Collaborative Multimedia Presentations Feature Aspiring Talent - ImageMovementSound 2001 Festival Debuts April 7
A spectacular celebration of artistic impression will take to the stage for its fifth consecutive year. "ImageMovementSound 2001 Festival," uniting local motion picture/image makers, composers and choreographers, will offer up an array of collaborative works to stir the senses.
This year, about 30 faculty members and students from Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Film and Animation (SOFA) and School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, the Eastman School of Music, and State University of New York College at Brockport’s Department of Dance have created performances which combine, to varying degrees, motion pictures images, sound and dance.
Where an RIT artist uses film, video and computer technology to produce a motion-picture work or graphic elements, Eastman faculty and students compose original acoustic and computer-generated music and sound. SUNY Brockport choreographers and dancers add the final element by creating synergistic movement and spatial expressions in concert for the purpose of live and/or edited video performance.
"It’s no one person’s work," says Stephanie Maxwell, associate professor, SOFA. "It comes from the seed of an idea that results in a dynamic process—a collaboration. The end result is a powerful performance that’s done in a professional, polished way."
The innovative works designed for this year’s festival represent efforts to maximize educational opportunities and teach how cooperation can occur between artistic disciplines. Past festivals have been so successful in that regard that a 10-week intercampus course is now offered to help students at all three schools learn the fundamentals of each others’ art forms and how to work collaboratively. Many of the students who took the class have work represented in this year’s show.
"We want to continue to promote collaborative relationships like these as an ongoing process," explains Maxwell.
Planned works include:
"Given"—The seed idea for this piece was inspired by photographs the choreographer found at her grandmother’s funeral. Through music and dance, Given explores what gets passed down in families, generational themes that push through lifetimes, and the known and unknown layers that people inherit.
"Space Available"—The various sounds produced by an old, out-of-tune Ukranian bandura are the primary inspiration for Space Available. This rich source was digitally manipulated and augmented by computer-generated sounds. Acoustic instrumental music was composed after the electronic part. The creative process began after finding "space" for the music, dance and motion picture imagery to work together.
"terra incognita"—The work is a fusion of imagery and music expressing notions of navigation, geometry, and mapping an ever-changing flux and paradoxes in perceived space and location. The animated imagery derives from hand paintings and etchings on 35mm clear and black motion-picture film. The images were then manipulated in various ways during the digitizing and post-production process. Musical elements were layered into a pulsating "spider web" design suggested by the visual imagery.
"ImageMovementSound 2001 Festival" debuts at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 7, in Hartwell Theater on the SUNY College at Brockport campus. A second performance will be at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 15, in Ingle Auditorium on RIT’s Henrietta campus. Admission is $5, students with ID are admitted free.