Visual Media and Design in Dance

The students of the Visual Media and Design in Dance class presented the culmination of their work this semester through various combinations of visual presentation and dance. The dance  student body, including myself, had the opportunity to view these presentations in a performance setting.

One of the students used a basic video recorder to film our fall dance concert, Works-A-Foot, that opened the previous week in Memorial Auditorium. She then used Final Cut Pro, a video editing program, to create a promotional video for the concert of about three minutes in length. She spliced and combined various clips together, overlaying a single music track to create a cohesive promo vid for our concert.

Two students worked together to create a unique duet of sorts in which the female dancer performed and interacted with a video projection of the male dancer. The dancers set up a small white dry erase board for the projection to be casted upon. The dry erase board also hid the male dancer, who stood behind the projection of himself only to be revealed at the very last second of the duet. This was my favorite moment of the duet, as the male projection ran off of the dry erase board, the male dancer ran out from behind the board almost as if the projection jumped off of the board turning into a three dimensional human being.

The final presentation project used projection and bluetooth technologies to show what audience members sometimes do at dance performances. I female dancer began performed a solo in the space. Midway through the performance a projector turned on which revealed time-lapsed images of us, the audience members, and our reactions to the dancer’s movement phrases. The creator of the presentation stood in the back of the auditorium on his cell phone. With bluetooth technologies, the creator projected the screen of his phone onto the back of the auditorium. He browsed through various forms of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, texted friends, and scrolled through his various calendar events. This entire project was a clever way to express the lack of interest in the arts and I quite enjoyed this humorous allegorical display.

This class clearly broadened the horizons for all of these dance students, showing them the many different ways to incorporate technology into their art form in order to further convey their intent. Technology and dance have a symbiotic relationship as one increases the validity of the other and boosters the lasting effects of both.