2015 · Performance · Installation · Authorial
Kinetic.Lab
Dancers dance with their own images, in real time
A research lab on body, image, motion and technology, formed in 2015 at the Faculdade Angel Vianna: the Kinect captures the dancers, and TouchDesigner returns their bodies as light, color and trails projected on stage, in real time.
Kinetic.Lab began in 2015, when Marcus Moraes, who teaches Dance and Multimedia at the Faculdade Angel Vianna, brought his students Brigitte Wittmer and João Mandarino together with Marlus Araujo for a series of jams in dance and live projection, with the Kinect sensor and TouchDesigner. Designers, dancers and performers research there the creative use of new technologies in performances, installations and videodance.
Kinetic Dance is a game of movement between two dancers who dance with their own images. The Kinect captures their silhouettes, and the computer turns them into images projected at the back of the stage, in real time: a virtual mirror of bodies of light and pixels, trails and colors, which the designer plays live. At the end, the audience tries the effects. As an installation, the dark room returns to any visitor the drawing of their own body.
In Alucinestesia, the performer receives the audience wearing virtual reality goggles, and what she sees is projected at large scale on the set, people's silhouettes turned into lines and trails. Then she dances behind a semi-transparent screen, and the audience sees at once the real body and its image projected in front of it: a double body, in five choreographic modules.
The making of Kinetic Dance is told in the article Kinetic Dance: Performance and Game of a Digital Body, by Marcus Moraes and Marlus Araujo, in the journal Repertório (UFBA, 2017).