Festival Showcases Multimedia Works of Art in Live Performance at RIT, April 6

ImageMovementSound engages the imagination and the senses.

It’s a festival that provides an opportunity for Rochester area dancers, film and video artists, musicians, and media and graphic artists to come together to collaborate and premiere new works of multimedia art.

The performance is at 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 6, at Rochester Institute of Technology, in the Student Alumni Union’s Ingle Auditorium. The program will consist of live and video performance works, along with two interactive installations. Tickets are $6 and can be purchased at the door. Students with ID are admitted for free.

Forty-five students and faculty from RIT, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester’s River Campus, SUNY Brockport, William Smith College, and Visual Studies Workshop are the creators and performers of these diverse works.

Preceding the live performance on April 6, installation works will be on display for 10 days at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, 137 East Avenue. The exhibit runs March 26 through April 4. The interactive installations employ digital imaging and audio technology and encourage active participation from viewers.

The ImageMovementSound festival now in its 12th year, merges dance, film, music and other art forms in new and unexpected ways. Works premiered at previous festivals have won awards at hundreds of international festivals, competitions and venues.

Planned works for the April 6 premiere include:

• “Currents”- In this abstract work, the artists create a tapestry of textures that emerge as washes of sound, color and motion. Tone and light follow changing currents in evolving variations that coalesce in alternating densities toward a final surge.
  
• “Moving Parts, Emotive Fantasy”-Emotive Fantasy creates a choreography of gesture and parts of the body to express the inherent tension between the body as machine (set in motion with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and refers to Maslow’s Theory of Coping) and the body as a sentient whole (refers to Maslow’s Theory of Feeling).
  
• “Concealed Fusion”-Features live dance, live music and animation. It focuses on using found objects to create a “being” in the projected imagery and the sound score. A live dancer explores the space she feels confined to and the space outside of her realm. The final result is a dialogical duet between the “being” and the live dancer about finding the self through a spiritual exploration of past and present experiences.

RIT will host an encore presentation of some of the best works from past ImageMovementSound festivals at Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival on Saturday, May 3, from 10 a.m. to noon. “The Best of ImageMovementSound” will be held in Ingle Auditorium in RIT’s Student Alumni Union. Admission is free.

For more information about ImageMovementSound, visit www.imsfestival.org or call Stephanie Maxwell, IMS co-director at (585) 475-6127.