Choreography by Carol Murota,
Music by Edmund Campion with Ali Momeni
2002, UC Berkeley Playhouse, Berkeley, California
Supported by the UC Berkeley Consortium for the Arts
I collaborated with composition professor Edmund Campion and dance professor Carol Murota in the production of a dance performance called Persistent Vision. Performed at UC Berkeley's Playhouse in spring 2002, the musical accompaniment for the piece was entirely based on real-time translation of the dancers' motions around the stage into sound.
In Persistent Vision, the stage was separated in two by a semi-transparent scrim. A group of 12 dancers behind the scrim acted as instrumentalists by providing their voices, steps and other sounds they made on their body for realtime sound processing. Edmund and I invented a sonic language as well as classes of sonic trajectories. These allowed us to compose short and long phrases with the live processing of the dancers' sounds. We then spent much of the semester training the dancers to move in this system. In the mean time, I created a live processing environment in Max/MSP that could dynamically route any amount of any input sound source to any possible processing unit, and allow one to take snapshots of the settings of the entire system.
Check out some excerpts here:
