Dance embraces a high-tech world

At last weekend’s presentation here of the third Nijinsky Awards, named after legendary dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, the male dancer and female dancer statuettes went to members of two of the world’s leading dance institutions, Nicolas Le Riche of the Paris Opera Ballet and Alina Cojocaru of the Royal Ballet in London. In addition, an homage celebrated U.S. choreographer George Balanchine and his great muse Suzanne Farrell.

But it was symbolic that Monaco’s Princess Caroline -- honorary president of the five-day Monaco Dance Forum, which culminated with the Nijinskys -- chose to present the award for emerging choreographer.

Before revealing the winner -- Chinese-born dancer, choreographer and multimedia artist Shen Wei, artistic director of the New York-based Shen Wei Dance Arts -- the princess spoke of “courage, audacity and ingenuity” as the means for creating new dance. And promoting such qualities is at the heart of the dance congress she co-founded four years ago with Jean-Christophe Maillot, artistic director of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and Stephane Martin, former president of the Grimaldi Forum, a 400,000-square-foot pyramidal facility where the event has been held every two years since 2000.

Maillot and Martin first envisioned the dance forum as “a space for artistic, economic and social expression” for dance professionals, who face an ever-shifting cultural economy and constantly evolving creative categories and techniques. General director Dominique Passet called it “a gamble on dance.”

But the gamble seems to be paying off. This year’s edition, with a budget of 2.8 million euros, or about $3.75 million, drew 10,000 spectators.

The dizzying array of programming included all-expenses-paid trips that enabled 90 young performers from 26 countries to audition for their first professional contracts before representatives of leading dance companies; a conference for the aDvANCE Project, aimed at helping retiring dance artists around the world effectively negotiate career transitions; and the screening of more than 200 works from dance film festivals across the globe.

However, the ever-increasing integration of interactive digital media with all idioms of dance -- including contemporary, hip-hop, butoh and flamenco -- was the clear star of the event.

Keeping new media in just this focus concerned Maillot as far back as eight or nine years ago, when he “realized that on one side there were great technicians creating new tools, but the artists who could use them were not really conscious of what was happening. What was happening artistically with the tools was a bit poor, because there was no bridge to people who could really use them. I thought it could be interesting to create a forum where people could meet.”

To him, Maillot said, the forum “is like a roof protected from the rain -- a quiet, open space with no walls or doors where people can come and learn from each other without judgments.”

A key organizer under Maillot’s roof has been dance technology impresario Scott deLahunta, 47, of the Amsterdam-based Writing Research Associates. At each edition of the Monaco forum, he has served as co-organizer and facilitator of the Tech Lab, a research team gathered from America and Europe comprising dance and media artists, acoustic and technology experts, and specialists in movement analysis and sensory perception.

“Before the 1990s,” DeLahunta said, “people exploring the relationship between dance and technology were on the margins, partly because access to computers and programming was much more limited. Now there’s a convergence of accessible tools. The question of whether the work is interesting or rigorous comes down to the individual artists using the tools.”

This emphasis on digital creativity was evident in a majority of the 15 public performances at the forum. Movement-to-sound technology, or “hearing the expressivity of the body,” took center stage in “Konnecting Souls” by French hip-hop pioneer Frank Il Louise. In “Held,” noted American dance photographer Lois Greenfield created a live multimedia performance from the process of visually capturing leaps that was made famous in her early association with the American dancer David Parsons, whose 1982 stroboscopic solo, “Caught,” clearly inspired the work’s name.

Onstage, Greenfield trained her digital camera on the Australian Dance Theatre’s 10 kamikaze performers to instantaneously project images of their structured-improvisational aerial forays onto large screens on either side of the stage.

When the performances did not hinge on digital technologies, they often accented progressive cross-cultural or cross-genre fusions, another goal of the forum’s organizers. The French group Vagabond Crew’s “Chienne de Vie” aspired to relate a narrative on homelessness via virtuosic hip-hop; Israeli dancer-choreographer Emanuel Gat set salsa to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

Many of the digital dance scene’s foremost innovators also participated in the smaller presentations, symposiums, installations and specialists’ workshops that constituted the forum’s multimedia programming. Composer and media artist Mark Coniglio of New York, a 43-year-old transplant from Los Angeles, is one-half of the 10-year-old group Troika Ranch and author of the widely used software Isadora, which translates the movements of a dancer in three-dimensional space into various types of real-time audio-visual output.

Said Coniglio, “Theatrical lighting was once a radical new technology that transformed what you could see and experience in the theater. What we’re doing seems new now, but in 40 years it won’t seem any more exotic than theatrical lighting.”

Maillot, for his part, emphasized that new technology carries risks as well as potential.

“Should we take note of the appearance of virtual actors in movies and imagine that in 20 years people won’t see dance in theaters because advanced cameras will re-create studio performances in their homes?” he asked. “If we don’t claim digital tools as a means of adding to living theater, that might happen without us knowing it.

“It’s very important that artists are aware of such possibilities. The digital technicians need the artists to do something with the new tools, because otherwise mediocre people will use them just for commercial purposes.”