Quartet
£15 / £10 Concessions / £9 ICA Members.
A dancer, a musician, an avatar-dancer, and a camera-eye robot breathe life into the historical surroundings of the Great Hall at St Bartholemew's Hospital, lavishly adorned with Hogarth masterpieces and ornate fixtures. Informed by new scientific research in the field of physiology, this ICA co-production is an investigation into the kineasthetics of music: how movements produce sounds, and in turn produce new movements. Three leading choreographers - Lea Anderson, Russell Maliphant and Lisa Nelson will each shape sections of the performance.
Human and fabricated characters, perform duets, trios and quartets together as the live is juxtaposed with virtual, and real with mechanical. A musician and virtual dancer perform together, the musician's sounds creating the virtual character. A real dancer and virtual dancer perform together, the real dancer's movements triggering moves from the virtual dancer. A real dancer and a robot perform together: their bends and stretches mirror one another, as the dancer triggers the robot. A robot's cameara-eye view is projected on stage, showing the real dancer, the stage and the audience: spectators experience being the performer. The musician's violin notes are translated into computerised sounds, creating an orchestra of real and virtual instruments.
This multi-media interplay is the culmination of several years collaborative research from specialists from engineering, biomedical and computational science, 3D animation and motion control in the field of physiology. The performance experiments with our perceptions and their articulation. It demonstrates communication within and between bodies in real-time by creating relationships between music, the gesture of musical performance, dance, robotics and animation.
Quartet has been funded by Sciart Production Awards 2005-6 for the Wellcome Trust in collaboration with the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge University and the Arts Council of England. It is co-produced by the Live and Media Arts Department at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria, and ZKM Center for Art and Technology, Germany.