What I got the most from the WDA conference was: interesting meetings and contacts, afternoon studio showings (some innovative works), amazing Taiwanese performers and choreographers in their technique and quirkiness.

The evening showings were laborious at times, as I had to fight my body clock trying to put me asleep in a cosy dark place, and struggling with lots of ‘modern dance’, except for the Isadora Duncan Dance Company which was retracing some pieces.  Screendancewise, if there were videos in pieces, they were all projected as backdrops, behind performers, without using depth of stage, multiscreens or/and direct movements interaction (except for ‘States of Gravity & Light #2′ by Merian Soto who played with her shadow casted on video projection of water).

WAAPA dance students seemed to have had a great opportunity participating in the University Wisconsin-Madison Summer Dance Institute, for 3 weeks before the conference, ‘worked on’ by various choreographers. Some great performers coming up!
The Australian contingent had interesting approaches in education with the multidisciplinary techlabs (Avril Huddy and Madonna Ellaby, QUT), practical transitions from studies to employment in the performing arts (Robyn Torney, WAAPA/ECU) and seeding interests for and participation in arts from early childhood with nice process (Jeff Meiners, UniSA). Great to share time with Leah Shelton, Tammi Gissell, Matthew Day and Sarah-Mace Dennis.

I was surprised to hear people talking about:
- ‘vertical hierarchy’ with ‘bottom up and top down’ ways of thinking, while I feel we strongly need to address laterality in order to embrace rapid and important changes in technology influencing our daily lives!
- the use of video in classrooms as if it’s a new tool, replacing the mirror. I remember using it already in the late 70ies – hmm, more than 30 years ago!
- the use of podcasting, posting videos for students to revise their class, seems to be a good and sensible way of using internet, but on the other hand – I still don’t understand why YouTube seemed to be considered by some teachers like a bad spell for education!
- ‘the natural way for dancer to film/cut/edit/move the camera, as ”the dancer’s eye knows the dance!’, a statement from a moderator which could have been discussed a bit more.
These points triggered personal reflections about elitism versus accessibility, and technique versus expression, which to me, ultimately are diversions from the primordial aspect of art: the content!

I got food for thoughts from the sessions: ‘Intercultural Aesthetics’; ‘Movement and Meaning’ with Michael Parmentier’s (NZ) duet vocabulary (piloting, tacting and zooming) and the performative presentation by Eduardo Oramas (Columbia- translation of his paper); ‘Tension in Time: Endure, Relate, Disrupt, Flex and Web’ a rich session with a particular focus for me on the skype presentation by Valerie Alpert; and the writing workshop with Marcia Siegel: ‘Looking at Dance – Writing Dance’. Marcia’s workshop happened over 2 sessions, gave some tips and hints about: writing ‘things as they are’, more detailed observations, making a personal lexicon with basic choreographic elements, finding the structure, questioning the relationship between performers, the space…. Marcia took the screendance ‘Arms’ by Susan Marshall as a starting point for exercises. She didn’t acknowledge it as a screendance but as a pure dance, with video being a means to watch it. While for me, its black and white aesthetic, the camera view points and editing were entirely part of the work we watched, a screendance.
TRAVEL NOTES: NYU cafetaria has a great view on the Empire State building.   A food cart across the road was selling delicious dosa.

The simultaneous Dance Critics Association conference was a plus:
- all evening shows got reviewed, and reviews were discussed the day after
- great session organised by Deirdre Towers, director of Dance on camera Festival, asking overtly what would be Dance Critics interests and fees for reviewing screendances.  Nice to meet Deirdre in person, after lots of emails exchange. We had a few great discussions.
- amazing intervention by Baraka Sele, producer of the New Jersey Cultural Center, during the session about ‘Cultural Exchange in 2010′.  She asked critics to take out of their vocabulary: minority, multicultural, coloured people – every body has a colour, joking about being non-white – and have a global perspective instead of talking about being ‘inclusive’, because – she said – ‘You are in control of how the world/people talk’!

I presented my fellowship work with an accent on the project emerging from my networked performance research (Virtual Fountains, title might changed) in a session called ‘Movement and/on Video’, shared with Maria Adriana Verdaasdonk, Ann Moradian and Nanette Bertschy. People from Guatemala, Columbia, New York, Chicago showed immediate interests in participating in the Virtual Fountains, and after discussion with the Chair of World Dance Alliance Americas, Jin-Wen Yu, the project might be used for next 2012 WDA conference in Taiwan, which will have a focus on dance & technology.  As Igneous installation performance ‘MIRAGE’ will be shown early October at Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto, James and I announced it to some presenters and artists who might be able to see it ‘live’.  After Toronto, we will go for a week to teach and lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and I got also an invitation by Jin-Wen Yu to present the ‘Virtual Fountains’ to the University of Wisconsin-Madison students, where I hope to meet Doug Rosenberg, who lectures there. We might go to Chicago before leaving (still working on the itinerary), to visit Valerie Alpert and her dancers. She is pursuing a PhD about Digital Dance at the Texas Women University.

James and I had the chance to see ‘A disappearing Number’ by La Complicite at Lincoln Center: very moving, great use of the stage and projections with multiple and moveable screens accentuating shifts between time periods, also underlined by performers physicality.  Second week in NY, we moved to an apartment in Brooklyn, visited a bit our new neighborhood, Chinatown, Lower East Side, Central Park, went to see a few exhibitions ‘Haunted’ at the Guggenheim, ‘Off the Wall’ at the Whitney, tried to refrain from buying books at Strandbook Store where we met 2 performers from Melbourne Luke Hockley and Jonathan Sinatra, watched Fortier performing ’30 x 30′, 30-minute solo daily for 30 consecutive days outdoor, met Jody Oberfelder, Larry Goldhuber, went on a tech-trip in H&D megastore where it is possible to try a lot of equipment (sent to the cashiers on a long conveyor belt throughout the shop, which felt like being in ‘Brazil’ movie!). Great to see the pico/micro-projectors with LED lights, all beside each other.

End of July, we went to Amherst where we spent a few days with Wendy Woodson, talking/showing each others works, spending great time exchanging information, feedback, good food, wine, swimming in the lake and visiting Earthdance and MassMOCA. Wow! Intense and beautiful summer days!

More information from http://bram.org/9meetings
+++ Documentation of the Huis Clos / No Exit – On Translation performance at NIMk Amsterdam available from http://bram.org/huisclos/ontranslation/
+++ Article on the HTTP show of this spring IF NOT YOU NOT ME, ANNIE ABRAHAMS AND LIFE IN NETWORKS by Maria Chatzichristodoulou in Digimag 54 May 2010 http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1793

Following the artist talk and installation performance at Tembi contemporary gallery, I gave a 2day-workshop to local artists, at MES56 Gallery, on networked creative collaboration, sharing info about internet platforms, tools and  processes.
Humour, focus and motivation contributed to overcome language difficulties.  Different priorities, variable accesses to internet and speed of connection (slow at times!) were interesting challenges, reinforcing the demand of being flexible to scale/re-scale/adjust schedule and content. Thanks to MES56! Sip!  – photos by Wimo, Akiq, Dolly and Andre -
exhibition on gallery walls:’Contact Lens’ by Victor Zwiers

Visits to artists encouraged me to formulate better and further the concept of VIRTUAL FOUNTAINS and what networked performance means. It also showed me that if the project is based on contribution and collaboration, it needed to be done in stages.
So Scotia and I made an installation performance at Tembi contemporary Gallery, followed by an artist talk and few days later I gave a workshop (next post).

The installation performance was closely connected to the gallery’s two ponds. Beautiful art space!  Plastic bags full of water hung over the ponds (people use them here for drinking). Two of them contained a goldfish.  There were 2 simultaneous projections on the walls behind the ponds:

- video of village people, grouped by age, drinking, mixed with images of waterfalls (from plenty to scarcity), ending on an image of drought
- animated loop of Scotia and I drinking from plastic bottles, using internet platform Upstage, with participation of Marlena Corcoran as a remote performer in Munich, performing/responding to me in real time. When the water diminished in the other projection, a wall of plastic bottles gradually covered the frame.

A soundtrack built up, consisting of a common ‘choosing’ rhyme (‘I love him, I love him not’ in 3 languages: Bahasa Indonesian, English and French) layered in crescendo and gave rhythm to Scotia for developing a movement variation inspired by water usage and then, piercing the bags (with same idea of plucking petals from a daisy) creating waterfalls from each into the ponds. This continued until only the bags with the fish remained.
At this point, 2 fish appeared on UpStage saying ‘I love the world, I love it not’ and developed a short ‘on-line performance’. Scotia released the fish into the ponds and piled up all plastic bags.

The cartoonesque fish on UpStage then introduced my artist talk about VIRTUAL FOUNTAINS. – photos by Elly Mangunsong -

We are staying in a traditional Javanese wooden house next to a paddy field in the South of the city, in Taman Tirto, Kasihan Bantul.  Children helped us to connect with the village life.  We invited the community to come on a Sunday afternoon to gather, meet us and make a video portrait, which we used in an installation performance later that week.  But first, we gathered again in a former Gamelang room used a hall now, to show the edited video and get people’s feedback.

Since March, am doing some trials on Selfworld with ActiveLayers (with Cherry in London and Liz in Kawerau (NZ) and James and I in Brisbane).  Ivan Chabanaud comes sometimes to our meetings to tweak the server and our room, and in some pix, played Gulliver demonstrating how to use the encoder as a moving backdrop….
We are working on theme of water…made few movies, gather some images and songs, and try to find scores that we can do online.
The use of multi-video streams is powerful,  opening up a lot of possibilities but it needs a lot of tweaking and patience, above all for the sound.  But somehow being able to see each other is a big reward which gives us all the patience needed!
It gives definitely another space to ‘perform’, a space of intimacy, closeness, macro details, computer’s immediate surrounding, but also outdoors, public spaces, landscapes…
In Yogyakarta (Indonesia), we bought a 3G stick, and continued our trials  from here, just beside a paddy field.
James went to internet cafes/parlours to have a separate connection.  He could not put his own laptop on the network, and had to use the local computer/webcam….which once was pretty fuzzy (because of fungi growing with humidity)… but other time, were quite interesting cause not in-built in the computer, giving freedom to film around and have various angles.
Because we didn’t have access to printers, we start using other devices with mini-screens to show images (iphone & digital camera), sketches, little objects, using also paper that we were tearing on the spot to shapes… great immediacy, interesting aesthetic, fine movements of hands… to be continued!

It is a place where you can leave your waterstory, waterpoem, watersketch, or whaterever: suzonfuks@gmail.com > subject: water.

It is a time when you can get other kinds of aesthetic fluctuations, through the force of streams which have to be caused by decorative and dramatic tidal resonances.
We can’t tell you any more, because this plot is highly dependent upon the coming myriad of tiny aqua-semantical dataflows.
The only saying that would flow around for now is: to sprinkle or not to sprinkle?

SPRINKLER FOUNTAIN is part of VIRTUAL FOUNTAINS:  for 101010 UpStage Festival, there will be presentation of initial ideas of a new project about WATER, a currency in all cultures, a compelling issue providing metaphors and vocabulary for creative exchange online and on-site.

In other words: please send us before the festival memories, tales & media about water that you are happy for us to use: suzonfuks@gmail.com > subject: water, or just turn up at the fountain on the day! we will post a link closer to the date.