Rhizome A Multi Media Dance Performance
December 8 - 9 2010, Urbana, IL.  Created and Performed by Hallie Aldrich
Developed through an inter-disciplinary dialogue between myself and Michael Peters, professor of Education Policy at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

PROJECT CAST

Costume                                    Hallie Aldrich

Choreography                            Hallie Aldrich

Electronics Design                    Hallie Aldrich

Electronics Supervisor               Ken Beck

Graphic Design (front)                Liza Donovan

Isadora Programming                 Hallie Aldrich

Research Supervisor                  Kate Kuper

Sculpture and Installation            Hallie Aldrich

Sound Arrangement                    Hallie Aldrich

Sounds Source                            Freesound Project

Video

            Performance                    Hallie Aldrich

            Videography                     Daniel Bruttig, Chantelle Hougland

            Costume                           Andrea Bourk

PROGRAM NOTES

This project is a work in progress with interactive programming between sound, set, video, and dancer.  It is a site-generated piece that deconstructs the spaces of dance using ideas of intimacy and anonymity within public and private realms.

My aim at the outset of this course was to make interactivity happen in a multi-media project.  Atypically, I decided to take on the duties of programming and set-building myself.  This process generated a sound-set-dance-scape.  At the outset, I had the idea of making a moving sculpture.  Miraculously, after many hours of construction, problem-solving, and one minor electronic melt down, this idea became a reality.

My process-driven methods of inquiry allowed me to study the sculpture’s relationship to the space and the dance.  Originally, I saw Rhizome fitting into a very open space—the sculpture, video, and dance placed far apart, thus allowing public autonomy and anonymity to become the focus.  When I decided to use my small and intimate apartment studio, I adjusted focus to aim at private machinations of autonomy and anonymity.  This adaptation became a discovery—I found that the work can live in both situations (a small stage or a large gallery) and retain its relationship to public and private worlds.

The creative process generated the thought,  "I'm afraid of my mind, I'm afraid it will separate me from belonging."  In Rhizome, this thought becomes a physical relationship to space:  it extends through miles of ground; it starts in one place, travels invisibly, and recurs or reverberates in another place; it inhabits the space within me and lives in my actions; it starts in a small body, but affects large spaces, multiple objects.  I’m still investigating the physicality, the body’s relationships to this idea.

This piece is part of a cross-disciplinary, literary dialogue/article, a collaboration on the philosophy of dance generated by Michael Peters, professor in Educational Policy Studies and myself.  Initially, We simply allied under the idea of rhizomatic dance, and went about our inquiries separately.  In his initial draft, Peters writes, “The rhizomic approach to culture and history is to resist its narrativizing tendencies and to present them as a map, assemblages with no specific origin or genesis…. Deleuze and Guattari calls the rhizome ‘an image of thought’ which can be used as a mode of knowledge and a model for society that does not rely on any structural or generative model of linguistics or psychoanalysis.”  His draft brings up many parallels to this piece.  I look forward to collaboratively uncovering the multiple intersections between rhizomatic thought, this piece, and dance philosophy.

Other topics of relevance to this piece include:  visual imagery,  feminism, personal history, control and freedom, theatrical uses of interactivity.  The topics were brought up by audience members in a discussion after the first night’s performance.

--Hallie Aldrich

 

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