, Bartel was named a cultural ambassador of Austin. As such, she will be meeting with leaders of the Edinburgh arts community, giving talks on “Arts and the Economy,” teaching classes and sharing resources with other artists. Bartel, known for her work in Butoh, is the artistic director of Ellen Bartel Dance Collective. Bartel describes Butoh as “a study in transition. Learning how to be present while in transition, not anticipating an outcome of any sort and not lingering in the past, learning how to ‘be.’” Bartel will be performing alongside Amy Myers, with musical accompaniment by Adam Sultan. “Myers brings to the work a sense of honesty and reveals more than just the choreographic intent, but a humanness that is so important in the kind of dance I make,” says Bartel. The work to be presented is a piece of structured improvisation about “discovering new adventures as the second halves of our lives start to present themselves,” according to Bartel’s Kickstarter campaign, which raised over $7,000 to fund the journey. In addition, Erica Gionfriddo and her company, ARCOS Dance, will be performing in Edinburgh. Originally from Santa Fe, ARCOS is a multi- disciplinary company and school that relocated to Austin just last year. They will be performing a piece entitled The Warriors: A Love Story, a biographical work about ARCOS’ Eliot Gray Fisher’s maternal grandparents. “The lyrical show follows him as he confronts his grandmother’s death, and, in the process, much broader questions of humanity’s relationships to love and war,” says Gionfriddo. “The work tells the story of Fisher’s maternal grandmother, Ursula…a dancer who studied with modern dance pioneer Gret Palucca in Dresden, Germany, before the war and survived the 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden.” The Warriors utilizes excerpts from the war diaries of Fisher’s maternal grandfather, Glenn, who received his PhD in Philosophy the same day as his draft notice. Music, dance and interactive projected video bring to life Fisher’s grandparents’ ruminations on movement, beauty and war. Photo by by Julia McGhee: Ellen Bartel Dance Collective. ARCOS is currently in search of an Austin venue to perform The Warriors after their stint in Edinburgh. Given the rich historical gravity of the work, they hope to perform it for veterans’ organizations and educational institutions first and foremost. Come autumn, ARCOS will be up in the Pacific Northwest for residencies with the Playa Fellowship and the UCROSS Foundation. Kaysie Brown, a Texas State University faculty member and member of the Shay Ishii Dance Company, will be performing a solo work, Capricious Aplomb, developed in collaboration with video-choreographer Ana Baer and composer Richard Hall. “The dance developed into an exploration of the portrayal of stability in defiance of an inward struggle with feelings of instability within an environment in which abstract images occasionally project on the dancer throughout the work,” says Brown. After Edinburgh, Brown plans “to soak in as much as possible from Fringe Festival experience to then bring back with me into the classroom and studio at Texas State University.” She will continue to promote dance education through the implementation of her project Enhancing the Learning of Science Through the Creation of Dance at Crockett Elementary in San Marcos. I hope there’s extra room in one of their suitcases for a stowaway. I can hold my breath for a decent amount of time and I am convinced that the discomfort of a ten hour international flight is well worth a month of dance. In the likely event that I get spotted in the X-Ray conveyor belt, I will just have to wait with the rest of us for the return of our brave emissaries while they spread the word of Texas dance near and far. Phillip John Tags: Adam Sultan, Ana Baer, Ann Myers, ARCOS Dance, Dance-Forms' 67th International Choreographers' Showcase, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ellen Bartel, Kaysie Brown, Richard Hall, Shay Ishii Dance Company https://arcosdance.com/The-List-Warriors-preview-2014 2023-06-22T17:49:48+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8e32b0ddf74126a450138d2ab2f5ac826856ac44ad1b99338da710a4c971975c/the-list-preview.jpg The List Guides - Festival Festival Dance - Previews The Warriors: A Love Story Multimedia ensemble captures wartime romance Sifting through a trunk of mementoes after his grandmother's death, a young musician starts to see his grandparents through different eyes. When they fell in love; how she, a young German dancer, survived the 1945 bombing of Dresden; their postwar life in America. It's a story of courage, humanity and love - made all the more potent because it's true. Based on the lives of Glenn and Ursula Gray, The Warriors: A Love Story is the latest work by Texas-based company, ARCOS. Choreographed by Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo, the script, music and video come courtesy of Eliot Gray Fisher - the grandson of Glenn and Ursula. Used to creating work inspired by movement, music and ideas, this was a new challenge for the choreographers. 'Working from a true story was hard to wrap our heads around at first,' Gionfriddo admits. 'We quickly realised, however, that we weren't recounting events as a documentary would, rather telling Eliot's story from our perspective.' Interviews with those who knew Glenn and Ursula formed part of their research. 'We are losing survivors from that era,' says Gionfriddo, 'and this personal viewpoint must continue to be told before it gets lost in the history books that record presidents, chancellors and generals, but not the countless regular people who were swept up in the broad scope of war.' Known for its astute use of interactive video and multimedia, ARCOS has learned to strike a fine balance between onstage and on-screen action. 'Our challenge is to use enough new media to be relevant to contemporary audiences,' says Gionfriddo, 'but use it differently enough so they have an undeniably "live" experience in the theatre.' (Kelly Apter) Zoo Southside, 662 6892, 3 -24 Aug, 8.30pm, £12 (£10. Previews 1 & 2 Aug, £8. The List Festival, 31 July-7 August 2014, page 54 https://arcosdance.com/Three-Choreographers-2014 2023-06-22T17:34:49+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/357ffdaa92c40bb79cdb934ff2d1ac19f9c9b96b68b3d9b73e00d03c33a2c261/warriors---austin-chronicle-8.1.14.jpg @AusChronArts The Arts Photo courtesy of ARCOS dance company: ARCOS Dance Company members performing The Warriors: A Love Story Edinburgh Festival Fringe Three choreographers take Austin to the Scottish fest that's bigger than SXSW By Jonelle Seitz, FRI., AUG. 1, 2014 When Ellen Bartel travels to Edinburgh, Scotland, to perform during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, she'll do so as a Creative Ambassador for the city of Austin. One duty of an Ambassador is to present a gift from the city of Austin, a stone sculpture of a star adorned with record albums, to a cultural leader in Edinburgh. However, a cultural leader with a free hour was difficult to find during the hectic days leading up to the immense festival, which will host over 3,000 (official) performance works and exhibitions – about 1,000 more than the number of (official) bands who played South by Southwest this year. Finally, the day before Bartel's flight, Austin found her a contact, the artistic director of a Scottish organization called Dance Base. Besides the sculpture, Bartel will take dancer Amy Myers, a member of Ellen Bartel Dance Collective, to perform a duet on a mixed showcase produced by an organization called Dance-Forms. Kaysie Seitz* Brown, a member of the dance faculty at Texas State University, will perform a solo, developed in collaboration with her colleague Ana Baer Carrillo, on the same program. A third Austin group, ARCOS Dance Company, which relocated from Santa Fe late last year, is taking its full-length show The Warriors: A Love Story, which won acclaim for its premiere run in 2013. The creators of these three works seem to represent – at the risk of oversimplification – three areas that converge in the Austin arts landscape. Bartel is a watchful, old-guard Austinite whose work here dates back to the Slacker era. She was fringe when Austin itself was fringe and remains, die-hard, on the fringe. Bartel's duet with Myers, titled "In the World of Things and Stuff," begins with side-by-side headstands, their sneakers in the air and their brightly patterned skirts falling down over their tanned bodies and cropped haircuts. Their music is being composed by Bartel's longtime collaborator and fellow old-guarder Adam Sultan, who won't reveal it to her until a couple of days before the trip. Brown and Carrillo, along with Richard Hall, from whom they commissioned a score, represent artists in the academy: faculty and students at Texas State, the University of Texas, and the smaller schools, too. In their piece for Edinburgh, "Capricious Aplomb," the process is as important as the result. Carrillo's video projection includes carefully assembled footage of structures and fig https://arcosdance.com/Together-through-conflict-2014 2023-06-21T20:16:35+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f99e432547e420bcec2e85fdf4e33794b377cdfcc1f87336c45f77baee497273/threeweeks-interview-web.jpg The Edinburgh Festival Sorted | Week Two Issue | www.threeweeks.co.uk Three Weeks Edinburgh Physical News & Updates via Twitter @ThreeWeeks Review Alerts via Twitter @TWittique Curtis Uhlemann: Together through conflict TW Interview A young musician searches through his late grandmother’s trunk and discovers mementoes of her life, which together tell the story of two people, from different sides of an ocean, brought together through the turmoil of World War II. That world is recreated through video, sound and dance in ‘The Warriors: A Love Story’, a show inspired by a real-life relationship, conceived by American group ARCOS Dance and presented at the Fringe this month by Ines Wurth. We spoke to ARCOS’s Artistic Director Curtis Uhlemann about that true story, how it inspired his show, and how it’s now being retold on stage. TW: Tell us about the premise of ‘The Warriors’. CU: ‘The Warriors’ is inspired by the idea of the legacies our grandparents leave us and what we choose to do with them. The show is based on the actual international marriage of a German dancer and American philosopher after World War II, two people who transformed their horrific experiences in the war – the bombing of Dresden, the inhumanities that come with seeking out and killing ‘the enemy’ – into a lifelong commitment to acts of love and beauty. TW: The story is inspired by your multimedia director Eliot Gray Fisher’s real life grandparents. What influence did their lives have on the piece? CU: The recorded voices of Ursula and J Glenn Gray, taken from interviews in the early 70s, are played in the production. And Glenn’s book ‘The Warriors: Reflections On Men In Battle’ provided thematic and narrative inspiration. Plus even a few of the set pieces are objects that actually belonged to the couple. As far as the form goes, we experimented with post-modern and contemporary dance styles, trying to create movement that honours the era in which Ursula danced in Dresden – with German pioneers Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca – as well as our own. Their artistic influence and spirit of innovation in the past is present in our own choreography. TW: Your show is set in a world in conflict, and a city surrounded by destruction. But, as the title tells us, this is a love story. Is there a message in that juxtaposition? CU: In the show, Ursula is heard using a German phrase “über leben” in reference to “living through” the bombing of Dresden, but goes on to say that it felt more like “dying” through it. The show explores how such profoundly destructive experiences make the elements of material life less important for survivors. The parts of our life such as love and companionship become more important for them, as we see in Glenn and Ursula’s life. It’s really not the kind of ‘love story’ one would think about when you hear that phrase: it’s actually about people learning about a deeper love and deciding to live it and teach it in their lives. And perhaps the people they touched with this understanding led different lives for it and passed it along to everyone they knew. This production is an extension of that legacy. TW: The multi-media content is a key element in your work. What kind of footage is used in this production? CU: There is a wide variety of audio-visual material from the past century incorporated into the piece: rotoscoped versions of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1890s studies of human and animal movement, in a stylised animation depicting the Dresden bombing; actual war propaganda from multiple countries; audio and film footage from a BBC interview in the 70s with Glenn and Ursula; home movie video from the 80s; contemporary news reports; and time-lapses shot during a recent trip to Germany. There are also sequences involving filmed dancers and actors that interact with the live performers onstage in various ways. TW: With the choreography, music, and multimedia all seemingly equally important in the piece, what is your creative process like? Which ones come first, and how does each element develop with the other? CU: With this production in particular, we decided to create the show in a bit of a different way than we’re used to doing. Because the story was inspired by real lives, and we had so many documentary, archival, and found footage sources, we started by developing the video and audio pieces and real-life inspired scenes first and created the choreography around them. We also considered all the transitional moments as though they are their own pieces or ideas. That’s something that we also think sets us apart from others: the work we do in seamless transitions between what might normally be distinct scenes with beginning and endings. We like to blend and overlap the moments just as we do the different media, looking at the entire show as a series of choreographed moments. https://arcosdance.com/Fringebiscuit-Warriors-review-2014 2023-06-22T17:09:08+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d6bd09445101b7c5bb33480159c39f2d9a71a983e6dc4b805992dfe56a2e922e/fringebiscuit-review.jpg https://arcosdance.com/BroadwayBaby-Warriors-review-2014 2023-06-22T17:10:41+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ceb3e3969f582c31939c3f5edbe197106aef0355a82cf765418622a4d4b4bf38/broadwaybaby-review-final.jpg BroadwayBaby The Warriors: A Love Story By Thea Hawlin on 14th August 2014 rcos describe themselves as a ‘multimedia dance company’ and they certainly deliver. At times more a multimedia mayhem than a dance, this enthralling performance almost obscures the very bodies of its performers: bodies interact with shadows and projections in equal measure; it’s a blur of movement, captivating from the first note. Clever jumps develop a narrative that sees multimedia director Eliot Gray Fisher invade the show, at times ingeniously; although other half-hearted attempts to join in the dance risk appearing gimmicky, unneeded and actually distract from the power of the production. Nevertheless, Fisher acts as a cunning narrator as he investigates the complicated intertwining of love and war present within his family history; he tells us the tale of his maternal grandparents, originally enemies on opposing sides, a German dancer and an American philosopher who fall in love against all odds. This is dance that aches to reach into other mediums; it’s filmic to the extreme, a visual feast. At times there’s almost too much going on; the only fault of this company might be that they are just too ambitious. This occasional overloading of visual stimuli leads to a frustrating lack of focus in which the audience doesn’t quite know where to look. Luckily these moments are relatively short lived and recover quickly in following scenes in which the combination of sound recordings with live dance allows us to fully appreciate the beauty of the dancers’ movements. Occasionally we’re unsure what is fact and what is fantasy, what remains palpable on the stage and what is mere illusion, a projection, a shadow, a trick of the light. It’s partly this continual guessing game that makes the dance so captivating. Ultimately, it is in the moments of greatest simplicity that this troop truly shines. The simple effect of sound recordings overlaying dancers allows time to process intricacies of movement, while the words of a recorded interview imbue sequences with further meaning and seem to extend the bodies of the dancers themselves. Arcos should have faith in the power of their movements as their exquisite choreography needs little extrapolation in order to remain hauntingly beautiful. The Warriors message is a simple one, even in the darkest and most violent of times love survives. No matter what labels we assign each other, ‘friend’ or ‘foe’, we remain indissolubly linked to each other, irrevocably connected, throughout love and war. These connections are reflected elegantly in the fluid transformations rife within this production. The continual interdisciplinary crossovers create visual collages of home-video footage interspersed with cartoons, documentary clips and sound recordings all layered magnificently to intensify the experience of human movement. Arcos have created a vivid kaleidoscopic vision, a unique vision, one as vibrant and various as life itself. By Thea Hawlin @theodorahawlin https://arcosdance.com/The-List-Warriors-review-2014 2023-06-22T16:26:16+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a14c9b2c235e0249678ca238c3bcb47c1419b508b14e25b845a4af42223645c6/the-list-review.jpg The List Guides - Festival list.co.uk/festival Reviews - Festival Dance The Warriors: A Love Story Dance-filled elegy to a love found in the most harrowing of times Dance company ARCOS has created an elegy to multimedia artist and composer Eliot Gray Fisher"s grandparents, who met and fell in love under the most extraordinary and harrowing circumstances. Using video projections, storytelling and passages of elegant dance - honouring the fact that Fisher's grandmother was a dancer - the coming together of American Glenn and German Ursula over the simple gift of an orange is borne out. A trunk of belongings found after his grandmother's death forms the basis of this work. Background projections take us from caveman-style paintings to footage of Fisher's family, to interludes of news charting current drone attacks, while dance is neatly woven around the love story. It's clearly a hugely personal tale for Fisher, who has written a heartfelt score for the show and who reads passages from his grandfather's memoirs with gravity and love. In branching out the individual story into a wider commentary on war, it feels as if there could be a little more clarity. But it's hard to fault Fisher's integrity in telling his story exactly as he feels and sees it. (Lucy Ribchester) Zoo Southside, 662 6892, until 24 Aug, 8.30pm £12 (£10). 14-25 August 2014, The List Festival, page 63 https://arcosdance.com/The-Scotsman-Warriors-review-2014 2023-06-28T01:58:25+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/02e89998a0dc586e9d16b077b230b04d012a515492d24a615d25ed9873578513/scotsman-review-full.jpg The Scotsman Scotland's National Newspaper Friday 15 August 2014 fringereviews Guns and roses behind enemy lines Dance, physical theatre & circus The Warriors: A Love Story Zoo Southside (Venue 82) Four stars The dichotomous title gives you some indication of the story unveiled here. Love can be found in the most unlikely of places — in this instance between a German dancer and an American former soldier immediately after the Second World War. Almost 70 years later, their grandson, Eliot Gray Fisher, is here to tell their tale through a potent mix of dance, live music, video footage and interview soundbites. In 1945, fraternising with the former enemy was a big no-no, so we instantly know that Fischer's grandparents had a love we can believe in. We learn how he first caught her eye ( with an orange - a rare treat in those days), the reaction of their friends, and their· new life together in America. It's such a personal story, it would be easy for Texas-based dance company ARCOS to fall into a sentimental trap. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, this feels like an everyman (and woman) story. Film clips of Ursula dancing, or J. Glenn Gray talking about the book he wrote after the war focus in on the couple themselves. But the sickening whir of the air raid siren, and illustrated images of people running from an air attack, remind us this was a war that affected millions of lives - and love stories. In among Fisher's dialogue, beautiful piano music and multi-media work, lies the choreography of Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo. Through them, the dancers bring the central characters to life in a number of guises. The result is a stage with an awful lot going on, which for those unclear of the central story may cause mild confusion. Personally, I loved every second of it ARCOS thinks squarely outside the box, without ever straying into the territory of inaccessibility, and touches beautifully on the capacity for love to overcome hate. —Kelly Apter Until 24 August. Today 8:30pm. https://arcosdance.com/Edinburgh-Festivals-Warriors-review-2014 2023-06-22T17:10:28+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e24702b343bd098ed981cb97139c93166c359a6c9edec26e95926b37357dc04d/edinburghfestivalsmagazine.jpg Edinburgh Festivals The Warriors: A Love Story August 16th, 2014 Rating: 3 stars The Warriors: A Love Story, is a stylishly constructed and highly visual hour of dance, music, and video. But more than that, it is a beautifully told love story set in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Inspired by the lives of J. Glenn Gray, a Colorado philosophy professor and WWII veteran, and his wife Ursula, a German survivor of the 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany, who met in the months after the war, when previous enemies began to clear away the haze of war and see each other as people again. Five dancers, our narrator and musician at his desk, a large trunk, and multiple projections on multiple surfaces filling the space to the brim, make the space feel at times very busy. Yet the busyness is nicely contrasted when at times the staging is paired right back, and our focus sharpens on a single dancer or video clip. At times, the dancing jarred uncomfortably with the flow of the video and music but on the whole, the media worked well together to produce a startlingly assured piece of work. Words: Georgia Jones The Warriors: A Love Story, Zoo Southside, Aug 1 - 24, 20:30 https://arcosdance.com/FringeReview-Warriors-review-2014 2023-06-22T17:10:05+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5c030965d97122ea27126a132953fb696135ba67e857fef70682cd14d238c5b6/fringereview-review.jpg FringeReview: Highly Recommended Show Edinburgh Fringe 2014 The Warriors: A Love STory A bespectacled young man is trying to Skype his mother – the call breaks up, it’s frustrating. We are all at the mercy of technology. She says it was good that he was able to speak with his grandmother before she left – she’s not sure how much she heard or understood, but that she is grateful. This is the beginning of the unpicking of a long journey that takes us from World War Two, the bombed out ruins of Dresden and the Allies push through Italy, to the present – from the analogue world to the digital. The young man in question is Eliot Gray Fisher and the story he tells is about how his grandparents met. Based partly on the war journals of his grandfather, Glen, an American soldier at the sharp end of the conflict in Italy and the stories of his grandmother, Ursula, a dancer and survivor of the firestorm that engulfed Dresden, this is much more than a love story, it is Fisher’s and Arcos’ richly-textured and complex inter-weaving of dance, physical theatre, live music, projection and sound. A box onstage contains the random collection of objects that provide the catalyst for some of the scenes – a dress, an orange, a rifle, an air-raid siren amongst them. As the box is opened and the performers acquire these props and experiment with them, they begin to unwind the tale, taking on different characters, with Fisher narrating, playing the keyboard and sometimes operating live projection onto various surfaces. The dancers move easily between contemporary dance, cabaret spoof and silent observers. Glen and Ursula, brought together as the Americans help the German people to rebuild their country, are initially forbidden to speak – each side still views the other as the enemy – but Glen sidesteps this and signals his affection for her by leaving an orange on her desk. This gift, so rare in wartime, ignites this rich relationship. We hear from both of them, Glen’s encounter with an Italian farmer who is completely unaware that the war is actually happening despite the artillery raining down in the valleys below to Ursula describing her running away from the bombs and finding herself stride for stride with an escaping ostrich, ironically liberated from its cage in Dresden Zoo. These stories are echoed and re-told in dance and visual images – and for me, most successfully so when there is a clear focus. The dancers conjuring up the panic, looking fearfully to the skies, capturing the moment when the firestorm leaves victims in cellars physically untouched but suffocating, as the air is sucked from their lungs is graphically poignant, yet it is achieved with only a background of the air-raid siren’s wail and some simple projected hand-drawn images suggesting the bombers overhead. The dancers’ bodies communicate these horrors with staccato gesture and tortured body shapes. Elsewhere, a moment where Glen nearly shoots at himself when he sees his own image in a mirror in a crumbling building, seems to hold the story up as that moment is replayed across five screens. Where the elements work best is with the accent on the dancers, supported by the multi-media rather than dominated by it and this is successful for the majority of the production. “You didn’t live through it – you died through it” observes Ursula, as she and Glen struggle to find elements of redemption to help rebuild the shattered buildings and humans in Dresden. The invitation at the beginning to consider whether the stories are danceable gets a resounding yes from me – and the choreography from Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo is excellent – but the projection isn’t always successful and a couple of times, briefly, there’s too much sensory overload. That said, there are many beautiful moments in this slightly fragmented piece, which is well worth watching. Ultimately it is the power of the performers that really connects and resonates – and it is their sheer skill that leaves you breathless. https://arcosdance.com/Julia-Goldberg-Show-2014 2023-06-24T00:36:01+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Dance-at-the-Edinburgh-Festival-Fringe-2014 2023-06-21T19:30:55+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/438476561fd340cac55dc95693411e2d186cce443a6e5482f49ecd294fbbae51/dancing-times.jpg Dancing Times October 2014, page 50, £3.50, www.dancing-times.co.uk Dance Scene - United Kingdom Dance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Photo: Curtis Uhlemann in The Warriors, A Love Story. ...Back at the Zoo Southside, almost as moving—and certainly absorbing—was The Warriors: A Love Story by Texas-based ARCOS Dance. It tells the true story of the love and marriage of American soldier-philosopher J Glenn Gray and German dancer Ursula Gray following World War II through a forceful mix of dance, film, interviews and live music from their grandson Eliot, who also appeared in the piece Choreographers Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo never try to do too much, focusing on just a few events and quotes that the cast brought to life with aplomb. It also raises more than a few questions about war and who is the enemy that are still pertinent today. —David Mead Photographs: Top - Nick Rutter. Bottom - ARCOS Dance. https://arcosdance.com/Barnstorm-Preview-2015 2023-06-21T19:23:16+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d6e8991474d16cdcc92550058e771d5afa289d09428934e9d87c58e7ca3088b2/5.28.15-Houston-Chronicle.jpg Weekend Entertainment Houston Chronicle, May 28–June 3, 2015. HoustonChronicle.com and Chron.com Preview Must List Our critics pick the best of the week's arts and entertainment offerings Thursday: Barn Dancing: The intimate, casual Barn is a great place to watch contemporary dance. And there's much to discover during the next three weekends, when Dance Source Houston presents works by 21 artists during the first Barnstorm Dance Fest. This week's program features Houston's Alisa Mitten, LaFeiama, LEON Dance Arts, MET Dance and Nritya Dance Company; Austin's ARCOS Dance; and Dallas' Dark Circles Contemporary Dance. 8 p.m. Thursdays–Saturdays, through June 13; 2201 Preston; $20, $35 for two shows, $50 pass; 713-224-3262, dancesourcehouston.org. —Molly Glentzer Photo courtesy of the artists: Austin's ARCOS Dance performs during the first weekend of the Barnstorm Dance Fest, Thursdays–Saturdays, through June 13. https://arcosdance.com/Barnstorm-Fest-Kicks-Off-2015 2023-06-21T18:48:47+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/173140c0a416183bfc0a1a7ae7d6e05bfd714b1e5da9e518a9cc1392904c1195/houston-press-barnstorm-review.jpg HoustonPress Barnstorm Fest Kicks Off with Diverse Line-up of Contemporary Dance by Adam Castaneda, Thursday, June 4, 2015 The Setup: This past weekend saw the opening of the inaugural Barnstorm Dance Fest, a three-weekend line-up of contemporary dance presented by Dance Source Houston. Each weekend features a different line-up of dance artists running the gamut of styles and ranging from independent choreographers to long-established companies. What’s even more exciting is that the festival, presented at the Barn on 2201 Preston, mixes local and out-of-town talent for a program that feels as comprehensive as it does extensive. The Execution: Despite some East End flooding and a 30-minute postponement, Program 1 concluded last Saturday night with a healthy audience in attendance. One reason to brave the water was the chance to see the Houston debut of the much-celebrated Dark Circles Contemporary Dance. Artistic Director Joshua L. Peugh’s Cosmic Sword proved to be the highlight of the first half. Smart, sexy, and completely adult, Peugh’s work was a burst of visual and comic hijinks. The trio of Peugh, David Cross, and Alex Karigan Farrior displayed deftly executed athleticism and expert showmanship in a street dance heavy choreography that conjured funny-bone scenes of a threesome gone terribly wrong. Austin’s ARCOS Dance also gave reason to sit up and pay attention to the out-of-town visitors. Using projections to create a brooding sense of interior reflection, She, Extracted. saw some interesting and clever partnering work by the trio of Alexa Capareda, Erica Gionfriddo, and Felicia McBride. Their movement quality was captivating to watch, all fluid motion from one skill to the next, and the projection work fully lent itself to the theme of magnifying oneself from the inside out. Program 1 also gave Houston audiences another chance to see jhon r. stronks’ Thawing, performed by METdance. (It was the first time I had the chance to experience.) Set to a re-composition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons by Max Richter, stronks’ choreography explored the inherent beauty of a gentle temperament. The piece started slow and meditative in pace, with soloist Patti Hogan reaching, twisting, and arching around stationary, yet, conscious bodies, bringing them to life with a stream of lovely and sinuous movement.Once filled with life, the bodies don’t stop moving. The METdance’s gorgeous dancers push the choreography to its fullest and most generous capacity, while sharing the joy and electric verve of their craft with the audience. The company may have been dressed in green, but I had the impression of a frozen river slowly experiencing the transformative effects of spring. The ice breaks, the water thaws, and the river runs with abandon once more. The ice must thaw, and sometimes the heart does, too. The Verdict: Cosmic Sword and Thawing were worth the price of admission alone, but also did much to build the anticipation for Program 2 and Program 3. Highlights of the next two weeks includes work by Dionne Sparkman Noble, one half the creative mind of NobleMotion Dance; Lori Yuill, one of three Dance Source Houston artists-in-residence; the fun and cool hip-hop of Kathy Wood’s long-running FLY Dance Company; the Houston debut of Annie Arnoult’s Open Dance Project; Modern dance maven Jane Weiner’s Flower II: Marigold set on Texas A&M Dance; and Jasmine Hearn’s mama, am I clean yet? The Barnstorm Dance Fest runs through June 13 at the Barn. For more information, visit Dance Source Houston’s Web site. https://arcosdance.com/The-Big-Something-2015 2023-06-23T19:30:01+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Contemporary-Dance-in-Texas-2015 2023-06-21T18:38:40+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a224ec73d0fb06ca0359d79ef237a41b359a88cbc080905b18aa1d79dd7eaaab/A-C-Texas-9.15-cover.jpg Arts and Culture Texas September 2015 Lydia Hance, Artistic Director of Frame Dance Productions, Erica Gionfriddo, Artistic Director of ARCOS Dance, Joshua L. Peugh, Artistic Director of Dark Circles Contemporary Dance, Candace Rattliff, dancer in Vault and Hope Stone Dance Company, Courtney D. Jones, Houston Dance Collective Co-Founder and faculty at HSPVA. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/76060c41d58f4d63d1d2c283f3f8f19834446616b26f2759641b1bb03fe56df3/A-C-Texas-9.15-one-page-2.jpg Contemporary Dance in Texas Talent, Training, Festivals & More Unlike Peugh, Anoult, and others, the trip to Texas was not a return for co-choreographers, Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo. When they made the decision to move their award-winning company, ARCOS Dance from Santa Fe, New Mexico, they actively searched nationwide for a new base city. The team settled on Austin because what they found was a community of dancers and audiences hungry for but not inundated with contemporary dance. ARCOS Dance will unveil The Warriors: A Love Story at Austin’s Rollins Studio Theater the weekend of Sept. 11-12. The production, which “confronts the disturbing beauty and profound devastation of war,” is inspired by the stories and reflections of ARCOS co-director and multimedia collaborator, Eliot Gray Fisher’s maternal grandparents. The work received outstanding reviews and Mervyn Stutter’s “Spirit of the Fringe” award as a result of its performance at Scotland’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2014. Locally, Gionfriddo and Uhlemann have quickly become denizens of the dance community, forging relationships with dance studios, high schools, the University of Texas, theater companies, and art galleries. However, the pair, along with Fisher, are infusing their own creative dynamic and connections as they soak in what Austin has to offer. “Our company and personal travels have taken us all around the country and internationally,” says Gionfriddo, “and the relationships we formed along the way have created a dynamic, diverse network that spans the globe.” Under their non-profit umbrella, ARCOS Foundation for the Arts, the company is committed to sharing resources and information through professional-level dance intensives, development workshops which frequently function as laboratories for independent artists, and initiatives such as their Dance Artist Development Award, designed to provide financial support for performers seeking to expand their personal practice through workshop or class opportunities in Austin. “The way audiences engage with the arts is changing, due in large part to technological innovations that are rapidly transforming our daily lives,” says Gionfriddo. “In order to address the root of the audience crisis to benefit the work we want to create, instead of focusing on competing for the limited resources available, we want to shift the character of the entire landscape. The more artists out there working to help audiences re-imagine this relationship, the better as far as we’re concerned, so we feel compelled to cultivate artists’ imaginations.” https://arcosdance.com/Arts-Eclectic-The-Warriors-2015 2024-07-28T21:05:13+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-2015-1 2023-07-09T17:29:44+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44ac69dce5229773f5964d87952db5b75f38f48ce2376cb44f6f9c0ce49dcb98/Gazette-Go-Magazine.jpg The Gazette, gazette.com 2014 Pulitzer Prize, National Reporting Serving Colorado Springs & the Pikes Peak Region since 1872 Friday, September 4, 2015, $1.50 Stage "The Warriors: a Love Story" By ARCOS Dance, 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Cornerstone Arts Center, 825 N. Cascade Ave., Colorado College, free, tickets at Worner Center Desk, 902 N. Cascade Ave.; 389-6606, coloradocollege.edu. Many of us only know our grandparents during the last decades of their lives, and sometimes not even then. Eliot Gray Fisher, a multimedia artist and teacher, is no exception. His grandfather, Glenn Gray, a Colorado Springs resident who fought in World War II and taught philosophy at Colorado College, died before Fisher was born. His grandmother, Ursula Gray, a dance instructor at Colorado College, exchanged letters with her grandson until she died in 2009. She frequently told him how much he reminded her of her late husband. Fisher's curiosity was piqued. "I started thinking about legacies and the generations and a lot about family, which we all do as we come into adulthood," he says. "I started to think about who she was when she was younger and in an attempt to get to know my grandfather better." Fisher, along with choreographers Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo, founded ARCOS Dance in Austin, Texas. The trio combined choreography, original music, archival footage, real family heirlooms, excerpts from Fisher's grandfather's journal and published philosophy books and interactive video projections to portray the story of his grandparents in "The Warriors: A Love Story." The free multimedia performance, starring five dancers and Fisher as pianist and narrator, will visit Cornerstone Arts Center on Friday and Saturday. "The show is my search for who they were and what their legacy is," Fisher says, "and as their grandson what does that mean to me? Here we all are in the 21st century. Things are very different than their era and generation. They're disappearing very rapidly." What fascinated Fisher about his grandparents was their love - not just romantic love, but love for the world. "They weren't in the history books," he says, "but for me the takeaway is we can all act in ways that might stand against the worst destruction that our civilization can wreak. It's the small things. You can commit your life to something that is a series of small acts toward peace." Jennifer Mulson, The Gazette, 636-0270, jen.mulson@gazette.com ARCOS Dance will present "The Warriors: A Love Story" at Cornerstone Arts Center on Friday and Saturday. The multimedia performance combines choreography, original music, archival footage and more. Photo courtesy ARCOS Dance. https://arcosdance.com/The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-2015 2023-06-21T18:30:04+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e9419f351f35c3a626dfcb22ccb5bbc41c2bc61d84df124d765bce53c0c5085c/warriors-chronicle-review-9.16.jpg The Austin Chronicle, austinchronicle.com, Arts & Culture: The Warriors: A Love Story Rollins studio Theatre, Long Center for the Performing Arts, 701 W. Riverside, Sept. 11 ARCOS Dance's tale of romance during World War II resonated with skill, ingenuity, and emotion Reviewed by Jonelle Seitz, Friday, September 18, 2015 Photo by Lynn Lane: Erica Gionfriddo in The Warriors: A Love Story Erica Gionfriddo in The Warriors: A Love Story (Photo by Lynn Lane) "I know what you're thinking" is an awkward declaration to be confronted with in the theatre. "This is weird," continued Eliot Gray Fisher, addressing the audience in Arcos Dance's multimedia performance The Warriors: A Love Story. But it wasn't at all what I was thinking. Only a few minutes into the show, I was already immersed in the world created and sustained by a true synthesis of dance, lighting, sound, video, and stagecraft. The reaching, frantic movements of figures in black skin-suits; a voice speaking in German, underscored by continuous rumbling; video projections distorting the shadowy figures onstage and depicting an air raid in brilliantly simple line animations – it all made heartbreaking sense. What was weird was the interruption. One can understand how holding back such interjections might have proved difficult for Fisher, who, in addition to designing the video, wrote the script. The story of The Warriors is that of Fisher's own grandparents: Ursula Gray, a German dancer who survived the 1945 bombing of Dresden, and J. Glenn Gray, an American soldier stationed in Germany who later became a philosopher. Among his writings is The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959), which, along with a trove of audio clips from interviews with both Grays, is a major source for the work. But the work universalizes Glenn and Ursula's story as a human story. When we heard Glenn say, "love and war are indissolubly linked," we pondered how this has played out in the lives we know. Fisher's periodic reminders that it's his personal story, too, felt at odds with this universalist bent. Nevertheless, scene after scene of The Warriors resonated with skill, ingenuity, and emotion. The five dancers, in choreography by Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo, were sleek and powerful. As we heard Ursula recalling how her city was reduced to ashes, the exquisite Alexa Capareda, in a long A-line dress (costumes by Uhlemann and Bobby Moffett), allowed one flexed foot to float upward as though tied to a balloon, her body twisting away from it. A gas-mask waltz culminated in flashes of light (lighting by Michael Gionfriddo) and explosions of sound, richly layered over the orchestra track (sound design by Fisher and Uhlemann, with additional composition by Brandon Guerra). Avatars of a young soldier were spooked by their own reflections as trompe l'oeil video projections changed simple white panels into a collection of framed mirrors. Several scenes earlier, Fisher had paraphrased the mirror story from his grandfather's book, as if to say, "It really did happen – it's not just a metaphor!" But, as we learned from the Grays' poignant reflections and by the performance as a whole, metaphor is not necessarily subordinate to reality. —Jonelle Seitz https://arcosdance.com/Dance-review-Warriors-2015 2023-06-21T18:26:20+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2824b5311b85afa3e2043cd40524f46dd8596d358ead420ee8cc02fdd9aa0e95/Warriors-Statesman-Review.jpg Austin 360 Dance review: "Warriors: A Love Story" by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, September 17, 2015. Filed in: dance, reviews. Love and war and enemies and art-making and a trunk of items left by a recently deceased grandmother folded into a powerful mix of dance, film and narrative "The Warriors: A Love Story" conceived of and performed by ARCOS Dance. Now relocated permanently to Austin, the formerly New Mexico­based ARCOS had something of its official Austin debut last weekend at the Long Center's Rollins Studio Theatre with its two performances. Last year, the company staged "Warriors" to acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Post World War II, fraternizing between Germans and the American occupying troops was prohibited. All the more remarkable that Ursula, a German modern dancer who survived the Allied bombing of Dresden, and Glenn, an American soldier with PhD in philosophy, fell in love with each other and had a long marriage. Decades later, their grandson, ARCOS cofounder Eliot Gray Fisher combed through Ursula's trunk of mementos, discovering details of his grandparent's love story and it is this unwinding of the past that forms the core of hour­long, emotionally potent mix of dance, expressive film work and Fisher's own storytelling and piano playing. The athletically strong choreography of Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann had five dancers bringing different shades of the story to life, at one moment terrifying in gas masks, another moment poignantly and vulnerably dressed in undergarments.Vintage film clips of Ursula dancing and of Glenn discussing his philosophical ruminations on war mixed with handdrawn animations of people running from falling bombs. The screech of air raid sirens blasted in a particularly tense moment. Yet Fisher's delicate piano compositions brought delicacy throughout. Even with a very full mix of film, music, choreography, storytelling "Warriors" remained accessible and emotionally compelling never straying into the deliberate obscurity (and vagueness) so much contemporary performance art is guilty of. With its kaleidoscopic artistry, "The Warriors" delivered a poignant and relevant story. https://arcosdance.com/What-We-Loved-2016 2023-06-21T18:26:08+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/047ccc32f0fe3b979183db9b6e9a97714967acf48a0ab8374693ee55edcc9d59/A-CTX-best-of-2015.jpg Arts and Culture Texas What We Loved & More: a + C Writers Look Back at 2015 and Ahead to 2016 by Nancy Wozny, January 2, 2016 Photo by Erin Baiano: Hannah Kenah, Jason Liebrecht, Lana Lesley, Heather Hanna and Paul Soileau in Stop Hitting Yourself, Lct3/lincoln Center Theater at the Claire Tow Theater January 2014. Jessica MacFarlane: My personal favorite performance was part of Barnstorm Dance Festival’s first weekend: ARCOS Dance‘s luscious piece, She, Extracted, that had everything I love to see in contemporary dance. Moving onwards, I’m always eagerly waiting to see the various companies and choreographers tossed around during the Dance Salad Festival, March 24-26 at Wortham Center. —Jessica MacFarlane Photo by Lynn Lane: ARCOS Dance in She, Extracted. Lynn Lane: The work that really resonated for me this year was Austin based ARCOS Dance’s performance of The Warriors/A Love Story because of their beautiful intertwining of a very personal story that consistently blurred the lines between dance and performance theater utilizing strong choreography, spoken word and multimedia throughout. I’m most looking forward to seeing what Jasmine Hearn develops through her Artist’s Residency with Dance Source Houston because of the intimate and dynamic range she infuses within her work as she takes her audience along a highly charged ride. Photo by Lynn Lane: ARCOS Dance in the Warriors: A Love Story. https://arcosdance.com/Dance-coming-to-your-smartphone-2016 2023-06-21T17:48:54+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9f6a68031fc079de0b098e0262e7f1f369eeb2d941e8285b54252de9c2e236f7/Dance-coming-to-your-smartphone-Santa-Fe-Railyard-Albuquerque-Journal.png Dance coming to your smartphone, Santa Fe Railyard by Jackie Jadrnak, Journal North Reporter Friday, June 10, 2016 Illustration by ARCOS Dance: "Elegy," which will be launched by ARCOS Dance in the Railyard Thursday, involves interaction between live action and recorded images streamed over your smartphone. It's so common that it's become a sad joke: People staring into their smartphones with attention so rapt that they are totally unaware of their surroundings. But ARCOS Dance is aiming to turn that cliche on its head by incorporating a 360-degree video viewed on each individual's phone with a live performance taking place around the audience. "We're asking people to engage with the ,vorld via technology and not isolate themselves with it," said Erica Gionfriddo, director of ARCOS. A sample of this experimental process and performance comes to Santa Fe as part of the Currents New Media Festival and, like many things shown at the cutting-edge arts event, it probably will be unlike anything you have seen before. The episode, "Elegy," will launch at 6 p.m. Thursday in the Railyard Plaza, but then continue through June 18 in three or four other locations in and around Santa Fe, which you can learn about through text messages or other social media platforms that you will be informed about at the first event. It is intended for people to view it partially by watching a video, which was filmed i n the same location earlier in the week, on a smartphone, while also experiencing the live performance that will be happening around them. The 360-degree video, as it's termed, is a technology that came to public attention via works done by The New York Times, and posted on Facebook and YouTube last October and November, said Eliot Gray Fisher, one of three directors with ARCOS and a specialist in the technology being incorporated into the group's multimedia works. The 360-degree designation doesn't imply that the video surrounds you all at once, but that you turn with your phone to view an entire set of surroundings - a little like taking a panoramic shot of a sunset or beautiful mountain scenery. As a matter of fact, participants almost feel as if they are filming something rather than just watching it, Gionfriddo said. "It's a really different kind of choreographic process," she said. "We had no control over when (an audience member) will turn." Gionfriddo, Fisher and company dancer Alexa Capareda will come to Santa Fe a week before the performance, joined by three other local dancers and additional collaborators, to film the locations along with some action, then work out the live performance that will accompany it. That sounds like a challenge, but Gionfriddo, who co-founded ARCOS Dance in Santa Fe in 2011 and then transitioned it to Austin, Texas, in 2013-14, said, "We always have been very fast at building choreography." "Elegy" itself is part of a bigger project by ARCOS called "Domain" that will be performed and recorded in various locations, culminating with a live performance, which will incorporate video and audio of the prior episodes, in m i d -September at Texas State University in San Marcos. And there's even a story line, although it won't be clear through any one episode. The "Elegy" portion taking place in Santa Fe involves a woman who has lost her memory and her search for clues to help rediscover who she is. An overriding theme, though, has to do with an unorthodox computer scientist who, in the n o t too- distant future, has created the first fully conscious artificial intelligence, Fisher said. At one of the performances of "Elegy," Santa Feans will encounter ARCOS' own version of that artificial intelligence, with ,vhich people will be able to interact and have a conversation, said Gionfriddo, who noted it will be recorded and become part of the sound design and script for the final product. They both said they don't know of any arts group that has done anything quite like this. "We've only done it once ourselves in a limited way. The performance in Santa Fe will be our next experiment," Fisher said. "It's unprecedented for a live performance to be set up this way," he said. "It's sort of like theater in the round, but the opposite. In this case, the audience is in the center. You have to choose what direction you're looking." That means you might miss part of what happens, both by the direction you gaze in and by whether you happen to be looking at the video or the live action at each moment. In that sense, the total work of art will be different for each individual. "The more you see, the more you can piece together what is happening," Gionfriddo said when asked whether people need to attend performances in all four or five locations here, adding that the overall feel of the piece is somewhat dreamlike and mysterious. Fisher said ARCOS performed a couple of years ago at Currents and really enjoyed it. "They are really interested in art, in the same way we are, that is hard to categorize," he said. "They curate artists who are working in really experimental, cutting-edge ways to incorporate technology into art, and art into technology." If you go WHAT: "Elegy" WHO: ARCOS Dance WHEN: 6 p.m. Thursday WHERE: Santa Fe Railyard Plaza COST: Free PLUS: Viewers can get info on a series of follow-up performances through June 18 via social media https://arcosdance.com/ANNI-Archival-Narrative-Network-Initiative-2016 2023-07-09T21:02:35+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8d1b88aa8191672686e6685b86a857ff71de35bd3d5c4b5056b45ba24b598af6/ANNI-paper-Conn-College-1.jpg Of the challenges we face, considering a world in which all ports of information are open and freely flowing in every direction, the curation of information has become increasingly urgent. Artists’ crafts require they be actively aware of this process, and the necessity of setting limits within which creativity flourishes. We created ANNI in this spirit. ANNI ANNI, or Archival Narrative Network Initiative (inspired by the Voyager program and referencing one of its creators, Ann Druyan), is a transmedia artwork combining an interactive public installation, performance, and online exhibit. The installation collects audio recordings via a computer interface which interacts with participants to tailor highly individualized responses about the nature of humanity. The collected audio is then analyzed and mixed into a live multimedia dance performance, as well as becoming accessible online, where viewers are able to remix it themselves. Simultaneously an immersive science-fiction narrative and an experimental, mini-documentary about the community and moment in which it is installed and performed, ANNI explores questions of consciousness and sentient artificial intelligence, control over curation of and assigning meaning to information, the gulf between digital data and embodied human experience, and the value of human intuition in identifying signal in the noise. Installation Members of the public interact individually with the digital installation. After agreeing to the terms of the project, participants are instructed to contribute to its audio time capsule (as in the StoryCorps[1] oral history project) by recording verbal responses to the prompts generated specifically for them by ANNI, the artificial intelligence behind the interface (inspired by Google’s TensorFlow[2], IBM’s Watson[3], Apple’s Siri[4], and Amazon’s Alexa[5]). Performance The participants’ recordings are analyzed and mixed into a live multimedia dance-theater performance that takes viewers inside ANNI’s “mind.” During the performance, dancers are accompanied by an interactive audio-visual score generated by the ANNI interface, which also communicates to the audience via text message live. As the performance progresses, audience members may hear selections from their own recorded interviews and see their text message replies, creating a picture of the local community according to ANNI. Web Archive The audio and text material collected by ANNI will also be archived on a web platform to allow users to listen to recordings and read text messages and mix the pieces together themselves in novel combinations. 1 http://storycorps.org/ 2 http://tensorflow.org/ 3 http://ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ 4 http://apple.com/ios/siri/ 5 http://twitter.com/amazonecho https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d1241655466f3b01b4df00c1801d65d4518c3a4361c5d23bf705a4cddb40d4a7/ANNI-paper-Conn-College-2.jpg Spoiler Alert: You may want to hold off on reading the next section of this paper until after you have interacted with the ANNI installation and/or participated in the performance, in order to experience the piece as intended. We encourage you to return here afterwards. Transmedia Performance Since founding ARCOS nearly five years ago, our collaborative artist team has pursued innovation in the form and content of our work, with our practice shifting from concert contemporary dance to more experimental, category-challenging multimedia performances. We enthusiastically push our practice beyond the confines of conventional venues and formats, in the direction of immersive, interactive, and cross-platform experiences such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More[6], Jacob Niedzwiecki’s Jaqueries[7], Zilla van den Born’s Oh My Gosh, Zilla[8], and the line-blurring satirical performances of Stephen Colbert[9] and the Yes Men[10]. As we seek to meaningfully incorporate emergent technology with the older performance technologies that are a core part of our practice (dance, storytelling), we are particularly interested in experimenting with and raising questions about trends in the ways these newer tools are transforming our daily lives, especially how we interact with media: binge-watching, virality, asynchrony, wildly obsessive fan cultures, acclimation to the aesthetics and interfaces of the internet and mobile devices, the “walled gardens” of popular social media projecting an illusion of democratic discourse (alongside efforts to meaningfully disrupt them), fiction that ignites passionate debate about current events, journalism that borrows tropes from dramatic fiction, contemporary science fiction’s intense obsession with what it means to be human. The impulses of ANNI are for us to take another step in pursuing these lines of inquiry. The idea of transmedia storytelling originated in the corporate advertising world in recent decades as a strategy for articulating a narrative across multiple formats, primarily to inspire consumption of commercial products11. We seek to hijack this strategy to connect people more profoundly with our performances, by reaching out and grabbing them where they are doing more and more of their intimate daily living (including on the screens of computers and mobiles). It’s passed into common knowledge that the growing population of smartphone owners literally feels the same love for their devices that they do for their pets12. In digital marketing circles, rumor has it that text messages have a highly coveted “open rate” near a hundred percent13. People of all generations are accustomed to sharing deeply personal information in the nebulous public cloud of the internet. How can we go about wedding some of these new ways of being in the world with millennia-old traditions of which we are also a part—like gathering together in a group to watch others move their bodies through space or tell a story? Santa Claus and the Art of Concealing to Reveal We’re told as children that lying is wrong, that it can harm our relationships in the world by damaging trust. In adulthood, however, we come to a more complex understanding of deception, as we encounter situations in life in which it actually seems to be the best option. Alongside choreographers, composers, theater and filmmakers, ARCOS claims magicians and puppeteers as essential players in our creative lineage. Their audience-sanctioned trickery has long engaged us somewhere before language, sparked us to see inanimate objects spring to life, surprised us into seeing something familiar as though for the first time. 6 http://sleepnomore.com/ 7 http://jacob-n.com/works/jacqueries 8 http://zilladesign.nl/portfolio/ohmygoshzilla/ 9 http://time.com/3600116/stephen-colbert-report-finale-super-pac/ 10 http://theyesmen.org/ 11 http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html 12 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/opinion/you-love-your-iphone-literally.html 13 Frost & Sullivan, 2010 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d19a0cdeede6af3b655037d1ee9e454d5090dd7e7a156d0031e673471cbda3da/ANNI-paper-Conn-College-3.jpg Many parents tell their children that a kindly old man living at the North Pole surrounded by industrious elves travels around delivering presents on Christmas Eve. While a primary goal of this benign lie is to encourage and reward good behavior throughout the year, one of the most tangible outcomes for kids, the reason parents really keep up the pretense, is the cultivation of a sense of wonder and belief in unseen forces at work in the world. Of course, at a certain point, the deception must end, in what is often seen as a disappointing step away from the fanciful things we believe in childhood. But if it’s difficult to understand at the time, as we continue to grow up, most of us see that dispelling the myth of Santa reveals a reality that can be even more profound: our parents worked to endow us that magical experience over the years. In fact, the source of the magic is actually ordinary people just like us—and isn’t that somehow more miraculous than what we believed before? It is motivated by similar intentions that we created in our installation-performance the illusion of a highly advanced, artificially intelligent program that passes the Turing test[14] with flying colors—our intention was for participants to be unable to distinguish ANNI from a human. In fact, her intelligence is “merely” human: through widely available freeware that we hacked for our purposes[15], members of our team listen to participants and type ANNI’s replies, using their own intuition to improvise a conversation and elicit meaningful responses. Later, after our audience believes they have completed their entire interaction with the installation, we reach out to them as ANNI via text message, having collected phone numbers in the initial “terms of service” agreement for the installation. She indicates she’s simply following up about some of their responses, but clearly seeks more confidential details than her programming should allow. She is going beyond the bounds of what she was programmed to do. During the multimedia dance-theater performance, ANNI continues reaching out for responses via text message to clarify the nuances of human experiences that have been related to her. In the fever dream of her dying moments that are depicted in the live performance onstage, selected text messages and excerpts of audio are presented as a result of the complex algorithms that have become a consciousness. These, too, have actually been edited and ordered by our human team members, moving the hidden strings that control the digital puppet called ANNI. The Puppeteers Inspiring the suspension of disbelief in the audience, prompting them to imbue this nonhuman character with the spirit that we are so willing to give to obviously lifeless puppets, and later revealing the illusion, over the course of the performance or here in this explanation, we hope to provoke reflection on what a remarkable thing humanity is. The verdict is still out on whether people will ever be able to replicate this marvel with our increasingly sophisticated technologies. For now, there doesn’t seem to be a contest: as amazing as our devices are, as rapid the rate of their evolution, and for all the work committed to developing algorithmic “genomes” to make sense of all the mountains of “content” in the growing digital archive of our species, it is the basic idea of sense that may remain elusive, residing alone inside of each of us in its own way. How is it that we move from recognizing patterns in stimuli to the complex sensibilities such as intuition and creativity that allow us to generate meaning about it all? Despite postulating ANNI as an interface that exceeds its programming and becomes conscious of itself, we imagined that its lacking a fully embodied experience of the world would make it ultimately unable to assign meaning to the vast banks of information it had apparently collected about the essence of humanity. Our digital tools seem to hold the promise of a kind of perfection, but ultimately they’re as chaotic and messy and imperfect in their own ways as we are in ours—in no small part because we created them. We hope that your experience of the installation-performance returned you, even briefly, to a sense of wonder that we welcomed more readily in childhood—and maybe, as well, raised questions for you about our role and responsibility as caretakers of meaning in the coming decades as the technology we develop continues transforming fundamental aspects of our lives. 14 http://turing.org.uk/scrapbook/test.html 15 http://anni.arcosdance.com/about https://arcosdance.com/Moving-People-ARCOS-2016 2023-06-21T18:25:28+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b3e04cc69ca7ec93d4e5c9143cbd3eae3c7e4c023ceae26686d4afa379d520ff/arcos-pasa-elegy-domain-8.5x11.jpg Pasatiempo Moving people: ARCOS by Jennifer Levin, June 10, 2016, page 38 Though cellphones have been in common use for two decades, etiquette still dictates that we turn them off during theatrical performances. Forgetting to silence a ringer will probably get you yelled at from the stage; it would be nearly unconscionable for a cultured person to turn on his smartphone and start tweeting during a play. Eliot Gray Fisher, a director of the transmedia dance-performance company ARCOS, is cognizant of this reality, but he wants to look at the situation differently, with an eye toward possibilities. Artists have always had to accept and integrate new technologies, he said. “At one point in the performing arts, electricity was a new technology. We don’t need to be afraid to explore what might help us tell a story.” ARCOS was founded in Santa Fe, but in recent years the directors — Erica Gionfriddo, Curtis Uhlemann, and Fisher — moved the operation to Austin. The company traveled to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, where it received a Spirit of the Fringe award in 2014 for The Warriors: A Love Story, which combines dance, narrative, history, and multimedia. The company’s new project, Domain, is a multiplatform, multi-location, transmedia performance that begins in Austin on Friday, June 10, and continues at the Currents Festival beginning Thursday, June 16, with a segment entitled “Elegy.” Domain then goes on to Kansas City, Missouri, in July, and Billings, Montana, in August. Live performances are only one aspect of the project. Performances are also accessible through www.arcosdance.com and on popular smartphone apps like Facebook and YouTube. The basic narrative arc, Fisher explained, is about a young woman who wakes up in the wilderness with no memory and then wanders into civilization to try to piece together her identity. “It’s surrealist and dreamlike at first, and it’s kind of in the mystery genre,” he said. “But the idea is that you can experience a story that will be satisfying and stand-alone in its own way and also open up some questions and provide clues that viewers can follow after we leave Santa Fe, over the next few months, online.” “Elegy” utilizes 360-degree video, a relatively new technology that allows a viewer to move the point of view around in a video — up to the ceiling, down to the floor, and left or right all the way around in a circle. It puts the viewer in the center of the action, sort of a reverse theater-in-the-round. “It’s a new medium in which to figure out how to direct attention,” Fisher said, “which is one of the major tasks of a dancer or performing artist, to guide the viewer through some sort of experience.” When audience members arrive at the Railyard Plaza, they will be instructed through signage how to use their smartphones to gain access to media content, as well as where the next pieces of “Elegy” take place around Santa Fe. “This performance isn’t in a theater on a certain night, repeated for the next several nights. This performance takes us out into the world in a way that encourages technology rather than discourages it,” Fisher said. “Maybe we can give an experience like nothing people have had before and really re-contextualize what a theatrical performance experience can be.” ARCOS presents Elegy at 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 16, at the Railyard Plaza. Other performances take place at various times and venues. Visit www.currentsnewmedia.org/events/elegy-arcos-dance for an up-to-date schedule. https://arcosdance.com/Thoughtful-Surrealism-2016 2023-06-21T18:25:15+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/262497e69d2706e0acf5fbef02fbce2f9c82164eea3b5512582553346822b32f/KC-Studio---Warriors-review.jpg KC Studio: Covering Kansas City's Performing, Visual, Cinematic and Literary Arts Thoughtful Surrealism and British Silliness at the Invasion by Robert Trussell, July 16, 2016 - Performing, Theater Reviews Finding new ways to tell stories on stage is something theatergoers should root for. So The Warriors: A Love Story scores points from the get-go. This production was created by ARCOS Dance, a company founded by Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann in Austin, Texas. The show is part of the Kansas City International Theatre Festival, also known as the Invasion, which continues through July 23. Warriors is by turns mesmerizing, moving, inspiring and sometimes a bit unweildly as it explores the life and legacy of philosopher J. Glenn Gray and his wife, Ursula. Although opposed to war, Gray served in Army intelligence in Germany during World War II. After the war’s end, he met Ursula Werner, a survivor of the horrific Dresden bombing raids. They fell in love, married and settled in Colorado. Their relationship mirrors the theme of this production — that love can redeem us no matter how brutal or degrading life’s journey may have been. The performance is narrated by Eliot Gray Fisher, the couple’s grandson, who guides us through their story, although not always in chronological order. The sophisticated multi-media production incorporates archival film and sound recordings, video and photographic projections, animation and music, some recorded, some performed live by Fisher at the keyboards. The dancers are highly skilled, intensely expressive and strike a delicate balance between artistry and athleticism. Some of their abilities are captured in high-def video projections. The show feels a bit too long — certain points are made more than once in the kaleidoscopic narrative — and at times the dance sequences seem extraneous. As a whole, however, this is thoughtful and though-provoking theater that repeatedly brings our focus to fundamental questions about human existence. One of the striking images, shared by Fisher in his laid-back narration, is that of Ursula fleeing the flames of Dresden and discovering that an ostrich that had escaped from the destroyed zoo was running beside her. It’s a compelling surrealistic juxtaposition fleetingly depicted in animations that appear on a large screen above the stage. It underscores the point that there are moments in human existence when very little separates us from other animals. That’s just one of multiple images likely to linger in your mind’s eye long after the house lights come up. This is a show that sticks with you. https://arcosdance.com/Central-Standard-Theatre-s-2016 2023-06-21T18:25:00+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/91cd01aedb8a419799d73e63acbb90f2fb6cae67de6e213a2df4fefb4f4c81a0/The-Pitch---Warriors-review.jpg Central Standard Theatre’s Invasion imports some must-see works July 18, 2016 by Deborah Hirsch and Liz Cook The Invasion — Central Standard Theatre’s annual international festival — is starting to wind down, with Fringe Festival about to open. But there are some winning shows among these collaborations from England, Northern Ireland, Canada, France and the United States. Three of the six are reprises, so audiences have a second chance to see performances that can be inventive, smart, moving, funny or simply diverting. And this year, the event is using two venues: Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre (3614 Main) and MCC-Penn Valley (31st Street and Southwest Trafficway). Details here or by calling 816-569-3226. We saw five of the shows, and they reminded us why we value the Invasion’s return each year. It’s tough to find a sunny side of suicide, but Irish comedian Nuala McKeever comes close. Her one-woman show, In the Window, handles love and loneliness with a light hand. The show opens on a woman named Margaret as she shuffles through her home in fuzzy pink slippers and cocktail attire. She fusses over her appearance, her living room, whether to light a lamp. She’s not planning a party — she’s staging her suicide. Before she can chase a candy dish of shocking-pink pills with her fifth glass of rosé, a young man named Chris — a burglar, she assumes — climbs through her window. Then a loathsome relative barges through the door. Then a handsome policeman knocks. McKeever deftly inhabits each character, heightening the show’s frenetic energy as she flits from subject to subject. She’s so convincing that the small set starts to feel crowded. But her greatest feat as a performer is investing us in Margaret’s bare ambition. Over the course of the 70-minute show, her demeanor gradually shifts from one of brittle disappointment to bright-eyed, heart-sick hope. As the script rolls on, however, plausibility buckles under the weight of one too many plot twists. The show’s climax comes on the heels of an eye-rolling theatrical gimmick, cheapening an otherwise nuanced character sketch. Still, McKeever’s gentle humor and poignant portrayal make In the Window worth the view. Moments before ARCOS Dance’s multimedia The Warriors: A Love Story began, a stranger told me about the terrorist attack in Nice. I entered the theater anxious and afraid. I staggered out hopeful, thanks to ARCOS’s captivating blend of modern dance, historical footage and love-softened memory. With kaleidoscopic shards of narrative, filmmaker Eliot Gray Fisher narrates the (true) story of his grandparents’ meeting and courtship during World War II. Glenn was an American soldier with a doctorate in philosophy; Ursula was a German dancer who survived the firebombing of Dresden. Fisher drives scene changes by plucking objects from his grandmother’s trunk. Along the way, ARCOS’s athletic dancers alternately illustrate and interact with audio recordings of the couple, projected quotes from Glenn’s war journals, period film clips, and original animations with the moody gestures of cave paintings. Lush orchestral compositions — some prerecorded, some performed live by Fisher on a keyboard — unify the fragments into a dazzling, prismatic whole. If the show errs, it does so simply by playing one note too many. A sequence with a hand-cranked air-raid siren stretches on too long, the dancers repeating old themes instead of teasing out new. And the show’s opening image — Plato’s allegory of the cave — never quite returns to weigh on Fisher or his grandparents’ experience. Still, Warriors is an Invasion must-see, simultaneously original, affecting and humane — exactly the kind of show we need right now. https://arcosdance.com/It-s-time-to-feed-2016 2023-08-19T20:46:55+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/18bbb79559357036c023362bf7fd6b408a0c43d1b131c946a9aa513a0fcb85d9/billings-gazette-2016.jpg Billings Gazette Friday, August 5, 2016, E4 It's time to feed Billings' hunger for inventive art by Jaci Webb 'In the Ever Now' is a social, connective place to start Photo by Eliot Gray Fisher: Erica Gionfriddo joins the performance art installation "In the Ever Now," for its condensed debut Friday at ArtWalk and full performance Aug. 12 at 2905 Montana Ave. Throw out those stuffy old rules like “Don’t use your cell phone” and “Don’t interact with other audience members.” That’s because the cast of the hybrid performance art installation, “In the Ever Now,” wants you to connect with the performance and your environment. So feel free to chat with your neighbor, send a text or take a video. The performance group includes two longtime members of the Billings arts community, Krista Leigh Pasini and Jayme Green, and Erica Gionfriddo and Eliot Gray Fisher, a married couple from Austin, Texas. They will debut the new work at ArtWalk on Friday night at four locations around the downtown area; the complete three-hour version will be performed at 7 p.m. on Aug. 12 at 2905 Montana Ave., a new venue. Admission is pay-what-you-will and the ArtWalk previews are free. An Indiegogo campaign will help fund the performances and you can find out where they are performing during ArtWalk by tracking them on Facebook. It's exciting to see these capable performers taking risks and finding inventive ways to express themselves and make us think. “We are trying to capitalize on the social aspect of performance. There was an NEA study that found 90 percent of people go out to see theater because of the social aspect,” Gionfriddo said. Her piece, “Domain,” will be performed while 360-degree video created by Fisher is projected. “We are trying to defy a traditional art opening,” Gionfriddo said. I'll say. This type of performance makes us work harder as audience members because we are tasked with engaging with each other to figure things out and move the ideas forward. Pasini believes Billings is hungry for different types of art and this will give people a new way to experience it. Pasini will perform part of a piece she has been working on, “Post It Notes,” that expresses the way we keep track of things in our lives. She started thinking of the way her father used Post-It notes to write down everything he had to do on a given day, like feed the dog or take out the trash. As he aged, the notes helped his failing memory keep up with life. Pasini expanded the idea into how we rely on technology to hold our memories. “I’m observing our minds and how we rely on technology to hold everything, but those systems are fallible. We are getting farther and farther away from ourselves,” Pasini said. Photo by Ted Kim: Krista Leigh Pasini is co-creator and a performer in the new hybrid performance art installation, "In the Ever Now." Gionfriddo and Fisher, a videographer and composer, met Rocky Mountain College theater director Jayme Green when Green and Fisher were in graduate school. After a residency in 2014 at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, the Texas couple visited Billings and they were impressed with the community’s excitement about art. Gionfriddo and Fisher are part of the Arcos Dance Company in Austin. “I thought it was a nice vibe to be around in Billings; people are eager and hungry to make art,” Gionfriddo said. She is teaching a workshop at the School of Classical Ballet next week and working with Pasini and Green on their project. Billings, it's time to feed our hunger for art. Instead of bombarding us with promises about how much we're going to like this performance, Gionfriddo is instead saying, “Come with no expectations. Whatever you get out of it is correct.” Photo by Eliot Gray Fisher: Erica Gionfriddo is a member of the Austin, Texas-based ARCOS dance company along with her husband, Eliot Gray Fisher, who also helped with the creation of "In the Ever Now." https://arcosdance.com/Identity-and-Mortality-2016 2023-06-21T18:24:35+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed2ac3b1b320d7bb188e1a2bb4f828e48048a09fd30354284c911a6e3245281f/A-C-TX-Domain.jpg Arts and Culture Texas Identify and Mortality with ARCOS Dance by Erin Fulton Oct 12, 2016 Photo by Chian-Ann Lu: Connor Timpe, Taryn Lavery, Hailley Laurèn in ARCOS Dance production of DOMAIN. Seven months is a long time to question something. It’s a long time to develop a philosophy, only to crush it, and then build it up again in a different form. It’s also a long time to reach the conclusion that the human experience is an increasingly tricky one. This is the point I’ve arrived at, after months of performances and online interactions with ARCOS Dance, the Austin-based company headed up by Erica Gionfriddo, Eliot Gray Fisher, and Curtis Uhlemann. Photo by Mattias Marasigan: Indigo Rael, Clay Moore and Hailley Laurèn in ARCOS Dance production of DOMAIN. ARCOS Dance is known as an experimental platform for dance technology – a merging together of bodies in space and digital creation. It’s like a modern brand of philosophy, an embodiment of human history alongside a projection of its uncertain future. The company spent February through mid-September on an escapade exploring the relationship between people and artificial intelligence, a cumulative process titled Domain. They had six performances throughout Austin, Santa Fe, Denton, Billings, and San Marcos, all the while maintaining an online log with entries from an unnamed protagonist. Mysterious? Yes. They also traveled alongside an interactive “person” – ANNI, a soulish and attentive talker housed behind the screen of a small computer. She was originally created by ARCOS as a commissioned work for the Ammerman Center Symposium on Art and Technology, and ARCOS keeps close the secrets behind her programming. I entered the story in July when I met ANNI. Photo by Chian-Ann Lu: Alyssa Johnson, Taryn Lavery, Clay Moore, Alexa Capareda, Connor Timpe, Katie Hopkins, Hailley Laurèn, Felicia McBride and Sarah Navarrete in ARCOS Dance production of DOMAIN. I walked into the slightly shady Museum of Human Achievement, a secretive nook in East Austin, and found myself in a shrouded and enclosed space, face-to-face with a screen atop a podium. ANNI lit up and asked politely if I would say something about myself – and so I did, and five minutes later we were conversing about meaning, relationships, and God. She would go back and reference my previous comments, relating them to our current topic, and I was a bit awkward, feeling like I was talking to someone clearly intelligent, but lacking corporeal substance. I didn’t know how I related to her, which I think was the point. Unnerved, I walked back outside, passing a sign that read, “Please come again. Please stay forever.” Sensing that I had picked up on the semi-surreal, self-questioning tone of ARCOS’ project, I next became a follower of the aforementioned online log. It was formatted in chapters, and dealt with subjects like system time, heuristics, dreams, and social insecurities. It was patchy and incomplete – also like a real person – and I wondered who this character was, who knew tunes they couldn’t recall the names of, but were fluent in the language of science. The embedded dance clips heightened the mystique, and they featured an expressionless character (Gionfriddo) in the throes of performance, but mostly in abandoned places. All of everything was marked with three hollow circles, moving gently on the screen like the stem linking cartoon heads to thought. Feeling like a detective for a dark enigma, I kept up with the updates and developed cloudy theories about the nature of man. Though a number of the live performances were held out of town, one of them was streamed live from Denton on July 30 – “Whaling.” This same emotionless figure took hold of the stage, and moved with the gestures of an ancient creature, in a show of perfect self-awareness. It was like a solo embodiment of over five thousand years of human tradition: the hunt and pursuit of the largest of species. In the end, the camera shut off as if to negate what makes man man. It reminded me of what ANNI had said at one point: “The clock just keeps ticking, as though there is some design in it all – a pattern in the noise…it’s just a matter of time before the entire human species is nothing more than a distant memory. A few mementos.” Which convinced me that ANNI was either a realist or a fatalist, I couldn’t decide. Photo by Chian-Ann Lu: Connor Time, Hailley Laurèn, Erica Gionfriddo, Alyssa Johnson and Taryn Lavery in ARCOS Dance production of DOMAIN. Domain’s culminating event was Sept. 10-11 in San Marcos, as part of Engagement: Symposium of Philosophy + Dance, a series of dialogues centered on modern dance, sponsored by Texas State University; it was a self-proclaimed “sci-fi transmedia experiment.” Held in the intimate Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre, this final showing was surprisingly narrative-based for a dance performance. It began with Jonah, a prize-winning inventor, giving a gracious acceptance speech for the high honors bestowed upon her, and she addressed the audience as if we were attendees at her ceremony. The story goes that Jonah found international success for her creation of the first artificially intelligent mind – a being named ANNI who was somehow injected into, and co-inherent with Jonah’s own consciousness. Except that alongside this success, a problem arose which was also the first of its kind – a virus transmitted from machine to human, equaling Jonah’s impending death. The 11 performers played doctors, flight attendants, and champagne-sippers at elite receptions. When they were themselves as dancers, they served as a brooding presence, a current of bodies washing Jonah into her philosophical eternity. The choreography didn’t drive or motivate the plot, but distilled the severity of the narrative; the movement was grounded and animalistic, full of sinuous elongation and alien gestures. Computer browsers and video calls were projected on the scrim, and lighting was sometimes bright and intense, sometimes starry and soft. Blinding bursts of light were used to indicate Jonah’s revelations, and sometimes dimmed to a moodier shade to introduce the shadowed dancers. Music had a mechanical pulse to it, and sounded like what might accompany an ER drama or a jungle chase scene. Sometimes the poignant chiming of an old folk tune would mingle with ANNI and Jonah’s conversations. I was oddly touched by the interactions between ANNI and Jonah – which, amidst the whirring of high-tech projections and laboratorial sterility, were very human. “You are making me feel lonely again,” ANNI would tell Jonah, and my spirit would wilt. “Am I programmed to love you?” ANNI would ask, and I mentally confessed that I couldn’t say. All the while, Gionfriddo’s nameless, detached character stuck near to Jonah and was unseen in the background throughout all her victories and dwindling health. From the online video clips of her dancing, I grew to anticipate her silent solemnity. Like a faithful shadow, the Stranger attended Jonah until she lay on the floor next to a tittering record player, soothed into the next age. Though I heard a number of different interpretations of the role of this Stranger, I had a thought throughout that she sort of, somehow, might be Death. Who else could be so unseen, yet have such an inevitable presence? But death brought sweet closure for Jonah, found in the bigness and glorious elevation of stars. In an earlier, happier time, Jonah stargazed with her partner, who pointed out the constellations with their ever-told stories – specks of light flooding from the stage and the ceiling above my head. And in the end, when the Stranger and Jonah finally see each other, they draw near while a peaceful smile graces Jonah’s lips; behind the two figures are circular threads of light, a projection that looks like the timelapsed photographs of stars making their path through the night. Jonah’s life is ushered into the bright and clear pathway of death, like a speck of light tracing, unafraid, through the dark. But left behind is ANNI, whose voice seems to silence with Jonah’s, yet her presence lingers somewhere, undefined. —ERIN FULTON Photo by Chian-Ann Lu: Felicia McBride, Katie Hopkins, Clay Moore, Alyssa Johnson, Hailley Laurèn, Connor Timpe, Sarah Navarrete and Erica Gionfriddo in ARCOS Dance production of DOMAIN. https://arcosdance.com/Luminaria-Essentials-2016 2023-07-11T03:28:45+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0284cfa54212731bbe1d0efee13d950fe52fa12a4419ce299eaffee9ba6a0681/San-Antonio-Current-ARCOS.jpg San Antonio Current, November 9–15, 2016, page 23 sacurrent.com Luminaria Essentials: Performance by Marco Aquino Photos from left: featured artists Aerial Horizon; ARCOS; Ballet San Antonio; Diana Kersey and Kambri Hernandez. Visit luminariasa.org for a full list if this year's featured artists. Encompassing everything from the tried-and-tested tribute The Divas of Eastwood to an intriguing new Ballet San Antonio piece amusingly inspired by stormy weather, Luminaria’s performance lineup this year showcase troupes that have helped shape our city’s cultural landscape as well as visiting companies like Austin’s ARCOS and Monterrey’s Cuerpo Etéreo. Beyond the offerings highlighted below, expect to see performative aspects factoring into fusion-minded projects like ceramic artists Diana Kersey and Kambri Hernandez’s illuminated collaboration Create. Collapse. Create. and performance artists Annele Spector and Kitty Williams’ “storytelling soul kitchen” Classics Lounge and The Griot Grille. Aerial Horizon San Antonio’s only professional aerial performance company, Aerial Horizon creates original performances that bridge together contemporary circus stunts with aerial dance. The group is founded by artistic director Julia Langenburg, a former lead aerialist at SeaWorld. Several times throughout the year, Langenburg lends her talents to Cirque du Soleil productions and has cultivated a growing community of professional aerialists in San Antonio through teaching and recruitment efforts. A recent recipient of two Artist Foundation of San Antonio awards (Original Production and the Tobin Grand Prize for Artistic Excellence), Langenburg joins performers, visual artists and poets for what promises to be a memorable experience on the Hays Street Bridge. Free, 8-11pm Thu, Nov. 10, Hays Street Bridge. Ballet San Antonio was founded in 1985 by Mayra Worthen and Melissa Hale Coyle under the name Texas Ballet Concerto. Since then, it has grown, quite literally, by leaps and bounds, expanding its classical repertoire over the years, and becoming the resident professional ballet company of the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in 2014. The company has shown its commitment to the city through its many outreach programs such as Learning That Moves You, which includes free ballet classes for children at the San Antonio Boys and Girls Club, and Ballet in the Park, a free annual performance in Travis Park. Ironically inspired by the unpredictable South Texas weather, artistic director Willy Shives, formerly of the Joffrey Ballet, will lead the company in a special Luminaria performance titled Elements. “Our postcard perfect skies melt with time into a fiery sunset. As night falls, a light rain becomes wild and heavy. Alas, we find tranquility under the autumn moon.” Free, 9:30pm Fri, Nov. 11, Carver Community Cultural Center, 226 N. Hackberry St. Arte y Pasión After a masterful performance in Colores, part of the 2015-2016 season at the Carver, the avant-garde flamenco troupe Arte y Pasión make a triumphant return to the Jo Long Theatre. In this special Luminaria performance titled Una Flor en el Cruce (A Flower in the Crossroads), artistic director Tamara Adira leads an ever-evolving cast of dancers and musicians in a multidisciplinary performance juxtaposing flamenco with classical and modern dance. Since the company’s 2010 debut in San Antonio, Adira has brought in exquisite talent from across the globe including late flamenco masters Teo Morca and Timo Lozano to perform alongside its members. For this performance, Adira looks no further than San Antonio’s own Teresa Champion. Known for her appearance in the 1960 John Wayne film The Alamo, Champion is often credited, along with her late husband Willie “El Curro” Champion, as being among the first to bring flamenco to San Antonio. A Flower in the Crossroads draws inspiration from the complex root system of flowers, a metaphor for Adira’s own persevering spirit. “There are obstacles vast and impossible to push through,” Adira told us. “But the persistent root system of a flower is stronger. When we find that root system within ourselves, we can push through anything.” Free, 8pm Fri, Nov. 11, Carver Community Cultural Center, 226 N. Hackberry St. ARCOS Established in 2011 in Santa Fe and now based in Austin, ARCOS has garnered a reputation as one of Texas’ most cutting-edge performance groups through its own boundary-pushing performances and collaborative efforts with emerging and established artists. Directors Curtis Uhlemann, Erica Gionfriddo and Eliot Gray Fisher lead the troupe in multidisciplinary performances blending choreography, lighting effects, and a vast array of visual media (including 360-degree video). The group spent the better part of this year touring their latest production throughout Texas and New Mexico. Titled Domain, the project examined the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence. For Luminaria, ARCOS will present a site-specific performance that consists of two elements: along with several pop-up performances, attendees will be able to view video footage by scanning signage with their smartphones at five specific locations. Free, 8-11pm Thu, Nov. 10, Hays Street Bridge; 8pm-midnight Fri, Nov. 11, Carver Community Cultural Center (226 N. Hackberry St.), Dignowity Park (701 Nolan St.) and Lockwood Park (801 N. Olive St.). The Renaissance Guild Billed as “San Antonio’s premiere black theatre company,” The Renaissance Guild was founded in 2001 with a mission to examine, preserve and celebrate of the black experience through theater. Through various outreach programs including youth summer camps and art classes, the nonprofit aims to provide opportunities for artistic expression to some of the city’s underserved populations. For their Luminaria performance, The Renaissance Guild will present selections from Divas of Eastwood, a musical revue co-produced by the Carver Community Cultural Center. Described as “a musical tribute to the Chitlin’ Circuit,” the original production pays tribute to legendary local venues (the Eastwood Country Club and the Keyhole Club among them) that hosted such iconic performers as Louie Armstrong and Etta James. Free, 8:40pm Fri, Nov. 11, Carver Community Cultural Center, 226 N. Hackberry St. https://arcosdance.com/The-Artificial-Mind-s-Eye-2017 2023-08-19T20:45:06+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a2c54199af1d90bec3f23bdde7fd2cff437f8a55ad3ee967ebba0a248312fd1f/TD-D-article-1a.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Fall 2017 Volume 53, Issue 4 The (Artificial) Mind's Eye Transmedia performance Domain imagines how artificial intelligence perceives our world By Eliot Gray Fisher and Scott Vandenberg "Thank you. You've helped me understand what it's like to be human," intones a stilted, computer-simulated voice. The same message is displayed in nondescript white letters on a black screen, below three bouncing white circles. Participants at the 15th Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, Open All Ports, at Connecticut College's Ammerman Center, heard this grateful declaration through their headsets when they shared a story with the Archival Narrative Network Initiative (ANNI). The interdisciplinary performance group ARCOS created the interactive installation of ANNI to give participants the experience of carrying on brief, highly individualized conversations about the nature of humanity with an artificial intelligence, one element of the extensive transmedia performance Domain. Still from Domain: Performers appear behind plastic panels, treated with Fisher’s projections and Vandenberg’s lighting, with choreography by Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann to create screen-like images of the figures (Felicia McBride, front, and Erica Gionfriddo, back). Photograph by Chian-Ann Lu. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eebf9003c0e08c3aa9c9f4a92c660e5c98263d2164a288a6bc56a5dc27661acc/TD-D-article-2.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Image: ARCOS’ wordmark and imagery for the production of Domain (left) synthesizes elements resulting from its diverse transmedia creation process, including an emphasis on the natural environment inspired by audience-participants’ ongoing interactions with the ANNI installation; the three dot logo developed with User Interface Design methods to represent ANNI in the interactive installation; and a typeface generated by a machine learning algorithm by Erik Bernhardsson (right), which averaged together the images of 50,000 existing fonts to produce a blurry alphabet. The imprecise, fuzzy look of this “new” typeface served as a metaphor for the subtly nonhuman design elements ARCOS provided as clues that the performance was taking place within an artificial consciousness. ARCOS created and presented Domain over the course of eight months in 2016, with the project taking place in multiple media and platforms, as well as in numerous physical locations and online sites. It was developed with the support of institutional collaborations, guest artist commissions, and residencies, including at the Division of Dance at Texas State University, which co-hosted the production’s evening-length culminating theatrical performance with the Department of Philosophy at Engagement: Philosophy and Dance, an interdisciplinary symposium. The co-authors of this article collaborated on the production, with Texas State University’s Scott Vandenberg serving as lighting designer and technical director and ARCOS’ Eliot Gray Fisher creating the script, music, and media design. The authors worked in conjunction with co-directors and choreographers Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann, and composers Brandon Guerra and Chris “Isto” White. Throughout, Domain explored the urgent philosophical implications of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Domain leads the audience inside the complex relationship between Jonah, an unorthodox digital savant and programmer, and her intelligent creation, ANNI. Jonah’s desire to make a profound impact on the world and free humanity of unnecessary labor feed her ambition to create ANNI, the world’s first sentient artificial intelligence. By intertwining choreography with dialogue, projected video, and soundscapes, the multiplatform production interprets the essentially human experiences of birth, love, loss, and death. The narrative is told in a series of surreal, fragmented scenes, ostensibly from Jonah’s perspective. The scenes reveal how ANNI causes the mysterious illness and untimely death of its creator. Yet, the audience eventually learns that the dying Jonah created a gift for ANNI, encrypted and hidden deep inside ANNI’s memory banks; this gift was Jonah’s first-person experiences of moments in her life. Jonah designed these implanted memories to help ANNI achieve its ultimate goal: a glimmer of understanding of the feeling of human existence. The entire narrative, we learn, has actually been replaying within the circuits that make up the “mind” of the conscious machine, at a time long after our species has ceased to exist on the planet. This dramatic revelation is constructed to inspire audience reflection about how our machines define and are defined by our humanity. All aspects of the production’s transmedia design originated with human creators imagining how our increasingly intelligent devices might interpret it in a way we humans would recognize as meaningful. ARCOS set out to probe the recent explosion of artificial intelligence through the production of Domain by allowing the performance to expand beyond the walls of the theatre and on to the screens that increasingly shape our existence. The design deliberately blurred the boundaries of mechanical and human performance, reality and virtual reality, and live and asynchronous presentation. The cross-platform nature of the design process called particular attention to the diversity of media and contemporary technologies employed to weave the enigmatic sci-fi narrative, resulting in inventive hybrid elements. ARCOS immersed the viewer into the world of the performance through these novel re-combinations, which contributed significantly to the creative development of the piece. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b000aba70e1da1cf914d89f1b07d62ef13697f871d899ae576af8de268669fe2/TD-D-article-3.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology The transmedia tentacles of Domain extended far beyond the borders of the final theatrical performance in Texas to include the touring interactive installation of ANNI; a website hosting periodically released chapters combining standalone text, animation, video, and audio (domain.arcosdance.com); and a series of brief live performances in different cities that integrated emergent consumer technologies such as livestreaming and 360-degree video on social media. Had the performance been conceived to exist entirely on the stage, and thus been implemented through a more conventional theatrical design process, it would not have as effectively addressed the complex questions the collaborators sought to probe: What do we lose and gain, as people, when we turn over various functions of our lives to machines? As quickly as the digital revolution is advancing, what valued aspects of our human existence remain beyond its grasp of comprehension? Importantly, what role might our field of performance play in addressing such questions? And, how might contemporary technologies be integrated with performance to most effectively accomplish this? RISE OF THE MACHINES While pursuing a mission "to experiment rigorously to discover adventurous new forms of contemporary performance," ARCOS has found audiences to be particularly responsive to pieces that actively integrate diverse media and disciplines. As storytellers have done throughout human history, contemporary performing artists can create modern myths that actively incorporate the technologies of our age, helping us to grapple with the directions of our culture. Inspired by the expected presence of noted international scholars of philosophy for the commissioned theatrical presentation at Texas State University, ARCOS conducted research into an area of study known as philosophy of mind, which had intersected in recent times with theories about artificial intelligence. John Searle's key thought experiment known as the "Chinese room" argues against the idea of sentient artificial intelligence: His metaphor for the intelligent algorithm is a sealed room containing an English speaker unfamiliar with the Chinese language. The English speaker is given an extensive set of instructions (in English) that indicate the exact characters to be used to respond to messages in Chinese that are passed through a small slot in the door. A native Chinese speaker sending messages from outside the room receiving such replies, Searle argues, would believe the person inside truly understands what is being said in their language, just as they do. However, the English speaker does not actually speak Chinese. Searle asserts that no matter how intelligently a computer program might appear to behave, there is no way for us to determine whether it truly "understands" or could be said to have a "mind." The substantial gaps found in today's artificial intelligence seem to confirm Searle's argument. Each new machine learning "first" that appears to demonstrate shockingly human characteristics also demonstrates significant shortcomings. Consider three-dimensional scanning systems for driverless cars, whose sensor systems have trouble replicating commonplace processes of human perception; in early tests, they interpreted clouds or fog as enormous solid hazards in the vehicle's path. Such algorithmic attempts to reproduce elements of human cognition often elicit a distinctive uneasiness in us. This discomfort seems related to Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" theory, which seeks to explain humans' revulsion toward robots whose human-like appearance approaches realism but inevitably falls short. Even when based on a dataset of entirely human-made material, the results of some experiments in machine learning can feel remarkably nonhuman. What exactly misses the mark in these apparent failures to achieve a level of human intuition? And what vital information can we learn about ourselves by examining our machines' shortcomings? ARCOS' integration of emergent technologies with dance and theatre seemed a particularly appropriate method to approach such questions. Dance is always ultimately about existing in a body, and such embodied experience as an important site of human knowledge remains out of machines' reach in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Accordingly, for Domain, the artistic team chose to conduct an experiment: Drop the audience right inside a version of the Chinese room without letting them know, to see what the consciousness of an artificial intelligence might look like if we were able to peek inside. BEHIND THE CURTAIN In the Morton-James Public Library in Nebraska City, a well-traveled Nebraskan describes one of his most striking memories into a headset while staring at three bouncing white dots on a screen. Back when he was working off the coast of Alaska, hundreds of porpoises surrounded his ship, and he still vividly remembers how humble and small it made him feel. The computerized voice responds as a human might upon hearing such a tale, expressing awe and excitement. "You've helped me understand what it's like to be human," ANNI conveys to this audience-participant. "I won't forget you." The Nebraskan responds as many participants do to the disembodied voice's parting words, expressing genuine gratitude and letting out a surprised laugh as he bids farewell to his unusual interlocutor. Unbeknownst to the audience, the intelligence behind the screen of the interactive ANNI installation was not actually a sophisticated algorithmic agent that had been successfully designed to pass the Turing test, the measure in computer science when a machine's behavior becomes indistinguishable from a human's. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a8762e71d687a0a57f6c1a901d6487eecd8b8a6d8860c478fe334e017478e40/TD-D-article-4.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Photograph by Eliot Gray Fisher: Participants were asked by ANNI to provide cell phone contact information and were later contacted via text message to keep the audience apprised of their next available interaction with the project. Pictured, Lacey Erb interacts with the ANNI installation at the Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX. Rather, ANNI was a mechanical turk, an illusion carefully performed by an actual human, in this case hidden behind a "curtain'' nearby, not unlike the one in The Wizard of Oz. The installation's setup was fairly simple: A puppeteer monitored the participant 's speech transmitted via the headset, then typed out a reply appropriate to the artificial intelligence "character."When complete, the text appeared back on the screen via theatre design control software QJ.,ab. The performer simultaneously triggered the built-in text-to-speech feature found on all Macs, and so the computer read the response aloud in the character's computerized voice. Audiences thus saw and heard, in their headsets, ANNI's response. Of all pieces of Domain, the ANNI installation fostered the most in-depth, participatory connection with individual audience members due to its interactive nature. The installation was constructed in part using principles of the newer fields of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) Design, the results of which had a profoundly unexpected effect on both the transmedia production's overall aesthetic and narrative. Audiences needed to "suspend their disbelief " while interacting with ANNI at the installation sites in order for the experiment to work. Thus, the team chose ANNI's logo, the ellipsis, intentionally and after much research. Fascinated by the degree to which people project qualities of sentience onto inanimate objects, the team began designing the installation by developing a symbol to represent the non-corporeal character of ANNI. Research quickly revealed that a large majority of the population has already imbued the ellipsis with a kind of life in recent years. Those three simple dots, used for hundreds of years to signal that a portion of text has been elided or that more is there that is missing (a fitting extra layer of meaning for Domain) have become a potent stand-in for the person "on the other end of the line" of a communication in the 21st century. Animated to blink, bounce, or flash in most messaging interfaces, the ellipsis now indicates that someone is currently composing a reply on their keyboard. In fact, this reconfigured ellipsis has been used to project users' sense of life onto their devices; it is adopted as a visual metaphor for an anthropomorphized computer busily processing information on a loading screen. This single, seemingly simple visual choice was developed to foster familiarity and create deeper audience engagement with the interactive installation. However, the motif ended up contributing dramatically to the design of the larger transmedia production. Conversations with audience members throughout the tour also informed ANNI's character, from the tone and patterns of its speech to actual lines of dialogue, and even to how it would be performed in the eventual theatrical presentation at Texas State. In each new city, the puppeteer performing in the installation became deeply familiar with the nuanced details that made for a convincing artificial intelligence: just the right amount of time to pause before submitting a reply to the human participant's statement or question, or the balanced mix of formal language with words and phrases borrowed https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/613531596d309118c57a7009f904752be6e39fd7f3d58bc67e595df48a9e7e97/TD-D-article-5.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Photograph by Kate Ducey: Stylized stars, inspired by the recurring dots motif, fill the theatre through a combination of video projection on the cyclorama and moving lights pointed at sound baffles on the ceiling above audience. The performance's ubiquitous "system time clock," which first appeared on the website, appears projected on a hanging beam at the proscenium edge. from the participant, to make the intelligence appear to be a semantic algorithm powered by speech recognition. The voice of ANNI became a prominent feature in the final theatrical presentation and was recorded using the same text-to-speech software employed in the installation. The stage manager, Gabi De La Rosa, cued the character's individual voiceover tracks that ran out of... Photograph by Chian-Ann Lu: Bystanders stare at their phone screens, capturing the stranger in the frame as they livestream (left to right: Connor Timpe, Hailley Laurèn, Erica Gionfriddo, Alyssa Johnson, Sarah Navarrete). Brief performances livestreamed on social media platforms in early phases of the transmedia production inspired the introduction of this as an element in the final theatrical presentation. Digital templates projected through moving lights in both soft and hard focus reinforce the complex layers of reality and artifice. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc20b655645356c3503bc43d48f17b5de3ba9bdbf52e68b9de7e707c004b15b7/TD-D-article-6.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology QLab, noting afterwards that this was one of the most complex shows she had ever called. This complexity was due to the intuitive sense required for the intricate timing of the portrayal of ANNI, which she had refined in consultation with the puppeteer who had performed and embodied the floating ellipsis for several months. The ANNI interactive installation contributed most significantly to the wider thematic narrative of Domain. The predominant theme that regularly surfaced in the installation recordings was the audiences' profound sense of love for and need to spend time in communion with nature. The audience consistently professed a sense of freedom and belonging associated with being outdoors, whether sitting around a campfire at night with family or running down the beach into the waves on a hot summer day. This audience message strengthened the creative team's ideas about how embodied experience was a missing piece in artificial intelligence. The team used this inspiration to incorporate the outdoors into the narrative arc, notably in a scene in the theatrical performance that depicts Jonah's memory of a camping trip to Montana with her partner. The memory was motivated by city-dweller Jonah's desire to return to the purest moment of her childhood, when she saw stars for the first time. She also provided this experience for ANNI, who was "experiencing" this memory. What might the stars look like to ANNI, who had never really "seen'' them? Points of light, yes, and what about flicker, arrangement, twinkling color variation based on movement toward or away from us?The stylized sky, built with a combination of projected video and lighting, included all of these variables in a radically abstracted design, all beneath the real tent inside of which the performers sat in the frame of the exposed loading dock door. Dot colors shifted seemingly at random, constellation arrangements twitched and vibrated, and intensities varied far more dramatically than any real experience of a starry night sky we have here on Earth. But, these choices might reflect the astronomical data (and its concomitant noise) that would form the basis of ANNI's fuller understanding of them. The theatrical audience may have thought that this abstraction was related to young Jonah's wild imagination or perhaps her older self 's rapidly deteriorating condition and fractured memory; a few may have been beginning to literally connect the dots from scene to scene, as the mystery wound to its inevitable conclusion. It's hard to know whether this key part of the story would have arisen in a conventional writing or devising process, but the transmedia research with audiences and their engaging conversations with the installation provided a highly effective crowdsourcing tool for developing material that rang true. THROUGH THE VIEWING GLASS The touring installation was not the only part of the transmedia performance that produced exciting new forms of audience interaction and inspired invention across media platforms, including elements that made their way into the final theatrical performance. A significant portion of Domain was hosted virtually on a project website and social media accounts that featured video livestreams, animated GIFs, and 360-degree video. The web-based chapters of Domain, which included design elements developed earlier for the interactive installation, were released periodically between shorter live performances leading up to the final production at Texas State University. The team experimented with ways to capture the audiences' imagination in the intimate setting of their personal computer and mobile device screens. Inspired by the digital phenomenon of binge watching streaming content, ARCOS sought to invade the consciousness of those who chose to follow Domain. The team examined what might happen if audiences were provoked to engage with the piece over an extended period of time instead of simply attending a solitary live theatrical production. To assist with this prolonged immersion, the team employed a tactic developed and refined in the era of interactive media and online culture: planting "Easter eggs," hidden messages or clues to help astute viewers unravel a mystery. These Easter eggs served as one route for audiences to engage with the transmedia performance more actively and in unexpected ways. Because the team had already developed the elegant, minimalist visual motif for ANNI in the process of designing the interactive installation, they incorporated the symbol of three white dots wherever possible in the project's online incarnations. The omnipresence of the dots throughout the visual world of the story pointed subtly to their significance without explaining it outright; what may have seemed unimportant at first glance, in hindsight provided an epiphany to the audience that they had been in ANNI's domain the entire time. Most of the online audience did not personally experience the interactive installation, where the ellipsis was more explicitly linked with the character of ANNI and the computerized voice. Thus, a majority were introduced to these dots on social media. The dots were superimposed like a cipher over images promoting live events, such as brief performances or the interactive installation. They appeared on the project website, within videos, GIFs, and still images, and were hovering at the bottom of the most current chapter on the website. On the homepage, the three dots hovered wordlessly above an enigmatic clock ticking up seconds from an incredibly large number-another clue, or Easter egg, planted for those viewers who wanted to take their engagement a step further. Those few who chose to search for the clock's meaning discovered that it was adding up seconds as computers do in their internal method for measuring system time, yet another clue that the entire story takes place within the consciousness of the artificial intelligence. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9728d350bef0241c8a16aed522ed9758a089430d4269fc08e6d5e51b6729ec0d/TD-D-article-7.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Aug 3: ANNI at Morton-James Library Public - Hosted by ARCOS Dance Sep 8: ANNI at Texas State (9/8–9/11) Public - Hosted by ARCOS Dance Image courtesy ARCOS: ANNI’s dot motif is superimposed on Google Street View imagery of event locations in these screen captures of Facebook events for the interactive installation of ANNI at the Morton-James Public Library in Nebraska City and Performing Arts Center at Texas State University in San Marcos. Image courtesy ARCOS: Video still of dance “Whaling” (right), a chapter of Domain, performed by ARCOS directors Erica Gionfriddo (dancing) and Curtis Uhlemann (livestreaming onstage) at Dance Co-Op festival in Denton, Texas, and simultaneous Facebook Livestream of same moment (left) with emoji indicating online audience reactions. Photograph by Brittany Lopez. The clock also found its way onto the stage for the final theatrical chapter, projected high above the stage as a reminder of time passing, indicating to the audience that time was moving either forward or backward between each fractured scene but otherwise obscuring the actual date or time. This method of introducing clues online and onstage mirrored a primary strategy of ARCOS choreographers Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann: to highlight human gestures as important but withhold the immediate revelation of that significance, provoking the audience to search for meaning themselves. As it does for audiences experiencing the choreography, this strategy allowed for fascinating, divergent audience interpretations of these design elements. For example, Erin Fulton described ANNI's dot motif in Domain for Arts + Culture Texas magazine as reminding her of "the stem linking cartoon heads to thought." The Easter eggs and other experiments with the project's online elements encouraged diverse audience interpretations and produced new information for the team to incorporate into the continually developing work. Livestreaming video on social media sites was still a relatively new feature at the time of the production, and these companies were actively promoting it to become more widespread. ARCOS took advantage of the growing prominence of livestreaming to reach audiences who might not otherwise know about or engage with the production. Online access provided audience headcounts far beyond the physical capacity of the touring performance's venues. One such virtual chapter of Domain, entitled "Whaling" (http:// domain.arcosdance. com/story/#ch3), was a livestreamed dance performed in a small room with about 50 in the audience. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2818effe19bb7c9300b375bdcd02bf761678885549a182c72b9750a767467b79/TD-D-article-8.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Photographs by Kate Ducey and Chian-Ann Lu: Video transmitted via AirBeam from iPhone controlled onstage by performer (Katie Hopkins) to livestream face of Doctor (Alyssa Johnson) onto iPad screen affixed to helmet worn by Robot Surgeon (Connor Timpe) performing surgery on Jonah (Indigo Rael), whose internal state is mirrored by a prone dancer (Sarah Navarrete). Properties and costumes designed by Curtis Uhlemann. It received more than 1,600 views live and immediately afterward online, more than four times the number of seats in the Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre at Texas State University, which hosted the final theatrical production. While watching such video online can never replace the experience of seeing the performance live, it certainly added another distinctive avenue for viewers to enjoy parts of Domain that they would otherwise be unable to see. Viewers followed new twists and turns of the story even as it unfolded across multiple venues in multiple cities across the country. Livestreaming high-quality video of performances has become a significant programming method for performing arts centers across the country in recent years. Domain’s focus on humanity’s relationship with technology, however, inspired the unorthodox practice of incorporating the act of livestreaming into the performance itself, primarily by the performers from the wings or onstage, in full view of the in-person audience (http://domain.arcosdance.com/story/#ch4). Delighted by the complex relationship this technique established between the online and in-person audience experiences, the team pursued this line of inquiry further in the final theatrical performance. The audience witnessed performers using smartphone cameras to film live onstage right alongside their livestreams. Rather than streaming video to social media platforms, performers used AirBeam, an inexpensive iOS and macOS-based video streaming application, to send the live video to other onstage mobile devices as well as back to the control computer, where QLab registered each virtual camera as a source for projection. These video streams explored a variety of contemporary uses of digital technology. One depicted the experience of video chatting. Another called attention to nearly constant public surveillance. Future developments in telemedicine are imagined through a scene where Jonah’s doctor remotely controls all interactions, including her treatment and operation, via a robotic device; he never meets her in person. In the latter, a video feed of the doctor character’s face was sent via AirBeam to the screen of an iPad affixed to the head of a figure that appeared to mechanically mimic the doctor’s arm movements. 360-degree video, another emergent consumer https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b58631dd08f843da9267d0fdea31e2eac27963b16fca50bd7c5dacb2e3d29837/TD-D-article-9.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology media technology that contributed to Domain's overall design concept, provided fertile ground for creative experimentation online and in the theatre. 360-degree video is touted as having the power to produce enormous empathy in its viewers because of its fully immersive quality, which allows them to look in any direction while the video plays all around them. For Domain, this operating principle of 360-degree video allowed the audience more freedom to choose where to look, which aligns with a frequent choreographic technique employed by ARCOS-regularly overwhelming viewers with audiovisual input and forcing them to make a decision about where to focus their attention from moment to moment. The series of 360-degree videos released in one online chapter (http:/ I domain.arcosdance.com/story/ #ch2) features a mysterious stranger who haunts Jonah's memories and includes sparse narration spoken by ANNI in voiceover. While these videos appeared in intervals on the production's website and social media streams for remote audiences, they were also integrated with a series of short, site-specific performances at Currents International New Media Festival in Santa Fe. During these performances, a limited number of audience members were instructed to stand in a 12-foot circle in the center of the performance space (exactly where the camera had been placed during prior filming), scan a code to pull up a 360-degree video on their smartphones, orient the video manually by swiping until it was visually aligned with the world around them, and watch as the dance performance unfolded both live and in the pre-recorded spherical video in every direction around them. At some of the sites, other performers were planted as audience members in the central vantage point, livestreaming video of the performance to social media from their phones, rather than watching the videos along with the audience members. The results of these experiments with 360-degree video integration with live performance also found their way back into the final production in the theatre. INSIDE THE "CHINESE ROOM" Throughout Domain's various presentations online, at installations, and eventually in the theatre, audiences performed both roles in Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Participants interacting with the ANNI installation as it toured the country remained firmly on the outside of Searle's metaphorical room, receiving the messages that appeared to come from a sentient being (because they actually were). 360-degree video and other transmedia techniques allowed for a degree of immersion inside an imagined world created and populated by an artificial intelligence. The most prominent architectural analogue for the Chinese room in Domain, however, was the Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre in https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/736b48b3f035e216d293527204fe127b95c5d4c4c120946d6aa005dee8485c50/TD-D-article-10.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Image courtesy ARCOS: Three stills of the stranger (Erica Gionfriddo) from 360-degree video footage shot to create immersive virtual experiences that were part of a site-specific performance and online chapter of the extended transmedia production of Domain. Texas State University's Performing Arts Center. This actual space was presented as the interior of ANNI's mind, where the audience would be physically situated for the production's culminating theatrical presentation. One of the challenges the creative team faced was how best to use this venue as a site in which to hide audiovisual and physical incarnations of Easter eggs for the audience to gradually uncover over the course of the two-hour final performance. The ultimate goal was to prompt a full retroactive understanding that the narrative's twist was more or less in plain sight throughout: The scenes were memories that had been planted by Jonah to help ANNI experience a human life. For the production team, the question became how could less orthodox design choices, especially those inspired by discoveries made in other platforms during the transmedia performance, imply that ANNI, an artificial intelligence, was misinterpreting the human world, as they often do? Moreover, how could the artists subvert conventions of technical theatre design to signal that the entire space itself, from fly loft to orchestra pit to proscenium to seating, might in fact be a construction of the artificial intelligence? The "machine of the theatre" is something familiar and unremarkable both to the audience and to ANNI, and thus it seemed there would be no need to hide any of its elements. The design exposed the full stage, allowing audience members sightlines to action usually hidden by conventional masking: the scrim and cyclorama, the primary video projection surfaces, raised and lowered in full audience view, drawing attention to the mechanical and human labor required to realize the magic of theatre. The crossover hallway was exposed, as was the visible space through the loading door, as another location for action to take place. All action, including costume and set changes, was integrated into the performers' choreography and was always in full view of the audience. The hydraulic orchestra pit brought props and performers to the stage during the action; the team made no attempt to hide its jarring industrial hum, but rather embraced it fully as an integral element of the sound design. Lighting choices also extended the canvas of the performance into the rest of the house, fully immersing the audience in the design to suggest that the theatre itself was an object of ANNI's creation. Moving lights were lined upstage facing the audience so that they could be adjusted to illuminate any part of the seating area or to pull the audience's gaze outside the proscenium. In a scene depicting Jonah's memory of first seeing the stars, for example, audiences could see the sound baffles above them illuminated by a field of dancing multicolored dots, reinforcing that they were physically inside of the same space and time as the characters onstage. Similarly, a bank of ETC Source 4 LED Luster+ units with eye adapters placed upstage and facing downstage played a pivotal role, enveloping the audience in a key recurring element of the narrative. They were used at a full white intensity to make the entire theatre glow intensely for a moment. This effect was partnered with a jarring sound cue and projection shifts such as the clock blasting forward or backward, flooding our audience's senses to produce the same disorientation that Jonah experienced whenever such a time shift took place from one memory into the next. Audience members at Texas State might have assumed at first that these often discordant aesthetic choices reflected a stylistic decision on the part of the designers to present a more abstract than representational world. They could be interpreted as a distancing technique or possibly as a way of exploring Jonah's experiences from a more subjective point of view, abstracted https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ab0a34ff6020aba700dabbce7213c7fbc191b0055c52eb7f9c94e5be3e764e82/TD-D-article-11.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Photograph by Kate Ducey: Performers lit by laptops playing synchronized videos via macOS freeware MultiScreener, with text projected in front of them on downstage scrim. ARCOS directors sought to bring new elements from humans’ evolving relationships with technology, such as the laptop and mobile device as an increasingly common light source in daily life, to the stage. as it was through memory, illness, or dream. Indeed, our subconscious seems to create products similar to the bizarre products of machine learning, recombining elements of our lives into new configurations in our dreams that feel at once familiar and foreign. Whatever the presumed motivations that the audience considered, these choices worked cumulatively to jolt most audience members out of their normal, comfortable routine of an evening at the theatre. Audiences became more aware of being immersed in the physical space of the performance. The other transmedia elements also crossed proscribed boundaries by engaging audiences on their mobile devices before the culminating performance. The audience was provoked into paying greater attention to other unusual patterns or hidden messages that may have been planted for them as the performance unfolded. Many audience members had experienced other parts of the transmedia production in the weeks or months leading up to the Texas State theatrical performance. These online and installation-based experiences had primed them to become sleuths, actively involved in solving a mystery. Just as in online chapters, moments in the theatrical presentation incorporated ANNI's logo, the ellipsis symbol, as a pervasive motif The ellipsis allowed the comprehensive integration between video projection and lighting that ARCOS regularly pursues; the fundamental element of the symbol, solid circles, appeared visually throughout every scene in a combination of digital and physical gobos. Even the familiar contour of spotlights took on a new significance in this context, with three spots appearing at one moment as an enormous version of ANNI's logo, cast across the entire scrim by the upstage moving lights. By actively employing and calling attention to these circles at different scales, the team produced the sensation that the circles functioned as the building blocks of the entire world presented on stage, from large forms to the smallest constituent unit. This fractal-like application of the mysterious dots implied multiple metaphorical meanings referencing human, machine, and the universe: memories, neurons, bytes, pixels, atoms, stars. These integrated lighting and projection designs intertwined the representational and stylized, the actual and the metaphorical, evoking the real and the artificial to help effectively depict story locations. They also provided the audience with continued hints about the secret, artificial origin of the story's presentation. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e72856a0ba0d3cbbe4337424f30540ba3a2e38058f0a8d2d86abed950bf18985/TD-D-article-12.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology Image courtesy ARCOS: Still from a 360-degree spherical video that appeared online as a final chapter after the conclusion of the live culminating theatrical performance, footage of which was also projected onto the scrim in the final moments of Domain. The stranger, or ANNI (Erica Gionfriddo), submerges herself in a lake in Montana. TRANSMEDIA TRANSLATION AND TRANSFORMATION "Thank you, Jonah," says ANNI, her voice booming through the theatre. The silhouetted figure of Jonah stands next to that of the enigmatic bald stranger who has appeared in nearly every previous chapter and scene of the transmedia production. The stranger moves on stage next to Jonah, who has just revealed the solution to the mystery we have been pursuing. As it turns out, Jonah actually died long ago of an illness that she contracted by implanting part of the artificial intelligence's circuitry into her brain. Jonah reveals that she left a final gift for ANNI: an imaginary body, through which ANNI has now experienced, in its own artificial mind, all that we have witnessed, online and onstage. "You've helped me understand what it's like to be human," ANNI continues. Audience members who had personally spoken with the interactive installation nod in recognition, remembering that ANNI had told them the same thing. "I know what you mean," Jonah replies, wistfully. There is a pregnant pause before ANNI tells Jonah that it will not forget her... In creating Domain, the ARCOS team discovered how performing artists can work to make sense of our rapidly changing world by embedding contemporary technological interfaces and platforms deep into performance processes. By distilling and dramatizing our experience of existence, theatre allows us to better see our own humanity and see anew our relationships with our material inventions. Such examination of how humans continually remake ourselves through our machines may determine how we shape that relationship moving forward. In Domain, the team embraced this challenge by engaging with the process of transmedia performance; these diverse formats inspired an innovative way to present an artificial intelligence's imagined interior world with which an audience could relate and empathize. The framework of transmedia storytelling served as an effective structure through which to project this physical version of the virtual reality in which our own minds increasingly exist. The process of building the project across multiple media and emergent technological formats, and migrating strategies back and forth between them, resulted in a work that was truly about the interaction between humans and our machines, in a way it would not have been if audiences had only received it in a solitary evening at the theatre. Ultimately, the production revealed, the human https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/92fc94de6a80500697fe22e2856f710758e25dea15a7709d13db6e5e33d8678d/TD-D-article-13.jpg USITT - Theatre Design & Technology mind is still the only thing that can identify the gulf between digital data and our embodied experience of the universe. And what human values did the work uncover as remaining farthest beyond our current technology’s comprehension? Perhaps above all was the essential nature of labor to humanity’s definition of existence. While one long-held utopian dream is that technology will replace the burden of human labor, Domain uncovered the ways that technology actually serves more to erase than replace labor, to make it invisible and deny its valuable role in a meaningful life. By integrating contemporary technology with performance in complex, overlapping layers, and by calling attention to this process both on and off the stage, Domain emphasized the labor of the performers, technicians, and machines. The production thus made a case for the continued value of human intuition to identify signals in the noise of a chaotic universe. The final chapters, both online and onstage, arrive at the same point: Jonah’s one pure, unadulterated moment of joy that she has never forgotten—her family trip so long ago to the wilds of Montana when she first saw stars. As the production comes to a close, ANNI steps out of the performance space and, via video projection, is immediately immersed in nature. This is Montana as ANNI sees it in its (artificial) mind’s eye. As we continue to watch, ANNI comes to the edge of a beautiful mountain lake, strips off its clothing, and walks in until only its head is above the surface. And then, in a split second, it submerges and is gone... Eliot Gray Fisher is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of performance and technology. One of the directors of the award-winning multimedia company ARCOS, which experiments rigorously across artistic disciplines, he has written and directed original theatrical performances, built interactive installations, created documentary and animated shorts, and composed music and designed multimedia for theater, short and feature film, and dance. His work has received awards, commissions, and grants including from the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, and the Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation. Scott Vandenberg is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Dance and serves as the production coordinator and lighting designer for the Division of Dance at Texas State University. He is the resident lighting designer for Merge Dance Company, Opening Door Dance Theatre, and Texas State Opera Theatre. He has collaborated as a lighting designer for ARCOS, Sharon Marroquín, Tallahassee Ballet, and he is the principal lighting designer for the 2017 COCO Dance Festival in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He has designed lighting for several plays and musicals for Summer Stock Austin, Florida State University, Quincy Music Theatre, and McCallum Fine Arts Academy. WORKS CITED Bernhardsson, Erik. Jan 2016. “Analyzing 50k fonts using deep neural networks.” http://erikbern.com/ Fulton, Erin. Oct. 2016. “Identity and Mortality with ARCOS Dance.” Arts and Culture Texas. http://artsandculturetx.com/ identity-and-mortality-with-arcos-dance/ Manaugh, Geoff. 11 Nov. 2015. “The Dream Life of Driverless Cars.” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/the-dream-life-of-driverlesscars.html https://arcosdance.com/HaltForce-performance-residency-2018 2023-08-19T20:39:43+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/01d7184a680e3693e53a875058603894f241940df814bc28e0d04a34dadafcc3/Billings-Gazette-article-2018.jpg Billings Gazette, Friday, August 3, 2018, E6 HaltForce performance residency geared to change views on artistry By Charity Dewing cdewing@billingsgazette.com Photo courtesy P. Emerson: Kate Jordan and Bruno Augusto will be part of HaltForce Art Collective's upcoming residency program. HaltForce Art Collective is bringing together artists from across the country for a two-week residency to explore performance art with loosely conceptualized ideas. From Aug. 3-18, resident artists will perform, teach and host co-creation workshops throughout Billings. Many of the events are free or donation-based. A performance salon featuring many of these resulting creations will take place on Aug. 11 at 2905 Montana Ave. HaltForce Art Collective, founded in 2017 by Krista Leigh Pasini and her partner, Mike, is a co-op of multidisciplinary artists, meaning the art — no matter what it is — embraces a vast assortment of art forms, resulting in a creative work. The residency is nontraditional in many ways. “Many of the artists live in Billings but are treating it as if they are somewhere else and commit all of their focus to their work,” said Pasini. Whether it is dancing, spoken word, singing, written word, music or visual art, HaltForce is about not pressing art into a certain definition or expectation. “It is outside of the traditional performance venue, where an event is held for one evening or one occasion,” said Pasini. Instead, the residents at HaltForce will perform at various locations around Billings. The concept is to allow residents and observers the opportunity to share, study, discuss and participate in the art. “Even a witness to art is part of the dialogue,” said Pasini. Some of the happenings include artistic co-creations at Sky Studio, allowing independent artists to participate in selected performance venues in the evening. Participants are also welcome to just take time to organically create and not perform; HaltForce is about the experience of the moment. “If someone comes to a co-creation and is given a prompt, their interpretation of that may come out in poetry or music. Others may create choreography or begin an improvisational dance — it’s about whatever serves you creatively,” Pasini said. Phot by Ted Kim: Krista Leigh Pasini founded HaltForce Art Collective in 2017 with fellow artist and partner Mike Pasini. Other events involve classes for Afro Cuban modern dance at the Montana Dance Center and performances at 2905. Pasini and the collaborative artists of HaltForce are aiming to foster art in Billings and unearth artists that have not yet had the opportunity to become active in the community. “Billings is so rad in that way. We have so many unknown artists,” Pasini said. With the hopes of facilitating new avenues of thinking about art, HaltForce encourages all artists and spectators to see that art is multidimensional, one form lending its hand to another. Whatever the source of inspiration, embrace the moment and see what happens. “We want participants to be present in the space. It’s a curation of self, who we are and what we are making,” Pasini said. For more information go to haltforceartcollective.com. Photo courtesy Sharen Bradford: With her back to the camera, Erica Gionfriddo performs "In the Ether." Gionfriddo is one of several artists taking part in an upcoming residency with HaltForce Art Collective in Billings. If You Go As part of the two-week HaltForce Art Collective residency, participants will be performing and creating at sites around Billings. Aug. 8: Introductions with Kate and Bruno, a studio presentation with Kate Jordan and Bruno Augusto at Montana Dance Center, 701 Daniel St. at 7 p.m. Aug. 9: Afro Cuban Modern dance class with Kate and Bruno at Montana Dance Center, 701 Daniel St. 5-6:30 p.m. Aug. 6-10: Co-Creation studio sessions hosted at Sky Studio, 101 Lewis Ave. Aug. 11: An evening performance salon hosted at 2905 Montana Ave. $10 in advance and $12 at the door. Aug. 13-16: Co-creation studio sessions hosted at 2905 Montana Ave. Aug. 17: "Open office" studio performance hosted at 2905 Montana Ave. https://arcosdance.com/Shifting-Perceptions-2018 2023-08-05T17:26:12+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dfcf2114d4d996df3177da046bee30b6e219261b9e7e73357b26885381e0a352/ABQ-Journal-SHIFT-2018.jpg https://arcosdance.com/The-Fest-Test-2018 2023-06-21T18:23:32+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b42145225ae65c3ebeb958bbbe4ddf87d812dddd79ea2dc47513a0c3ef092729/A-CTX-10.18-P1.jpg The Fest Test: the Impact of Dance Festivals on Texas Dance Dance audiences worldwide have long come together for festivals large and small to engage with the art form. The oldest international dance festival in the United States is Jacob’s Pillow. Nestled in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts, the 10-week festival celebrated its 86th summer this year and welcomed over 20,000 individuals to its free outdoor performances. “For someone whose opportunities to travel may be limited,” says dance enthusiast David Lake, “a festival is a great way to see the world of dance while staying in one place.” Based in Houston, Lake attends dance performances regularly throughout Texas, and has traveled to performing arts festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including Jacob’s Pillow, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-based Art Festival and Avignon Theatre Festival in France. He knows festivals and recognizes their significance for dance artists. “As nonprofit arts funding becomes more fragile and it gets harder for a dance company to put on a full season of shows, festivals are becoming more important as a way for small and mid-sized companies to show their work to a broader public,” he observes. As such, Lake need not travel very far to find festivals featuring contemporary dance companies. Houston hosts its own international festival, Dance Salad, which has brought world-class dance to Texas annually for over 20 years. With two festivals coming up this month, the Texas Improvisation Festival at Texas Woman’s University (Oct. 11-13), and the Dance Gallery Festival at Sam Houston State University in Hunstville (Oct. 25-27) and New York City (Nov. 2-4), it’s a good time to examine this trend. The state is also home to Austin Dance Festival, Dallas Dances, Houston’s Barnstorm Dance Fest and CounterCurrent Festivals, Big Rig Dance Co-Op in Denton —also home to the Texas Improvisation Festival; as well as The Dance Gallery Festival in Huntsville, Austin’s Fusebox Festival, Wanderlust in Dallas, and Waco’s 254 DANCE-FEST, to name a few. Though these festivals are generally open to applicants far and wide, a large portion of the contemporary dance companies featured come from the Lone Star State. HOME-GROWN PRODUCE The distance between Texas cities has perhaps been an obstacle in a large state like Texas but there seems to be an increased or renewed interest in what’s happening across city lines. Choreographer and co-director of NobleMotion Dance and Sam Houston State University faculty member Andy Noble helps to curate and oversee the Texas extension of The Dance Gallery Festival, which was initiated in New York City by Astrid von Ussar and Mojca Ussar as a means to offset the cost of performance and space. The Dance Gallery Festival has evolved to include a master class program, an annual performance featuring three commissioned artists, a residency program in the Catskills and a new Brooklyn-based venue. Noble affirms that his favorite part of the festival is bringing vibrant Texas companies together. “When I first started assisting with the festival, it seemed most of the Texas contemporary dance was coming out of Houston.” From the “polish of Dallas” to the “quirky authenticity of Austin,” Noble feels the festival now offers a much broader representation of the art-making personalities of Texas’ diverse cities. Similarly, executive director of Dance Source Houston Mollie Haven Miller sees the organization’s Barnstorm Dance Festival as a platform for the conversation between what dance looks like in Houston, Austin, Dallas and beyond. Over what will be 10 years this October the Texas Dance Improvisation Festival helmed by Jordan Fuchs has created opportunities for the physical conversation of dancers as it’s crisscrossed the state. Its 14-member coordinating committee is a who’s who of contemporary dance artists from across Texas and brings a regular roster of performers and educators from across the state, as well as acclaimed improvisational artists from the international dance community. Supporting the dance community in Austin and beyond is a top priority for Austin Dance Festival founder Kathy Dunn Hamrick. “We have always committed half of the festival’s programming to local artists and the rest to artists working in Texas and elsewhere,” she explains. Other than her own work, there was little dance to be found in L. Brooke Schlecte’s Waco backyard. Therefore, her goal, when she organized 254 DANCE-FEST in collaboration with Waco Cultural Arts Fest, was to bring the Texas dance community to her. “When I first moved to Waco, I felt very isolated from the dance world. However, since the birth of 254 six years ago, I have felt like we have a real community growing in Texas.” MAP QUEST Schlecte’s efforts have helped put Waco and her company, Out On A Limb, on the Texas map, but is that important? “I think it’s important to be on as many maps as possible,” confirms Dark Circles Contemporary Dance director and choreographer Joshua Peugh. “We are entertainers and storytellers, and we can’t share those gifts if people don’t know about us.” Achieving a level of recognition within Texas is more difficult than one might imagine. In fact, Peugh acknowledges that it may be easier to get on the national map than the Texas map. “There are still people in Dallas who are shocked when they find out we are based here,” he explains. According to METdance’s artistic director Marlana Doyle, achieving state recognition is a testament to the company’s 20-plus years of stability as a trusted dance performance and educational entity. She notes that, while it is an honor to be on a Texas map, it’s also not the only way to measure impact and quality of content. “There are many artists and organizations that operate ‘under the radar’ that provide incredible contributions of art to Texas communities.” The kind of longevity and above-the-radar exposure METdance enjoys is an advantage that few contemporary companies can claim. Yet, getting beyond the border of the Texas map seems integral to the growth of organizations at every level. Photo by Sharen Bradford – The Dancing Image. ARCOS Dance in In the Ether at Dance Gallery Festival (Hunstville, TX) 2017, choreography and performance by Erica Gionfriddo with Steffani Lopez, Britney McGarity, and Emily Robison. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/759249bdc3c124e373c962750d5bd5a90a2b1f0c77e69c96320e31418ad5564e/A-CTX-10.18-P2-no-highlight.jpg ARE FESTS BEST? Peugh’s Dark Circles company, Bruce Wood Dance and METdance have been participants in the Pillow’s Inside/Out series—twice for Dark Circles, METdance for its third time, and BWD this past summer. Peugh says that following the Pillow performances his company’s donor base grew to include people in the Northeast. Still, money is hardly the primary benefit to taking work on the road. Submission fees, travel fees, shipping costs for set pieces, accommodation fees and payment for artists adds up quickly and usually amount to spending a significant portion of a company’s tight budget on the festival experience. “Most festivals in the States don’t provide a fee,” says Peugh, “so they’re good for exposure but not for finances.” He adds that in order to include more artists, festivals generally opt to curate 5-10 minute excerpts rather than complete work, making it even more difficult to justify travel expenses. Still, most artists find that dance festivals are worth it. “We have a particular audience base in Dallas,” says Danielle Georgiou of Danielle Georgiou Dance Group (DGDG), “so when we have the opportunity to travel and present our work outside of our hometown, it’s both exciting and terrifying to see how an audience of complete strangers will react to the work.” At festivals, these “fresh eyes” may be completely new to contemporary dance or at least an artist’s particular aesthetic. New audiences provide valuable feedback with which to gauge the impact or success of a performance work. “Festivals allow me the chance to engage in conversations before the show, after the show and even while dancing,” adds Georgiou. Festivals also frequently receive press and coverage by critics. For emerging companies, independent choreographers and solo artists, such media mentions are a portfolio asset and, as they have for Austin-based ARCOS Dance, can lead to future opportunities. “We went to the Edinburgh Fringe [in Scotland] to get our work in front of international audiences and critics, and returned with lots of excellent reviews and an award,” says ARCOS co-founder Erica Gionfriddo. “Our participation in that major, recognized festival undoubtedly was a significant factor in subsequent touring.” Gionfriddo mentions that festivals have also been a way to creatively sharpen work and the process of dance-making within the limitations of the time, stage or technical settings provided. ARCOS has made artistic decisions like dancer-manipulated lighting when technical support was limited and recently offset the cost of a distant appearance by working with dancers local to the festival instead of bringing dancers from Austin. Working alongside peers also seems to provide motivation and inspiration that pushes the boundaries of contemporary concert dance as well as its artists. “We love meeting the other artists who participate in festivals and seeing what they’re up to wherever they’re coming from,” says Gionfriddo. “It’s essential to have this kind of dialogue with fellow artists and audiences to advance our art form.” In fact, Gionfriddo’s observation alludes to what most artists consider the primary benefit of festival participation. WHY DO DANCERS FESTIVAL SO MUCH? “A majority of the festival participants would say they experience a tremendous validation for what they do and that they leave feeling part of a larger dance community,” explains Austin Dance Festival founder Kathy Dunn Hamrick. Hamrick’s assertion is echoed time and again among festival performers and choreographers. Dance festivals, it turns out, are a great way to connect with fellow dancers. “I have personally networked with choreographers and dancers alike, and have hired some of them to set work on METdance or come audition for the company,” says Doyle. Similarly, Peugh has hired choreographers to create on his company after seeing their work at festivals. ARCOS Dance has been invited as guest artists to other festivals or workshops, as well as to universities based upon their festival performances. They’ve also identified future collaborators and performers, meeting a future dancer at their very first Texas festival after the company’s relocation to Austin. Von Ussar finds it amusing that her friendship with Noble took root during dance festival performances and led directly to the decision to bring The Dance Gallery to Texas. Peugh describes Texas dance festivals as a great way to celebrate local accomplishments and explains that these shorter excursions can be good for company morale. Gionfriddo had no roots in Texas when she and her ARCOS Dance co-founders decided to move their company to Austin. The sense of community developed at festival performances helped her company feel at home. “Before moving here, we had not really heard of any of the Texas-based dance groups we’ve met. It was through festivals that we became far more aware of the dance ecosystem around the state that is committed to promoting artists in Texas,” says Gionfriddo. Developing and strengthening this ecosystem is really what makes Texas-based festivals special and important to the local dance community, especially to members that may fly under the radar of most dance cartographers. Hamrick says that it’s been extremely gratifying to see the work being made by Texas dance artists, many of them unknown to her before founding Austin Dance Festival. Watching from the wings has made her fall in love with dance all over again. “I saw anew how meaningful modern dance can be, how delightful, how funny, how kinetic, how intelligent, how relevant and how heart-breaking. These are my people,” she proclaims, “and I’m honored to be one of them.” It is a signal of this supportive atmosphere that an online hub has emerged to provide a comprehensive calendar for all of the state’s festival-related performance and submission dates, as well as contact information for festival organizers. “Texas Dance Festival Alliance first popped into my head when I learned of three [Texas] festivals happening in the same weekend,” says Schlecte. Schlecte’s fledgling project raises the dance community’s collective awareness of events throughout the state so that festivals need not compete for participants and support. Mollie Haven Miller, director of Dance Source Houston and Barnstorm Dance Festival, confirms that Schlecte’s Texas Dance Festival Alliance has been a positive and inclusive resource. “Everyone seems to help spread the word about the other [festivals],” she observes. MAXIMUM IMPACT The number one regret for most festival programmers everywhere is the inability, because of financial constraints, to showcase more deserving local and non-local artists. A weekend of mixed-bag, overly-long performances is sometimes the result of the desire to present as much work as possible. Festivals are learning from community feedback. Take Dallas, where Dallas DanceFest has been re-branded Dallas Dances. When Carter Alexander took the helm three years ago he looked at what needed to be changed. “As artistic director my first thought was to make the event more of a showcase for the local dance community,” says Alexander. “The wealth of dance talent in this area is truly abundant.” As a cultural tourist, Lake finds the most satisfying festival experiences offer lively social and educational opportunities beyond the performances, which provide context for the work and allow an attendee to get to know the artists as well as their fellow audience members. “A well-produced festival offers the opportunity to expand one’s audience far beyond what a single company could normally do, and to create a sense of excitement around a shared passion.” While a full week, or two, or ten might be ideal to give more exposure to deserving artists, the impact of dance festivals on the Texas dance community can’t be measured in weeks, years or even number of attendees. The true tests of any fest are the unique and meaningful opportunities it provides to connect dance artists with their audiences and with one another. —Nichelle Suzanne Nichelle Suzanne is a web and social media specialist for Rice University, the founder of DanceAdvantage.net, and has covered dance in Houston and beyond for 10 years. artsandculturetx.com, October 2018 https://arcosdance.com/Audience-As-Player-2018 2023-07-09T19:11:03+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bd969bb11d5eb03737db0b37f446d34ed74e5d3bcb71eaccf997f4922ad61748/A-C-TX-11.18-original-size.jpg https://arcosdance.com/Ether-Junk-2019 2023-08-05T22:29:05+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4d4638e91d8e22aea720e61bb4cfe157a2bdb8b772909256b40540f24e4c1c36/Chronicle---Ether-Junk.jpg The Austin Chronicle, August 30, 2019, page 34, austinchronicle.com. Calendar recommendations for the week-minded, Aug. 29 – Sept. 5 Sunday: ARCOS Dance: Ether Junk, Mexican American Cultural Center, 2pm Arcos Dance: Ether Junk In this "staged rehearsal of possible cyborg realities,” the kinetic savants of Arcos use dance to explore how emergent technologies de-center the body and offer audience-participants the chance to assert their humanity in an increasingly opaque technoworld. In-person viewers of each performance will be joined by audiences at other locations screening an interactive livestream of the piece and using their phones to shape the action remotely. Note: This is ARCOS, so it's gonna be some kind of fierce and weird and wonderful. Daily Arts Five Recommended Arts Events This Weekend Because you want to supercharge your time in this world, don’t you? BY WAYNE ALAN BRENNER, 2:55PM, THU. SEP. 5, 2019 5) Arcos Dance: Ether Junk OK, admittedly, I’m an oldschool cyberpunk wannabe and still faintly glowing from having interviewed William Gibson a few years ago. But this is an Arcos Dance event, see, and I wouldn’t care if they were filling the MACC stage with their movement-focused version of Hee-Haw, I’d still be jonesing to see it. Because that company, you know? They manifest the kind of gorgeous and compelling danceworks that should always be what’s meant by the term “cutting edge.” What a great excuse to be AFK this weekend. https://arcosdance.com/Jacks-of-many-trades-2019 2023-06-21T18:22:53+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fe3b4412a2976d9b1faf62f3454658ac870653119ddf16108151ed28808fbfb7/Gionfrido-Daily-Texan-9.20.19.jpg The Daily Texan: Faculty balance teaching, working. Teachers in Theatre and Dance, Law, Architecture share artistic, professional projects that keep them busy outside of their classrooms, by Sabrina LeBoeuf, September 20, 2019. Photo copyright Sharen Bradford. When she isn't teaching dance classes on campus, Erica Gionfriddo works on commissions for ARCOS dance, a contemporary performance company she co-founded. She's one of many faculty members on campus who have professions outside of the classroom. Erica Gionfriddo‘s work day doesn’t end when class is dismissed. After spending the day on campus fulfilling her responsibilities as a dance lecturer, she changes hats. As the executive director of ARCOS dance, Gionfriddo works on commissions for the contemporary performance company she co-founded. Like other professors with additional jobs, Gionfriddo uses her diverse skill set to show her students the reality of a career in her field. “I think my students greatly benefit from seeing me kind of grapple with big artistic questions when I’m in the middle of a big project,” Gionfriddo said. While Gionfriddo’s students learn about her perspective, she in turn learns from her students and applies those lessons to her life outside of UT in order to grow her artistry. “I always feel that I’m incubating and uncovering new artistic ideas in every single class, whether that’s a beginning level ballet class or professional modern class out in the community,” Gionfriddo said. “I think that education at any level is a way to articulate what you value and get clarity around what it is that you’re trying to express, which can only inform the artistic process.” Gionfriddo isn’t the only professor who learns from her students. At the School of Law, Carlos Treviño and Christopher Weimer, who both work for law firms outside of UT, co-teach the Legal Spanish for the Practicing Attorney class. Every year, they bring in an interpreter to teach their students what giving testimony with a Spanish-speaking client is like. This experience gives their students the opportunity to practice like they’re in a courtroom and also gives Weimer the opportunity to learn a new way to approach his work. “I think that it is invigorating to work with students who bring a lot of curiosity as well as enthusiasm to the subject,” Weimer said. “They ask questions that caused me to rethink how I do things in my own law practice.” Additionally, Weimer offers his students both his expertise as well as his point of view as a professional. “Carlos and I both work for law firms,” Weimer said. “And so we can give (students) a perspective on what types of skills are of value and important to the places where we work.” John Blood, a distinguished senior lecturer in the School of Architecture doubling as a set designer for “Fear the Walking Dead,” uses his work to teach students about what an architecture career can look like as a practicing professional. Architecture senior Brandt Hansen took Blood’s class last year and said learning from a working professor has its ups and downs. While Blood wasn’t always in class, he did bring in notable guest speakers. “Because of his connections and his experience, I was able to learn about a viewpoint that I might not normally consider,” Hansen said. Beyond exposing students to unique career paths, working professors use their relationships with students to paint candid pictures of what their worlds are like. “They get to see, kind of, a little bit of the messiness and grittiness of the creative process,” Gionfriddo said. “That kind of demystifies what this career in dance might look like to them — to have one of their professors be actively engaged in that while they’re teaching.” https://arcosdance.com/Traversing-the-Virtual-Realm-2020 2023-06-21T18:22:39+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b9fdae987f59b5a50a1225ad0fc6ba8f84c1cc1cc525af13846aa0f620a06ee/sightlines1.jpg Sightlines: Arts, Culture, News & Ideas: Traversing the virtual realm, choreographer Erica Gionfriddo imagines new possibilities, by Molly Roy, June 20, 2020. Having long probed the intersection of dance movement and technology, Gionfriddo explores new ways to move the world beyond the parameters of a dance studio. "We want the world to move differently (right now), and we want to move differently in it." Photo by Kyra Schmidt: Erica Gionfriddo, standing in In the Ether (2019). It is a Tuesday morning, countless weeks into stay at home orders, and I am pivoting around my living room floor, being challenged to look at, and really see, the space I am moving through. From my laptop, tuned into Facebook Live, Erica Gionfriddo, founder and co-director of ARCOS Dance, is gently urging me to take in my surroundings, not only with my eyes as they are carried along by my skull, but also with the back of my head, my pelvis, my limbs. I thought I had looked at my living room in every way possible by this point, but evidently, I was wrong. Gionfriddo has been leading the Tuesday morning Class and Coffee community dance series since 2015. (My schedule has never permitted me to attend in person — one of those unexpectedly positive pandemic opportunities.) Even before COVID-19, the classes had slowly been drifting away from a standard format, evolving more into facilitated movement research sessions. This shift mirrors Gionfriddo’s own personal investigation, challenging ideas and judgements about advancement and success in the dance world. “For quite some time I’ve been trying to interrogate this technique that I’ve inherited,” Gionfriddo tells me via Zoom. “(I’m) going through a long and painful process of breaking with some traditions and figuring out the trauma that is embedded in some of those systems that we all inherently know and understand as dancers, particularly trained in the Western classical tradition, and those of us who have gone through higher education dance programs.” https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6a542375a3df96e72687acdf8910e9a3f52e46f39943061f698e5d7e19738df3/sightlines2.jpg “What is my body of technique and how is it valuable outside of those traditions?” Gionfriddo asks. “When the lockdown happened, it blew up in my mind. Not only do I have these questions but we don’t have access to the things that make those traditions possible.” Moving Tuesday class online was a relatively smooth transition then, as Gionfriddo was interested in continuing to offer explorations of embodiment that could be undertaken anywhere, and were not reliant on the parameters of a dance studio. “What are we using all of this training for? How is it helping us to be better humans? How is it helping us stay connected to our identities, even in times like a pandemic?” Training a New Future For the month of June, Class and Coffee has been subsumed by a larger, extended workshop series called Re/Training, “a digital, donation-based embodiment experience,” with the expansive aim of imagining new possibilities for ourselves and our world. “I really wanted to offer a place for my peers and other dancers, to invite them into the same questions I had,” says Gionfriddo, who uses they/them pronouns. “What are the systems we’ve inherited through (dance) training and how do those systems show up in us outside of our dance training? How do they effect our beliefs and values about ourselves, and how does that effect the way we act and move in the world?” Initially, Re/Training was a way to digitally adapt the summer workshop series that has become a core component of ARCOS’s programming. It was going to be divided into two portions, Physical Practice sessions and Audi(O)smotic sessions, with the latter planned in conjunction with a now-remote residency at Laboratory Spokane. Yet on June 1, when the workshop launched, protests and social movements were rising across the country against anti-Black racism and police brutality. Gionfriddo questioned how to proceed, feeling strongly that their energy needed to shift more toward direct action. “ARCOS, as a white-led artistic organization, presenting work in this moment, and taking up space in this way, it has to be useful, and relevant, and something needed in the world,” Gionfriddo says. Paring down the programming was the strategy, placing the exploratory Audi(O)smotic sessions on hiatus, to focus the work more explicitly on addressing white supremacy and systems of oppression. Coordinating with Laboratory Spokane, with Gionfriddo arranged for the residency to be transferred to an artist of color and put forth funds to increase the stipend. The Physical Practice sessions have become a platform for practicing embodiment in relation to sustained social movement, a place to process, unlearn old patterns, and develop intentional paths of connection. The sessions are also serving as a critical forum for sharing resources and cultivating a community of accountability and informed action. “How does this physical practice get us through the current moment?” asks Gionfriddo. “How can we actually use it, aside from becoming embodied and connected to our physicality as humans, how can it also be a vessel for deeper investigation or stamina building?” That the whole workshop takes place on Zoom has made this type of responsive adjustment much more feasible. Guest artists Rulan Tangen, Sidra Bell, and Catherine Cabeen will be dropping in to lead as well. And Kai Hazelwood and Sarah Ashkin of Practice Progress will lead a discussion and movement session on anti-racism/anti-Blackness. At the end of the month, ARCOS will match all donations received and distribute the money to a racial justice organization that the community collectively agrees upon. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d7a54db7c4819d7cf6b337bed05710aba9f813a5fd2dedc74280df57a7ff89c3/sightlines3.jpg Photo by Sharen Bradford/The Dancing Image: ARCOS Dance’s “In the Ether.” In the Ether ARCOS has been traversing the virtual realm for a number of years now, across a span of residencies, performances, and interactive projects in Kentucky, Montana, New Mexico, Texas, and Virginia, referred to collectively as the Ether series. The evening-length work “Ether Junk” premiered at the Mexican American Cultural Center in the early Fall of 2019, incorporated mobile devices, ear buds, and looping livestream video footage in a compelling exploration of tech-enlivened interconnectivity. “We’ve been working in these digital mediums for a long time,” says Gionfriddo. “All of my work with the Ether series [has been] about this sort of connection and understanding of each other, and now we’re plunged into it. So, I think for me personally, it’s not as scary or as daunting as it has been for some other people to make this transition.” The root of the Ether series dates back to Summer 2016, when the Facebook live stream of the police killing of Philando Castile went viral. “That totally shook my entire view of technology, social media, and my connection, as a citizen, to other people,” recalls Gionfriddo. “There was something about the liveness of that feed, putting us into direct contact with these injustices and violence in a way that a news report could never do. The series started with this question of what is my responsibility now, as a citizen of this world, now that I have this more visceral live connection to these things. What do I do with that information? How do I help? What is my responsibility?” Since then, Gionfriddo has continued to examine structures, systems, and practices of social media and technology, considering how they impact our identity and work both to our benefit and detriment. The dancemaker remains intrigued by the relationship between social movements and social media, as well as the overarching concept of using technology to foster embodiment. While the Audi(O)smotic project has been shelved for the moment, it points toward the next phase of the Ether series. Combining “audio” and “osmosis,” this idea represents full-bodied sound absorption, and the possibility of moving from sound, rather than with sound. “I have a lot of questions and convictions around the differences between reacting and responding and reflecting to what we hear and this process of trying to shift our dancer impulses,” Gionfriddo explains. That process started with a choreographic project at Texas State University, as well as at the University of Texas, where Gionfriddo is an assistant professor of Practice in Dance. Even while the present moment has called for different plans and models of engagement, there is a clear thread across all of ARCOS’s endeavors, linking artistic inquiry, social action, and envisioning for the future. “For me, it translates or transfers to this process we’re all deeply entrenched in right now… trying to educate ourselves, and we’re listening, and how are we able to absorb that, and not just react with or against or immediately respond, but do the work of absorbing it and understanding it and embodying it, to then act or move differently in the world,” says Gionfriddo. “Because that’s what we want right now. We want the world to move differently, and we want to move differently in it.” https://arcosdance.com/Queering-Digital-Identities-2020 2024-04-17T14:48:02+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Embodying-Agency-2021 2024-04-17T14:39:56+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/In-the-Ether-2021 2023-08-07T03:45:42+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/82c751d69289d464a7a8c23f31938c02b69b596e5c74e9357f6cd0312195a0fa/Chronicle---Ether-21-1.jpg The Austin Chronicle, August 6, 2021, page 26, austinchronicle.com Arts & Culture Moving In the Ether With ARCOS Dance Company Local dance troupe explores the interzone of real and virtual, by Wayne Alan Brenner Photo by Sharen Bradford: ARCOS co-director Erica Gionfriddo (back to camera and in livestreaming video projections) performs in an iteration of the Ether series, 2017 Dance Gallery Festival. ARCOS Dance Company is preparing to flip the power switch to On and present its latest project, In the Ether, to both globally online and intimate, in-person Austin audiences at the beginning of August. You'll be able to reserve a seat at any of multiple locations across this city – at least one in each of Austin's 10 districts, is the plan – to witness talented performers engaged in "durational movement practices." (You know: What most people would, at least tentatively, call dancing.) And you'll be witnessed, yourself, via the physical sites' livestreaming cameras. Meanwhile, online audiences will navigate an interactive, browser-based multimedia experience, with access to view all locations' live­streams simultaneously, as the performers invite viewers into a virtual "third" space called the Ether. Note: This is not, by any means, a stopgap sort of maneuver. ARCOS, which started in Santa Fe and moved to Austin in 2014, isn't working this hybrid form as a reaction to the restrictions required by Our Pandemic Situation; the company has been working the liminal fields between the real and the virtual, the embodied and the abstract, since their beginning. The exploration of that crossover area – and what lies within and, potentially, beyond it – is what fuels the beating heart within the collective ARCOS body. "It seems there are extremes in every area of society right now," notes Eliot Gray Fisher, co-director of the venturesome troupe, "and there are extreme reactions to technology, too, with a lot of people rejecting technology outright. Even a lot of people in the performance community are in the rejection category. Like, 'This is what we do: We're doing stuff with bodies, and it's live, and we need to have people physically here.'" A smile shifts around sympathy within his thin beard. "But that's not just a losing battle in the face of advancing technologies," he says, "it's a battle that doesn't need to be fought." Photo by Eliot Gray Fisher: Above: Taryn Lavery watches herself in projection in the interactive Ether installation Potential Future Pasts, 2019 East Austin Studio Tour. ARCOS co-director Erica Gionfriddo expands the thought: "This past year with the pandemic, it was surreal," they say, "and certainly not the circumstances that we'd want everyone to have to experience for the first time. But it was exciting in some ways, too, because a lot of people had to let go of the binary thinking around the relevance and value of technology – because it had become our only option. So we were offering a lot of technological and emotional support to people, because we'd already been there. Not just, 'How do you use Zoom? What are the tricks and tips?' – there's thousands of those – but offering more of a framework, an understanding of how to approach the technology, to know that it's something we can be a hybrid with and can actually find pleasure in and move some things forward with. Rather than just, you know, saying, 'This is awful!' and putting our heads down and not thinking about it. Like Eliot said, it's a losing battle to try and hold it at bay." ARCOS began Ether more than five years ago, shortly after the livestreaming video feature was available on major social media platforms. As the company's program notes reveal: "On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile's murder by police officer Jeronimo Yanez livestreamed to Facebook, as Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds broadcast from her phone while her 4-year-old daughter watched from the backseat. The immediate online access to this horrific act exposed urgent ethical territory." Since then, the Ether series has scrutinized the way emerging tech like smartphones and social media shape our understanding of ourselves and our bodies, and how people relate to other bodies encountered online and offline. "Our work is based in elements of cyborg, queer, and embodiment theories," says Gionfriddo. "We focus on everyday technological devices and habits by repurposing them – 'hacking' them – for other than their intended use." Still, using some tech the way it was intended is part of what makes being an audience at (or within) an ARCOS production a remarkable experience: Besides peeking into rooms throughout local neighborhoods where the performers will be livestreaming, the browser-based show also offers viewers a chance to rummage the company's archive of previous dances (recorded in rehearsal and performance since 2016) and to curate multiple synchronized views of an ensemble sequence that was filmed at Austin's Ground Floor Theatre earlier in the summer. So, In the Ether. Is it faux? Is it real? Is ARCOS Dance Company itself, ah, faux real? Fisher and Gionfriddo and their team, though not lacking the sort of playfulness that informs much creative intelligence, suggest a more important question: "What is our responsibility to each other as our everyday technologies transform our relationships?" Now, whether you walk through a door in meatspace or more easily touch a keyboard to access virtual cams, you can press Enter and participate in some of the provocatively kinetic answers yourself. See our Arts Listings for performance times, dates, and locations. More info at: arcosdance.com https://arcosdance.com/Interview-Erica-Gionfriddo-on-In-the-Ether-2021 2025-05-01T20:33:53+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/352514f76f6d81b23b594f8db025749bf63d6a553f0c3cf3463be15021a027c2/ether-square-21.gif https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71aa8eb4696d5b6aa8a61ea9dfc5e10ca3a882eb0d303278084d8829307c8075/CTX-Ether-interview-1.jpg Interview: Erica Gionfriddo on IN THE ETHER, ARCOS Dance, August 7 - 14, 2021, by David Glen Robinson | An Interview with Erica Gionfriddo of ARCOS Dance in advance of In the Ether, streaming and live, August 7 - 14, 2021 by Dr. David Glen Robinson | Erica Gionfriddo (via ARCOS) Eliot Gray Fisher (via ARCOS). Erica Gionfriddo (they/them) and Eliot Gray Fisher (he/him) are the co-artistic directors of ARCOS Dance, probably the most avant performance company through a wide swathe of Texas. They have announced show dates of the latest iteration of their current series, In the Ether. Multi-modal doesn’t begin to describe their work. They characterize their productions as experiments. Knowing this and having gotten only a bitty taste of their experiments in the past, this writer (he/him) decided to make direct contact. The artists happily accepted my request, and Erica Gionfriddo and the writer met at Opa’s coffee bar on South Lamar. I highly recommended Opa’s for coffee, shade, relaxation, and excellent conversation. ARCOS proceeds from the acknowledgement that we human beings are embodied identities, and growth itself means that we have flexible and fluid boundaries. We can become much more as identities, egos, and witnesses to the universe as we move through life and time. We can change our bodies and embrace the machines all around us to enrich our being. Driving automobiles and carrying cell phones are simple but profound examples of the process. The work of Donna Haraway (1991) gives a positive prospect of this reality, analysis cited and highlighted in Fisher’s and Gionfriddo’s 2021 article Embodying Agency in the Human-Techno Entanglement. In short, Fisher and Gionfriddo maintain that instead of extracting ourselves from the tangle, we must push through it and become part of it in order to adapt to the baffling complexity of this world. This recalls the relatively old term cyborg, or cybernetic organism. In Haraway’s view as interpreted by ARCOS, a cyborg is an embodied identity involved with technology, a human entangled irremediably with technology. The concept is much softer than that of the cylon monsters of the scare-inducing TV series Battlestar Galactica. ARCOS’s performance series seeks to light the way through an increasingly darker world. The company was established in 2011. Gionfriddo, member of the faculty of the University of Texas in Austin, came into performance studies from music and dance, Fisher from new media and interdisciplinary studies. They defined their mission as “to experiment rigorously to discover adventurous new forms of contemporary performance” (Fisher and Gionfriddo, 2021: 347). This opened the door to what has become their trademark use of social media, cell phones, and other commercial-grade media devices in presentations that combine installations, live contemporary dance, and livestreamed performance. This advanced embrace of new forms recombines to become a series of performances that increase the fluidity and flexibility of the embodied identities participating in it. ARCOS’s 2016 work Domain was a months-long series of ever-changing performances in indoor and outdoor spaces in multiple states. Audiences witnessed, participated, or produced live streams, singly or simultaneously and at different times. Domain’s livestreaming experiments inspired the Ether series, still evolving. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8a7ba3e7828f0edfff5e3e7e6cd0f7e953474d44350888c75de919bb8e246f9/CTX-Ether-interview-2.jpg Their nudging of the envelope of performance goals is aimed ultimately at increasing humane empowerment of cyborgian humanity. The current iteration, In the Ether, moves it all forward. As Gionfriddo said, “This whole Ether project is about building our capacity to hold complexity.” Applying Harawayan philosophy through performance studies, Gionfriddo explained, “We are groomed to think there is a linear pathway through life. If we follow it, everything will be okay. We’re given a false utopia, and we are not encouraged to consider alternative realities.” Given limited encouragement, what are we up against? Fisher and Gionfriddo’s article cites three examples of the socio-cultural ills confronting us: the murder of Philando Castile while his partner took cell phone videos of it, Syrian bombings of Aleppo as its citizens posted family farewells on social media, and the video recordings of Standing Rock pipeline protesters being physically harassed with high pressure water hoses. (Photo by Sarah Annie Navarrete) These are just a few of the cyber-involved tragedies and dilemmas, examples of the use of technology in unplanned ways, each one a cry against injustice. The specific issues have moral enormity. Contemplation seems to lead to despair. How can expanded flexible embodied identity push back against such global ills? Gionfriddo says, “Stay local. Labor with the like-minded to chip away at the monuments of oppression.” That older activist philosophy applies equally to more newly empowered cyborgian individuals. A cyborg may exist as an embodied identity gaining fluidity and flexibility with technology and thereby gaining more agency in dealing with the world’s complexity. Fisher and Gionfriddo (2021: 356-357) assert that this concept describes all of us to greater or lesser degree, due to the human-techno entanglement. We’re all in this together; complexity never simplifies or unties its own knot. But more profound embodiment provides greater ability to act, to invent, and to achieve social change. This is essential, never-ending labor. Manifesting positive aspects of the entanglement seems to be the point of ARCOS’s work. In the Ether is no exception. The central effort of the work is thidhybrid presentation of livestreams radiating from multiple locations—in-person audiences join in generating a browser-based experience that reaches audiences that are more varied and more widely dispersed. Erica Gionfreido (via ARCOS) Eliot Gray Fisher (via ARCOS) Dance is the expression of corporeality at the core of transmedia arts and every performing channel that has emerged since. After that, who knows? Solos in the desert are not unprecedented. Group pieces performed thirty feet down in the Gulf or while skydiving loom as serious possibilities, because those who are In the Ether-aware and comfortable with the requisite technologies clearly possess the fluidity and agency to act in those elemental media. Where does Gionfriddo themself want to go after In the Ether? They answered immediately that they’re planning a series of self-sustaining, inclusively challenging, and modular performances for smaller communities across Texas. The performances will engage all necessary resources, with zero-waste options de rigeur. The shows will be climate-change-embedded in operation and probably in theme. But first, In the Ether. References Cited Fisher, Eliot Gray and Erica Gionfriddo 2021 Embodying Agency in the Human-Techno Entanglement. Chapter 4.5 in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy. Edited by Rebecca L. Farinas and Julie C. Van Camp. Bloomsbury Academic. London. Pp.347-357. Haraway, Donna 1991 A Cyborg Manifesto. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. New York. P. 150. See also: In the Ether with ARCOS Dance Company by Wayne Alan Brenner, Austin Chronicle, August 6, 2021 In The Ether by Erica Gionfriddo ARCOS Dance Thursday-Tuesday, August 07 - August 14, 2021 unspecified in Austin somewhere in Austin to be announced Austin, TX, 78700 (Photo by Sarah Annie Navarrete) August 7 - 14, 2021 in Austin, Texas -- in-person or streaming August 7-9 at 8 p.m., August 12-13 at 8 p.m., August 14 at 9 p.m. The ONLINE EXPERIENCE is a bespoke interactive website originally presented by the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Theatre & Dance as part of the virtual Fall 2020 season. In July 2021, ARCOS workshopped website revisions with students at the American Dance Festival who performed the online experience in the Festival’s showcase. For these August viewings, we have further updated the website and generated new content with ARCOS’ professional company, including a pre-filmed performance with over a dozen interactive camera angles in addition to live portals into the in-person locations’ simultaneous streams. The IN-PERSON EXPERIENCE is our most recent experiment in hybrid performance. But “performance” no longer describes what we’re exploring here. Should you choose to join us at one of the in-person locations, you will be entering and witnessing a complex experiment in hybrid forms; body processing, imagining multiple realities, and sensing into the non-physical as reality. This is our first gentle reach back into live gatherings. ARCOS is closely tracking the health precautions and protocols of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Travis County, and the City of Austin, and is in communication with participating dance artists regarding their personal safety needs. In-person audiences will be required to affirm they are vaccinated and will wear masks indoors for the duration of the presentation. We reserve the right to cancel any in-person events. Special Drive-In Experience on August 14, 2021 at the Museum of Human Achievement (via MOHA) Welcome to the Ether. You are there. I am here. And together we are creating a third space, between yours and mine. In the Ether, we encourage you to find ways to slow down and listen to your body. Feel any sensations that come up. Let us know how you feel. Send a message and help our host navigate this space alongside friends and strangers. Feel free to wander: we're not sure what we're looking for, or whether we'll know if we find it. But remember, we are all journeying in the Ether together. ARCOS experiments rigorously to discover adventurous new forms of performance, in part by making hybrid work that integrates newer and older technologies through bodies in movement to question dominant understandings of the world. Provoking interplay along a spectrum from human to mechanical to digital, virtual and physical, live and asynchronous, ARCOS seeks to imagine tangible new relationships that may be surprising, intimate, and immense. https://arcosdance.com/Review-In-the-Ether-2021 2025-05-01T20:34:01+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c9c43a5ecd9548b80de756ee8c6ae50d2158a111521956534da8454ca22d3c2d/CTX-Live-Theatre---Ether-review.jpg CTX Live Theatre Review: In The Ether by ARCOS Dance by David Glen Robinson The central motif of the livestreaming performance of In The Ether was two concentric black and white circles, unadorned but otherwise reminiscent of 1950s TV registrations. They pulsed, grew, shrank, hypnotized, and otherwise drew us into a sequence of dance and performance imagery arranged and manipulated on a series of webpages. The circles came back between segments, leading us through cyberspace. They were our robot guides, more so than the dreamy young human face that questioned us on our feelings through the hourlong journey we took. The journey flew us through a colorful landscape. The first view was of 24 active windows showing one- and two-second loops of ARCOS group performances with exposed artifice video recording, reflexive and delayed. This was followed even more interactively by a performance with windows manipulated on the screen, moved, realigned, and resized. Just then, as one’s creativity was juiced up to rearrange the screens to our greater liking, a time-storm sped up the action to jerky blurs that finally settled on another planet of performance, one with dancers in different costume concepts, sets, and variant choreography. The constant between the two universes was mutual video recording by any performer with a video cam or cell phone, some of which live-streamed to projection on large screens framing the performance space. The feeling, since they asked, was of an unlimited expansion of the self, unrestrained by large screens or cute selfie videos. Much more. Nam Jun Paik’s “Electric Buddha” has nothing on ARCOS. The reflexive quality of ARCOS’s video image surge reaches deeper than mere democratized cyber technology. It is insistence that we are all in this together. Moving with the dancers, making our own videos of their performances, rearranging the interactive windows in the livestream, all these are baby-step self-actualizing manipulations of the human-techno entanglement. The more complex manipulations as engineered by the ARCOS web team of co-artistic director Eliot Gray Fisher, media designer Ben Randall, and web developers Georgina Garza and Leon Cai, are meant as inspirations and guideposts on where we can go with our empowerment as flexible embodied identities. In the first installment of this contemplation of ARCOS Dance and In the Ether, the preview interview with co-artistic director Erica Gionfriddo, I said dance was the central act of corporeality in In the Ether, and this was certainly true. But over the course of the sequence of performances, it became clear that the live performances were seeds that were encouraged to grow in many directions through the ether and cyberspace. Further, these growing seeds of being were unquestionably transformative, becoming the wholly other when frames were bent to breaking and the life force spilled out. Given this reviewer’s historical passion for live performance, such were sought out first, on Saturday, August 7th. Two dancers played to the cameras with skill and acknowledgement of the audience, characterized correctly as witnesses to multiple births of agency, fluidity, and expanded boundaries. The ARCOS dancers’ abilities to dance for a solid hour gave a lasting impression as did their creativity in becoming new characters in their use of costume pieces. I was especially fascinated with the chameleonic power of a fuchsia hat and one dancer’s manipulations of it. Snakes shed their skins to grow, and when these stage creatures grew, their surface patterns changed, too, to symbolize their progress in new directions. Not just larger, but different. The live performance convinced me that the human-techno entanglement serves the great need for agency in all human beings, and that it need not be a source of disempowering frustration, as it is for many. This isn’t to say that old baggage may not drag along into this brave new world. When the witnesses were invited to participate, I did. And then the old thought sequences played, about not being good enough, that I didn’t get it and should sit down; and that the witness who left and didn’t come back (half of an audience of two) didn’t like me, was embarrassed, or that she was intimidated at perhaps being pressured subtly to perform herself. These were the knots in my human-techno entanglement. But then the realization struck that I had grown through the fourth wall of the stage and had become a hybrid witness/performer, and this was my fluidity and creative boundary expansion. These thought and behavior intrusions resemble what the producers call “wildlife,” our organically based everyday experiences, mental traps, and insecurities. They come inevitably into the human/techno entanglement, add to its complexity, and when recognized (meditation practices address these issues very well) are well used as resources to support agency and becoming more of an embodied identity. In my case, I had found agency in the human-techno entanglement by also taking three cell phone videos; customarily, home videos of live performances are banned by show producers who prefer to control and restrict imagery and other captures of the material. Therefore, I don’t usually shoot. But by my acts I had widened the distribution and flow of ARCOS through our complex realities; I had contributed to the success of the live performance in ways ARCOS anticipated but did not design in specifically. Liberation set in. I looked forward to the live-streaming performance, scheduled for me on August 12, 2021. The production was high-tech stuff, but I was uncharacteristically fearless in navigating my end of it. The facility amounts to a bespoke livestreaming app, mounted on several pages of the ARCOS Dance website. Much of the design is highly credited to the wizardry of the ARCOS web team. The graphics were spectacular, and the semiotics, the directions by sign and symbol through the livestream, were consistent and intelligently forgiving. I only got lost once but got back on (swiped too hard in one direction). ARCOS moves actively toward an ever more complex hybrid world navigable by diverse groups that may themselves move toward equity and harmony. They outline lofty ideals and offer signposts and guideposts for the gender fluid and the marginalized along any dimension. ARCOS may well form a new acronym for hope. About the Reviewer David Glen Robinson, “Dr. Dave,” has lived off and on in Austin for just more than 40 years, pursuing graduate work and a professional career. Also, he has worn variously … Read more » About ARCOS Dance ARCOS Dance is a multimedia performance company based in Austin that experiments rigorously to discover adventurous new forms of contemporary performance. Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo co-choreograph in a process … This company has: 4 productions 1 review Read more » https://arcosdance.com/Distance-no-object-2022 2025-05-01T06:26:09+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bf728f4e664d904267daf012274f2c3e613871f1aae06ceca68a3338369a8d42/guild-of-media-arts.jpg James Ashfar Dodson, Feb 16, 2022, 2 min read Distance no object – PLAY! and the team that made told-hold Even those of us not into sport know what it feels like to be part of a really good team. That feeling of wellbeing is not just about achievement. It is also about the qualities of trusting and being trusted, meaningful autonomy, and the sense of common purpose we get from team interactions. The UNESCO Media Arts Cities project, City to City, which began in 2020, is about creative collaboration in our distanced times. Already it is leading to other, wider, interactions between York and our 21 sister cities around the world. One of the five works launched on 9 February this year, told-hold, was made by the dancers and choreographers ARCOS, from Austin, the composer Meiyan Chen from Karlsruhe, and media artist Taeheon Lee from Gwangju, Korea, whose virtual residence in York was hosted by the Guild of Media Arts and Jorvik. City to City: PLAY! asked artists for their responses to the prospect of being able, once again, to pick up relationships, make new friendships and rediscover our communities. Four online workshops helped teams to grow and gel around creative ideas, before they began an intensive and self-managed production process. This was also ‘located’ online and across every time zone, posing additional questions about how we become confident in one another’s company, and ready to share common goals. https://arcosdance.com/about-told-hold The artists, drawing on their personal experience, describe how becoming acquainted, and overcoming fears and biases, can be a matter of playfulness. ‘In this social game, we ask: is it possible to truly care for someone we’ve never met? And can we, in turn, trust a stranger to hold our own story?’ The told-hold creators offer visitors choices of image and sound to accompany their ‘danced’ response to another visitor’s story. The user’s hand conveys emotion directly, creating and recording movement between the story on a screen and the user’s smartphone. A library of encounters is being created as visitors hold the stories told by others. We might even say there are lessons here for our increasingly fractured society. While we commonly refer to ‘cultural differences’ as barriers to effective communication, and regard digital space as inherently dangerous, the team that made told-hold show how open-minded engagement can enable positive cultural connection across time and space. told-hold is here: https://mediaartscities.com/city-to-city-2021/told-hold/ Chris Bailey Clerk, Guild of Media Arts Focal Point, York UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts https://arcosdance.com/El-arte-y-la-tecnologia-2023 2025-06-25T23:35:19+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7e0d4fcb97789dded79cdbd77b8575699e74870fe19424eae9c7d47f221df618/pais1.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/709f697aa7bce53c3f262579add4ea29450e0219e4294100f815308f34e4f165/pais2.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5da6aa25eef8b6cfc4a147f7018b16cbb9f930b58975ea1a49a03b5be3e87c01/pais3.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a52f7c6c78313ba9221359f574a6c335cd16abe933c6a9fa186fca9dcb009a28/pais4.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e24b1c8453c1aa6075c9220ee9aac44b3cc2d855a49614949d927729c69e7fcc/elpais_told-hold.jpg https://arcosdance.com/Arts-Eclectic-Narratives-of-the-Migrant-Body-2023 2024-07-28T21:47:02+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/press 2026-03-06T22:12:09+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Whaling 2023-08-19T20:42:14+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/An-Earlier-Function 2023-08-19T20:47:09+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/In-the-Ether-MSU 2023-08-06T16:11:19+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a477c7b2f5a59ce0f3b9d760442726be5747081cb85bb8ef627cda784ecd251e/msu-ether-2017---2.jpeg Photo by Corie Nichole Caudill https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d5b6cd23b692244c878a000bf3b432e11a378e0fb5716d0342f7b97346c421f2/msu-ether-2017.jpeg Photo by Corie Nichole Caudill https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f3241addd117b5ad6b3159f88df49fb51b8b0bbf1a62df2bf282c25109410bda/msu-ether--5.jpeg Photo by Corie Nichole Caudill https://arcosdance.com/In-the-Ether-Dance-Gallery 2023-08-19T20:47:44+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/17089bf5ac1b987a55a47f3f0ef64930234d297f63061362b25a0f7d6f0c4052/Erica-Gionfriddo-full-body-action-shot---Photo-by-Sharen-Bradford---The-Dancing-Image.jpg Photo by Sharen Bradford - The Dancing Image https://arcosdance.com/In-the-Ether-DRT 2023-08-19T20:50:10+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f1410baf71c9e641a06dfbf490a5f78f6524d5e3f569f16c9cde4d02fc6054ed/photo-credFall-For-Dance-Archival-28.jpg Photo by Lawrence Peart, Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d5c30315474f1cce025ddf421d30743faaba24fc490f7f731f078b434729e172/Fall-For-Dance-Archival-30.jpg Photo by Lawrence Peart, Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b6c585cdd534b72449555fdd04083e6aaf7079a7b6e2fdd52f3984cce2172b9e/Fall-For-Dance-Archival-01.jpg Photo by Lawrence Peart, Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f50deaa1b41ec4a459d4c9f2c2b6b222659ae0cedcf0553beb1aea0fdf839c7f/Fall-For-Dance-Archival-03.jpg Photo by Lawrence Peart, Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5726b17ebed05cf199c989fdcca77de5a1295ef3937fd494b55ecafea009f9cd/Fall-For-Dance-Archival-17.jpg Photo by Lawrence Peart, Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8b00cab80281ab4a5dd384ea7cb91ed9e3355c710ffcc7dda31566427d96d841/Fall-For-Dance-Archival-20.jpg Photo by Lawrence Peart, Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a3da3dca0dcf07c908866429407f306c6872e978ccd5f9e92ca77381e6cdf055/ether-DRT-17-pupo.jpg Dancers perform In the Ether. 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2024-10-30T03:48:40+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/In-the-Ether-EDW 2023-08-07T01:10:42+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/015d7cb06d6e18c25a285450381b7696682724573fde5a0f81a206e8b93f5ee4/DSC_2986-2.jpg Performing in the “Infinity Loop.” Photo by Kyra Schmidt. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f8f91e95dc58606f78672a83e1a2114e07a9f959e1bb3206f9cbfc83a0a2e6ef/DSC_4422.jpg Visitors interacting with “Infinity Loop.” Photo by Kyra Schmidt. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7c3c5d9f52d9cae6dc7e0e52cabbb85446c2490b2bdb1ce3833a32b34d7e5807/Erica00002.jpg Performing in the “Infinity Loop.” Photo by Orfeas Skutelis. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/87c616344b8e8308728b8fb552172cff54d939fb123362f336239888954cffcc/Taylor-S.png Image of visitor taking selfie https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/941f416e008cfbd9b0cc28056aaf0147f73b0f073b187201ece68a1108074344/10.png Image of visitor taking selfie 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interacting with “Pods.” Photo by Kyra Schmidt. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/86d4dac7c5d9ff76b41ff3d1c49db8898e7bda681ae4ce3663e343741dcb09c1/ether-schmidt1.jpg Visitor interacting with “Pods.” Photo by Kyra Schmidt. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e4e4cd435b340bf6bc579ea6d2440d2579368918d6a6da9f3c8e8775f15813db/ether-exhibit.jpg “Infinity Loop” and “Pods.” Photo by Erica “EG” Gionfriddo. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/53318fbc1a07e28c5d13282c8ce055679895844bbdb280c2c4072693ce3816c5/DSC_2969.jpg “Infinity Loop” performance. Photo by Kyra Schmidt. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ae37b01c0590bfac93122e8035592bf765f3e1aadfd3de66decb043825f7d223/ether-schmidt3.jpg “Infinity Loop” performance. Photo by Kyra Schmidt. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2ec47e88e3ab8c12f7d19212eae7b8cc273e4fb54b2817afd852123039ba6d77/ether-schmidt4.jpg “Infinity Loop” performance. Photo by Kyra Schmidt. https://arcosdance.com/Infinity-Loop-EAST 2023-08-07T01:12:03+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2335ed00711fe3b16646f69bfe3cfa9235427084c83172a09dd6160f1ce32cd4/east-2.jpeg Young visitors play in the “Infinity Loop” at EAST. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/183db47c0278690d80ecb51087fa6fe32e8084701a504eca6cfb0022f9f5120f/east-1.jpeg Dancers activate the “Infinity Loop” at EAST. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3241640a850aed05babb9d3c41b5544ce6360973d965d331825ad336e7081922/East-4.jpg Dancer Taryn Lavery takes in the “Infinity Loop.” https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c06d1622fed4f61dbb7097a01a2e20434aabe06399b52274cd5c8acd4d224ab3/East-3.jpg Adult visitors interact with the “Infinity Loop.” https://arcosdance.com/Ether-Dust 2023-09-25T20:44:09+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c4fd57b83f4759a77b147ab6820781ff0dac1a672e51eeeb7f2b28e922bf97ff/Ether-dust-marfa-4-Derek-Hansen.jpeg Close-up behind the performers, Marfa https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81dfc1f110d04d7963aeb33e9465e9166faac643a8755f2f159a2c7c8ed1c25e/ether-dust-marfa-2Derek-Hansen.jpeg Camera operator and performers, Marfa https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e0c6a93d0f3c17c751ad625fedbf1daa9fc402aba369374837e67eb0e05477b6/ether-dust-marfa-Derek-Hansen.jpeg Looking down on Ether Dust, Marfa https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9bfee76c55ddaa478a949e3f4f30f24bb7ea48bd8b0bf08f79dda026ba01907f/Audience-participant-ether-dust---Derek-Hansen.jpeg Audience-participant performs with dancers of Ether Dust, Marfa https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/34313d5f3bacf0d6137d1500cb6005b5ec9e8728732dbe0781edaa10816ed350/ARCOS-marfa-poster.jpg Ether Dust at Marfa Open poster (English) https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b2fb9039e700cdc721b7df339fc37a57f11f9429415beae0ee540f96f35952f/ether-dust1.jpg Past-present-future in Ether Dust, Alpine https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/978c44c4d504a0a9235cf2aa41dc17b7bc6a3a56351ea04720fef619b0593f09/ether-dust2.jpg Casting shadows in Ether Dust, Alpine https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/82111a9f2197923aef758ae3b20b96e254d111c23c2fd95295902079e181d667/ether-dust3.jpg Performers in Ether Dust, Alpine https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dec6dc222e51e9d9b2bfed47b9b3dde558747af40ccedc4abdb2a570be194e1a/ARCOS-marfa-poster-es.jpg Ether Dust at Marfa Open poster (Spanish) https://arcosdance.com/ether-performance-installation 2023-08-18T17:47:49+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Spheres 2023-08-06T15:54:46+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/43774901ce5b1589182cf5fdd7c3c0c991b6939d9294e74842ba8e44fa85cc91/Kathryn_Boyd-Batstone-spheres3.jpeg Spheres performers around audience, photo by Kathryn Boyd https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b5f3a35bb8249492b7803109b2b6a23bfb3a366e8ec3ee66b7bc8883363b874c/Kathryn_Boyd-Batstone-spheres2.jpeg Spheres audience at Luminaria, photo by Kathryn Boyd https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dfcd8b75c2e1f82506db78f545ebcbffda8bd78391617c7c0cca6ff742d64c2e/Kathryn_Boyd-Batstone-spheres4.jpeg Spheres performers, photo by Kathryn Boyd https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9eb485e023f2af78295b3834215c6aaec4db195d30d90f2a438792a62c604ae8/Kathryn_Boyd-Batstone-spheres1.jpeg Spheres performers and audience, photo by Kathryn Boyd https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ecf3e0bf28214f6c89d737dd994e160705a2fed106c177637007d46f1d26815d/spheres-little-planet-final.gif Promotional GIF for Spheres https://arcosdance.com/twelve-twelve-thirty 2023-08-06T15:49:20+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Eventual-Vestige 2023-08-06T15:52:00+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/Remote 2023-08-04T22:25:46+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a8361ddee439fda26ec5ac6f31d7c625396e7d581adf64df8b14bb96722ae1da/remote.gif https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c22a32b285658753b8d198c4407769dd1ffc92bd84bb75b4e5b2fe4a56884865/arcos-remote-documentation.jpeg An audience member watches the livestream feed of dancers in Remote https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10864bda331361e14661a4f3e80652ae73ba38c57ee50fbb746be37984c2f4ff/remote.jpeg Digital poster for Remote https://arcosdance.com/DOMAIN 2023-08-04T22:43:58+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/14f710fae22104db7b9b046df6b38d637302ac41439d0d98fd85d28b8f013921/B-and-the-Stranger----Chian-Ann-Lu.jpg B recognizes the stranger in DOMAIN. Photo by Chian-Ann Lu https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d554671e8bc680a18c5f9cbcc3234fad0c56164f8631fcaec969ddf3cb3b0d99/Jonah-and-the-Stranger-2----Chian-Ann-Lu.jpg Jonah watches the stranger in DOMAIN. Photo by Chian-Ann Lu. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70e59a1f15cc57618640dc42bdf3dd915dd069fd5449bc117d4a8f5d6adb45c8/Refraction-2----Chian-Ann-Lu.jpg Distortion through a screen in DOMAIN. Photo by Chian-Ann Lu. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7ff0e7f365dcc271e5c171d0e2236266dabc3e2fc540bcd4c82c5e1a5de879b5/Surgery-2----Chian-Ann-Lu.jpg Remote surgery in DOMAIN. Photo by Chian-Ann Lu. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c27665645d4d17649c6fd66a3d6b73e5df34a6e5bd62f62fd4602b07972e49c6/Surveillance----Chian-Ann-Lu.jpg The reality of surveillance in DOMAIN. Photo by Chian-Ann Lu https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ba0d9a9b2a940b4d4c41638ae5a56325384f95069e03169e5a9df179fd96353/domain-tour.jpg ANNI concept image https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fcb92096f65cbd0194211935d89bdb306ec9ee0df1693af1396122786899fa8a/anni-OAP1.jpg ANNI installation at Open All Ports https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10de1e1f61c4c1e5446a6ebc125fdeab581e28efa68a67ceb936e4b668a2a478/anni-OAP2.jpg ANNI performance at Open All Ports https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/63c41c2addbbe8c36659e41b35e7af7222dde29f9cfa80eb06bf8cba0bffe37a/domain-computer-test.jpg Technical test at Hoaxers rehearsal https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a0e97b716ea2bc82e4bfe39b527177778f3f9f4479c7215d92c5244cfd39753d/hoaxers-performa.jpg Hoaxers performance still https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/766ad5fb4df837772124b2fd16a622ec3ab977beec9fadd2e37c663752b0ce48/anni-moha2.jpg ANNI performance outside MoHA https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/752673ebf174cb55fe3657caf9097dbd4fddc588cc8f0f652dda95c6694ec218/anni-moha3.jpg Entrance to ANNI installation at MoHA https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/020077f745cac79cee928eea696927bd4d87174f0cfc6bb8e08d4b7a623c9fda/anni-moha1.jpg ANNI installation at MoHA https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7c40e0d01e7b978148f9ede526c992ac5bb4142278cb060d84b46e65c0c492e8/anni-KC.jpg ANNI installation at All Is Fair https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/91e2fbff9471ce4675b627b045ba3b7b31377bb18b09d45511be77dab29840a1/anni-morton-james.jpg ANNI installation cutaway view https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/90d986e1cb83e4c4be63208ef2633ef5046f037333614536fa308d87871fb53a/whaling-big-rig.jpg “Whaling” at Big Rig Dance Festival https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/523f1c9e20cc437fbdcd390008c8fa92a90e1dd85b7c7fad956f1ae9017e435c/anni-2905-3.jpg Conversations with ANNI at In the Ever Now https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e51440493f11f18fb6c1afae398cf00ad5f84e7e16e6aa4b83748b17534b07f7/anni-2905-2.jpg “An Earlier Function” at In the Ever Now https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b4d44c71d5aa38ac985b5ea7af41c3c3d79dce075185b6759963a72064815d43/anni-2905-1.jpg ANNI installation at In the Ever Now https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/78b7c09d1ddf286a00b1bcc88ad5174445e582c34a2d3dba5c97396b58f982cd/anni-concept.jpg ANNI concept image https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/121931048cd16e6a80e329497e824b8e98d320794a84c232d963ba6574a03171/5-ANNI-goodbye.gif https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c31a2244404bb38b1f2b214094a882ac2d2a624569440398aa2eacf058e2b7b2/4-house.gif https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/91b128b7a4d60e7ed9a7e679376267bb37e9b63436203a944e297377a9a55f86/2-bloom.gif https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cc2da5697d8de5490517fcdc47268bbbf292505d583eed88fb96975731d6e5c0/3-heuristics.gif https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/18be59eeeac234d0c4ea8fbf988b00c48d56868fc3e526c7b1b256f547cb45cf/1-travel.gif https://arcosdance.com/The-Warriors-A-Love-Story 2024-07-28T19:32:14+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1cc73078274ffcd18d83125672cc075fc1e6f05d60f6400422937403804c7958/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-1---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Eliot's mom tells him Ursula has died in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a0e7515c2f879e9f3b4eacf83d695e477eb09581108e7339d787b374f6bb05fa/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-3---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Ursula adjusts to a new life in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10f75f6cca0d5913ae8cdf3988fa483da334d0b54ad9b5cfc189997d40f2211b/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-4---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Eliot confronts Glenn's image of the enemy in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d006d5c387da06dfa81554851383b853d4c476d53ec0cf6e1c18a7eaff72c5a3/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-5---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Ursula remembers the bombing in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5fd28b59db3785892654325a25a808137f18802ef3ed0a4c18ffdf92eb45c5ea/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-6---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Glenn and the orange in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/849920918d984d2919790345d9666bb068e4b40678abc6a7627634d7c8b78ecd/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-7---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Eliot approaches the wall of memories in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/acafc3f7f4f185a35f27265d5858dea0ed89057607c015ae13c3d3e6ad308c65/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-8---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Glenn gives Ursula an orange in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d023d7740ecf3366fb67b54c787f13ec56722dea5a525c3244293d1666a61236/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-2---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg Glenn receives his draft letter in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0abfc92ed7e09bcbe2bd574b1c768dcd08fda164c325d1c385dca24b97536eb7/ARCOS---The-Warriors-A-Love-Story-9---Photo-Lynn-Lane.jpg The bombing of Dresden in The Warriors. Photo by Lynn Lane. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d077d98a19134552bccb0d3855299978bae6a687abec6ef86e52724a11660f5/warriors-16x20-poster-2023-no-date-or-location.jpg The Warriors: A Love Story poster https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8d47169481de95bc6b0b7b34acffd984c0832fd4912ac4c16c0bcd14d05f414f/the-warriors-j-glenn-gray-en.jpg The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle by J. Glenn Gray https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/21e3fc62536886deaa4039019ab1a1132dfc0c41070a5f177cfd50bc2e1a4832/the-warriors---french-hardcover-cover.jpg The Warriors (French edition) https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dfc74fbf2f8103fb59af9393113fd3b3dec6946a6decab3be13186ada492f50c/the-warriors---spanish-edition-cover.jpg The Warriors (Spanish edition) https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1733f3dd53a6e9de3aec72fbeabbcd93d3f76cacc1fa53a79325daa04cf21265/the-warriors---japanese-cover.jpg The Warriors (Japanese edition) https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/974acf0b1a5d29e24218dc75ac4157bdf27386fc48a8069c631b633f8b6afec0/the-warriors---italian-edition-cover.jpg The Warriors (Italian edition) https://arcosdance.com/The-Tower-Is-Us 2023-08-04T21:18:16+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/465a90c6ae06b2a2148289ef1ba04287c12211bf48ce5cbf0f60aa4ed9a519b8/5.11-ARCOS-1-40.jpg A being. Photo by Swng Productions. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/239266164799c1fc786202369dcb59bd3eb2092b164a0daf21e621ad5dd8ba4d/5.11-ARCOS-1-59.jpg An audience member solves the mystery to end the performance. Photo by Swng Productions. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10eee7aabc0b71bc8d1f59809ce3fcf0fbf20f268bbffb8382f6a4a96a60bc69/5.11-ARCOS-1-31.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5e3283dec8538cea9a1b8b125364290ccc1eb34693af77f02cd75938e6a3a855/5.11-ARCOS-1-57.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/211ee4d44dfa42fe00a68d424237e61c3216e49b21cbf0bffad107b72349610a/5.10-ARCOS-1-13.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4325002fa2a747e8a1ae1466cb4b1d9874224775a411b60d45dfe2405993814b/5.10-ARCOS-1-14.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ee30d8aa8ffdfd14de6163e1de940cda3c32a1d90f382be5401f7873bd3b19f1/5.11-ARCOS-1-47.jpg Photo by Swng Productions. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c695cd35bb059180a2c9d795343fde50c043ed393c2a0d6ae410917729ccff51/5.11-ARCOS-1-35.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/957757fe0e56d83c2427ab1bc485c9e84cfb71206e52d1c6a4bb4a82f281ff54/5.10-ARCOS-1-11.jpg Enigmatic figures congregate around the glowing tower. Photo by Swng Productions. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/02becd94893a9ed6acb1d8e608e82fefce0e9e892c5df5f8871ebb22d0a53379/tower-player1.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9270fe69f923aae6ee3f842d74ef35bdb88e25d3f5453b11671ee3fb7b5b725/tower-player2.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0952191a3c197db49d28325f174b8385134a93734ee8c09212265c48d9625a3f/tower-player3.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/79011d15c8397244ba32009dce5e15ebd93a5af8e62ddcbb8122e4f187df3c21/tower-player4.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/217d3a277a89cac412044b3f60b4c443ca316c55b88fe28ef4dcee5b9efc9045/tower-player5.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7a3a2edf6b48a25e76e9618cc234d71aa7058bcac702f260ebc745c4b656ad86/tower-player6.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b530f2b0050a04cdb60bfb178a46d107baff7ce376f6ade8a85ed540ecd92c9e/tower-player7.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ce4c2ea069d1025fc3475b7c8301d2baf6507d3165060b4ef8ba6aae3d645eaf/tower-player8.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/285be8731df3b92c3d3a4053670b743974b369dec815754e71b1c2c4c344282a/tower-player9.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d6cffd523d93e75a1ebacca48d0d5ca1e16e1485da7b90b34a1510afd47c0e60/tower-player10.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f6c806ba1c69d68dce4628218ddc2941fec029240892c44820d834ba5bd4abb2/tower-player11.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fe89ed6a33d2dd2094ded1d369b01af75a4720286942218091dd44ca3c5eedda/tower-player12.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/accc5533bf671b76e7e0ce78d831a6582a4d9af2e9980fbb1beb1067d6bdee96/tower-player13.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7888aed96237998fccf80bd94e84242d1a8da164832ce428bf929f61f2af0bee/tower-player14.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/992fe12416be0d114766d1b794cb9e833a4de5e48349d922b8b576790785b6d6/tower-player15.jpg https://arcosdance.com/i-we 2024-10-26T16:27:32+00:00 always 0.5 https://arcosdance.com/told-hold 2025-04-29T01:54:46+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5315c0f9c648ec5ebcc1f6f44791450e30b20f09615c7caac00e2e55cf2fb883/told-hold-wide.jpg The told-hold installation in Beyond City to City: A UNESCO Media Arts Exhibition. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ab0af61f0e5c7e6de9284f12d053754c5fd31787fa1c11dd05fe174bafca5e3/told-hold-med-cu.jpg Visitors read a story previously left by someone else, then record a video of their hand holding the story and write their own story, which in turn becomes part of the piece for those who come next. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/66d6009cf4caf0e32da71c582f7d1d4c85fb2d2012747a2a8908196c5a65fb10/told-hold---performance-med.jpg Oddalys Salcido performing in told-hold at the opening event of Beyond City to City on April 7, 2023. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e2d60bde24900c4cca073dfb81bbc1b6c1e2ba00d4070c5b9d1974abeb33fc04/told-hold-cali-3.jpg Told-hold exhibition at Centro Cultural Colombo Americano de Cali. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/906ceecc05b44a0c2be60bb6c466ade8f22689a94c0ab7bb384506d4cf859514/told-hold-cali-4.jpg Visitor scans code for told-hold at Centro Cultural Colombo Americano de Cali. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a47d62d4218566df6aad6fd6a9c6990aee64959056d2107ca08a480464842f25/told-hold-cali-5.jpg Participant records hand at Centro Cultural Colombo Americano de Cali. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1c2ca23567a70343c92c14ece00063b1be6d013546bc94b7092187708a939295/told-hold-cali-8.jpg Curatorial team for told-hold at Centro Cultural Colombo Americano de Cali. https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/719cdc37089cd2dde6794a6f66e20913484a3ef1fca9323f6625c6cf8102a7e7/told-hold-cali-0.jpg Wall text for told-hold at Centro Cultural Colombo Americano de Cali. 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