Project > Cretive Industries:
The Flutterfugue
An experimental interactive collaboration between dancers and musicians, performers and audiences, people and butterflies, those who can move in physical space and those who can fly in their imaginations . . .
JULY 12, 2002 FLUTTERFUGUE PERFORMANCE
SMARTCLUB VERSION 1.0 LCP BACK HILL |
The Flutterfugue is a performance experiment that has taken many forms as the chrysalis has unfolded in different cultures over a period of several years. This project was originally conceived by Lizbeth Goodman and her colleagues in the performance and new media communities as an experiential interface that might contribute to the empowerment of dancers and other creative people (including music lovers everywhere) who could, for whatever reason, not move their bodies as freely as they might wish in time with the music they love.
Lizbeth moves, stretches, flutters, dances as a hybrid creature- half human and half winged spirit- with movements controlled by the audience, who respond both to the music (the Flutterfugue score) and in response to a collaborating dancer: a butterfly, which sometimes takes the form of a puppet and sometimes takes the form of an animation. Lizbeth spins, flutters and flies when the Flutterfly flies, and when she takes off, so do the audience, wheelchair dancers and other collaborators who participate and lead / contribute to the total dance. In this way, a wide range of people can participate in a shared performance, and can feel empowered to move, whether physically or by proxy. Participants may contribute and dance from anywhere, whatever their range of physical mobility, and whether they are physically present in the same location or separated by real space and connected by the world wide web.
The current phase of this work in progress has emerged from a series of experiments that began in 1999 when Lizbeth began dancing with ten-foot puppets (marionettes) to test the range of emotional frustrations corresponding to limitations on the physical movement of limbs. The work has since progressed through a series of remote choreographic and telematic experiments, with the most recent 3D screen creations for animated flying dancers offered by the CATlab. Nick Ryan has joined the team recently as the sound designer / composer who will work on the next stages to help the flutterfugue reach new levels of interactivity in musical contexts both live and online. In the next iteration, the team hopes to include culturally specific butterflies that may be posted to the web and then released into the shared performance space in a real-time international flutterfugue.
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