Premiered March 2012
AUTHENTIC RE-PRODUCTION
Authentic Re-Production is an original, evening-length, dance/theater work in collaboration with electronic media artist Darwin Grosse. With eight dancers, these collaborators pioneered a closely-crafted performance with original choreography, dramatic soundscapes, and extensive electronic media imagery.
“Authenticity” is a claim―a claim of distinction. In the world of art, surprisingly, as well as in the world of photojournalism, contestations of authenticity arise quite naturally from the point of view of artistic provenance and authorial attribution. Advertisers habitually remake the appearance of models and products to entice viewers and readers.
More to the point for the artists of 3rd Law Dance/Theater, however, works of dance, theater and opera are presented on television and over the Internet on YouTube as if they are equivalent to the experiencing of live works, humanly performed in the presence of an audience where each and every performance is unique and irreproducible—where the audience and the performers co-create the work of art through visual, visceral and cognitive interaction. For the dancer, reproduction is artifice: dance is an ephemeral, in the moment, interactive act of artistry.
But, how can reproduction become a part of or co-exist with actual performance? We invited our collaborator, electronic media artist Darwin Grosse, to create mediating artistic tools to work with live dance works interactively and in real time. Using the tools he created, we mediate dancing images in space and time, varying two and three dimensional imagery against the solidity of the human presence, to capture shimmering moments of performance.
This performance, then, is a unique, electronically-mediated work of art, adhering to our demand that each piece, and the entire work, exist locally in time, be ephemeral and unique in its performance, and yet blend live human performers with their in-the-moment images as well as elements of classically reproduced, filmed moments. The performance you are seeing will never occur again.