Film, Graphics, Dance and Music Combined for Onstage Extravaganza

The imagination and expertise from some of our area’s top artists are being reunited in the form of a sensory celebration. ImageMovementSound 2002 Festival debuts at Rochester Institute of Technology on April 28—combining local motion picture/image makers, composers and choreographers on stage for the sixth consecutive year.

About 20 students and faculty members from RIT’s School of Film and Animation 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 works that unite these diverse artistic media.

While RIT artists use film, video and computer technology to produce graphic elements or a motion-picture work, Eastman faculty and students compose original acoustic and computer-generated music and sound. SUNY Brockport choreographers and dancers create movement in concert for the purpose of live and/or edited video performance.

"It’s no one person’s work," says Stephanie Maxwell, RIT associate professor of film and animation. "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."

This year’s festival will also include the work of two European collaborative teams. These guest artists were the Best of Show winners from New York City Dance On-Camera Film Festival produced at Lincoln Center.

The innovative works designed for this year’s festival represent efforts to maximize educational opportunities and to teach how cooperation can occur between artistic disciplines. An outgrowth of the festival has been a 10-week intercampus course offered to students from all three schools to teach the fundamentals of each other’s art forms and their integration toward the production of collaborative work.

"The work that grows out of this course often becomes part of the festival," explains Susannah Newman, associate professor at SUNY Brockport’s Department of Dance. "The course is a great place for students to meet peers with like artistic interests and to form collaborative teams."

Planned works include:

• "passe-partout"—This abstract film/music composition conjures an atmosphere in which an aerial mobile suspend magically in a three-dimensional space. The floating pendants of the mobile each reveal a mysterious world filled with unique forms, movements and sounds. The visuals are being created using animated mattes in combination with 35mm motion picture film. The computer-generated music score grows out of a seemingly simple, open-ended harmonic theme that bounces through many key centers while undergoing continuous variation, development and transformation.
• "Cover Girls, Whisperings"—An electronic canvas transfigures media clips of Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe and Monica Lewinski through smaller, interior images and is accompanied by a musical score. A series of moving-image canvases has been built in which the structure of each frame is reconfigured through an internal code of mirrors and maps. The musical score blurs the meanings between life-giving breath and sensuality. Together, the images and sounds challenge cultural portrayals of women and sexuality.
• "Raindreams"—A screen dance with original music that explores a non-linear, solitary journey of life rushing by, emphasizing human interactions and unresolved relationships. The collaborators have employed a range of editing techniques, different cameras (including a head-cam and glide-cam), various settings, a computer-generated score which incorporates natural sounds into the musical framework, and a "movement vocabulary" of exaggerated gestures set with attention to foreground and background.

ImageMovementSound 2002 Festival debuts at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 28, in Ingle Auditorium on RIT’s Henrietta campus. An encore presentation, 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 4, will take place at the Little Theater in downtown Rochester. Admission for either performance is $5, students with ID are admitted free.