Rain Ring Dance Sketches
Experiments with projection and dance in 2016/2017
This work features a dancer inside of a ring of rain. There's a projector opposite the camera, and as the dancer moves, a Kinect camera picks up the movement and translates the movement into visual patterns. The work is about the improvised ideas that emerge when a dancer is exploring a dynamic system of feedback. The code and resulting projected visuals are almost like a dance partner. I wrote the code in Processing, spending a lot of time tweaking the motion detection to ignore the water drops, and getting the feel of the projection right.
Processing Code
I wanted to create a space where water and light respond to the motion of the dancer, creating a collaborative feedback system. Each of these sketches represents a different way of translating and abstracting the dancer's movements into shapes and imagery. Beyond the interaction between the dancer and projection, the way that water captures and transmits light is beautiful. Each droplet of water is like a tiny prism and breaks up the beam from the projector into a little rainbow. As you walk around the ring the colors shift. Also, the water is a volume and not a flat plane, so it extrudes the image into a 3 dimensional shape. Because the projector is designed to focus within a predefined range, I can control the sharpness of the image based on the dimensions of the curtain and the placement of the projector.
I am working towards capturing the dancer’s motion in a more detailed way. This would yield a closer collaboration between the choreography and the projection. I can see this idea applied to both intimate and large-scale spaces. So it could be about performance but also a casual experience, something relaxing and meditative.
