Hourglass

Hourglass

www.hourglass-music.com

Robin Cox | COMPOSER & CREATOR
Lianne Arnold | PROJECTIONS


Berkeley Art Museum | Berkeley, CA CalArts | Los Angeles, CA Santa Cruz Fringe Festival | Santa Cruz, CA Grove Haus | Indianapolis, IL NYU Steinhardt | NYC Master Space Co-op | Philadelphia, PA


An experiment in improv dance, Hourglass aims to provide professional and amateur dancers alike an outlet to experiment for exactly one hour.   Since 2011, Hourglass has been performed in a series of venues across the country.  Video was used to add an additional sensory stimulation for improv on top of the music, immerse and frame the spacial environment, and provide a visual timecode for the event so that the participating dancers could pace themselves over the hour arc.  Also, the video added a dynamic quality to the multiple performance structure by sourcing documentation of previous iterations of the piece as a base to create a visual reaction to what existed before I came along and contribute to the outcome of new iterations by providing a source of visual inspiration for future participants - creating, in total, a kind of exquisite corpse.

I took an analogue approach to creating the content.  I projected documentation from previous performances onto various organic, textured surfaces, filmed that projection, and repeated the process on a new surface - creating a copy of a copy of a copy; abstracting the form, but maintaining the the energy of the movement in the original documentation.  I then framed that content in a series of “clocks” that were projected in spaces around the venue, incorporating the quality of the space into the video design.