“Interplay: AnARTomy” is a live, surrealistic, cinematic performance art presented by Another Language Performing Arts Company in the Intermountain Network and Scientific Computation Center Auditorium, streamed live into Second Life by the Marriott Library, and available in a live video stream at www.anotherlanguage.org.
“Creating lots of options for viewing and doing that live8212;that’s exciting,” said Elizabeth Miklavcic, Interplay’s artistic director.
Another Language describes an Interplay event as two or more performances occurring simultaneously in separate locations. Using live performers and multiple video streams, Interplay is supposed to create the appearance of the formulation of a dream sequence. Interplay is also described as a telematic event8212;the science of sending, receiving and storing information with telecommunication devices. Since 2003, Another Language has presented an Interplay event annually, using Access Grid video conferencing technology. For this event, a life artist in Alaska, a mime in Wales, musicians in Indiana, and a dancer in New York are presented alongside the performance taking place in Salt Lake City, which consists of moving sculptures, poetry, life drawings and 3-D animation.
Elizabeth and Jimmy Miklavcic direct the performance. The first Another Language performance is to be streamed entirely in high definition. Jimmy Miklavcic hopes to move to uncompressed HD soon so Interplay can be presented with cinematic quality, though this year’s performance has the highest clarity of any so far.
For the event in Salt Lake City, two moving sculptures are filmed live while multiple video windows are projected onto a screen behind them. Some windows show the drawing pads of life artists in Salt Lake City while they draw performers, and sometimes, even the audience. Other windows show Big Robot, the computer and percussion ensemble in Indiana providing the soundtrack to AnARTomy, the mime in Cardiff, the pad of the artist in Alaska, and the moving sculptures themselves. Elizabeth Miklavcic said the concept for this year’s event, AnARTomy, was the art of the body, and most of the windows act out that theme in a straightforward manner.
“I tend to form the event and then I try to find the best people,” Miklavcic said.
Most of those people are being recorded or performing live and the windows are constantly being moved by Jimmy Miklavcic. Sometimes this process results in a loss of production values because once the windows are clicked the border is activated, complete with options to maximize, minimize, or close.
But other than the borders, and a few other computer-related mishaps generally related to speed and video quality, which should be eliminated as the technology improves, the performance is very professional. The human sculptures never break character and are ushered on and off stage discretely. Surprisingly, a lot of the performance is improvised, though there were rehearsals.
“A few of my poses were pre-choreographed, but when we came together it was very much improv,” said human sculpture Theresa Kulikowski. “My background was gymnastics where everything was pre-choreographed.”
Improvisation was encouraged by artistic director Elizabeth Miklavcic, who said, “I give them a little bit of structure and then let them go.”
“Interplay: AnARTomy” will be presented Friday and Saturday at noon and at 9 a.m. on Sunday. For more info, check out www.anotherlanguage.org.
Richard PaysonArtists sketch performer Patrick Barnes during a rehearsal of Interplay