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13Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 6 (2016 9) 1333-1344
УДК 793.3(18)
Art Nouveau Traditions and New Art-Technologies in Modern Dance
Oksana A. Mizko*
Khabarovsk State Institute of Culture 112 Krasnorechenskaia Str., Khabarovsk, 680045, Russia
Received 15.01.2016, received in revised form 21.02.2016, accepted 14.04.2016
The paper analyzes modern dance in phenomenological and semiotic aspects, the dance being the result of merging of modernism traditions and technological innovations of postmodernism. It systematizes comparative materials, concerning the modern dance phenomenon, attempts to unify definitions, characterizing this phenomenon, provides a self-dependent analysis of the specificity of choreographic means of expression peculiar for "Chunky Move", an Australian dance group. This group's creative work has not been described in the Russian art history. The author comes to the conclusion that modern dance was born as a logical continuation of the modernist style dance and incorporates the elements of dance cultures from different historic periods. In search of new artistic forms, the dance uses modern art-technologies that turn a descriptive and expressive potential of contemporary dance into a limitless one.
Keywords: modern dance, choreography, art Nouveau, postmodernism, art-technologies, video art, mapping.
DOI: 10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-6-1333-1344. Research area: culture studies.
Introduction to the research problem
Dance is one of the ancient forms of art. Regarding its age it can compete with music only. Having crystallized from the primitive syncretic art, dance became a human's inseparable companion, an integral part of human culture. In the course of time dance techniques and its functions changed. So did the very understanding of this art form. However, what remained unchanged was a human's need for nonverbal communication as well as for embracing the whole world with a human body. These needs were implemented through the art of dance.
© Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved
* Corresponding author E-mail address: mizko@yandex.ru
Art Nouveau dance that appeared in the early XX century will become one of the main sources of modern dance formation. Art Nouveau as well as innovations in the field of musical art and art-technologies generates a huge number of dance techniques, genres and styles: jazz, ballroom dance, Butoh, contact improvisation technique, a huge number of different kinds of pop dance, contemporary dance. Besides, dance turns into a synthetic art form, and the habitual union of choreography and music is not the only example of this kind. Dance actively integrates with painting, sculpture, poetic art, as well as
with modern technologies that are an important part of modern cultural paradigm and make it possible to embody the most ancient of the arts in qualitatively new forms. One of the dance groups, actively using various audio-visual media in their performances, is "Chunky Move", an Australian group.
Transforming, changing and improving, dance has always been a live, relevant means of humancommunication.Itimpliesacommunicative intention, which is a reflection of its epoch. Contemporary dance reflects a catastrophic, technocratic and mosaic picture of the world inherent to our epoch, a world in which human nature is getting lost and eternal human feelings are getting less and less place. Art (and the art of dance as one of the ancient ones in particular) is probably the last refuge of a sentient and thinking human, keeping him / her from turning into a biotechnological and social being devoid of spirituality. The art of dance is one of the actual means of reflection, aimed at helping a modern human to see and comprehend the contemporary world. There is no consensus regarding modern dance trends in the art history. Moreover, there is no single unified international terminology to describe all the art of dance phenomena that have emerged over the past half century. In addition, there have been debates on the art-technologies application in modern cultural paradigm. These problems give rise to the issue of the boundaries of art, the boundaries where art ends and pure technology or art-industry begins.
Problem statement
It is necessary to dwell on some controversial concepts to refer to the history of modern dance.
It is worth while distinguishing between two meanings of the "modern dance" term. In its broad sense the concept implies all the manifestations and forms of the art of dance existing at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries. As for its narrow sense,
the Russian art history refers to contemporary dance as a specific trend. The Russian art history lacks a unified term nominating the phenomenon in the dance art of the XX and XXI centuries. One can often notice that the "art Nouveau dance", "art Nouveau jazz" and "contemporary" concepts are mixed and used as synonyms. The "modern dance" term always regards a wide context. In the Slav countries (in Bulgarian and Ukrainian traditions in particular), the term "contemporary" is used to describe all phenomena of the art of dance, starting with Isadora Duncan's creative work. It should be noted that the graphic image of this term changed in accordance with the rules of a particular language. This did not happen in Russian in which the word still remains a barbarism. However, in English the words "modern" and "contemporary" are synonyms. The emergence of new forms of dance caused the term "contemporary" that appeared in the late
XX century. It was necessary to distinguish them from the art Nouveau dance that had already become classical and ceased to be modern as such. "Contemporary" is not a homogeneous trend or tendency. It implies creative work of many dancers, choreographers and dance groups different from each other in style and technique. In accordance with the foregoing, we argue that the use of the "modern dance" term is possible without any reservations, as in its both senses, trying to take root in domestic musicology, it will mean the same: a collective name for stylistically and technically heterogeneous styles and dance techniques in the dance art of the late XX - early
XXI century.
The origins of modern dance should be found in the art of the last century. The biggest event for dance art at that time was the emergence of free, or plastic (rhythmoplastic) dance. It originated in Europe and America as the opposition to the art of ballet in which the body was driven into narrow confines of rules and canons, and the
dance became the art for the limited circle of "enlightened people". In its separation from ballet, which is synthetic in its nature, dance was not considered to be art as it was merely an element of entertainment culture: secular balls, folk festivals, vaudevilles and cabarets were the context it was trapped in. The ideologists of free dance were anxious for the dance to get the self-value of art back and be equal to such arts as painting, architecture or music. In addition, the dance had to become the public heritage but not the subject of the elite culture. The emergence of free dance was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas. For the German philosopher dance is the beginning and the end of body and spirit perfection, the way of its performance and the quality of achievements.
Art Nouveau dance was a logical result of aesthetic disputes of the dance theorists of the early XX century. Like plastic dance, it denied the canons of classical dance, thus creating a kind of counter-art, "new" art. Yet, S.P. Diaghilev uses the results of findings of a young dance style in his performances for the "Russian seasons". Such dancers, choreographers and theorists as Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban, Merce Cunningham, et al. were at the wellsprings of art Nouveau dance. According to the article "On Modernism and Postmodernism in dance" by V. Giglauri, a domestic choreographer, "the key features of art Nouveau can be regarded in two aspects: external (motion-focused, form-building) and inner (psychospiritual)" (Giglauri V., http:// www.fox-dance.pnz.ru/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=52). First of all, it is worth while considering its most obvious differences from classical dance, the differences being the external features of art Nouveau:
- exclusion of Pointe technique and turnout as the only right foot position - a foot and a whole leg take the position, which is determined by
the line of dance and a choreographer's artistic intent;
- rejection of the traditional palm position, at which the thumb is always hidden in the palm;
- rejection of a direct fixed posture - the modernist style dancers' backs are live, soft, easy to take any position;
- extensive use of partner technique.
Besides, the external features include:
- maximum expression of the gradation of the body physical exertion; a large number of leading points of the vector;
- visual shift of the main centre of movement from a primary one to the auxiliary ones;
- special relationship of the dancer with music: search for the second, third, etc. planes of musical accompaniment, use of the minimum chordal accompaniment or a complete rejection of the musical accompaniment to achieve maximum expressiveness through figurative and expressive means of dance.
However, the internal features of the modernist style performances are more important. Perception of dance as an instrument of philosophizing, opportunities to express the answers to eternal questions of the humanity in the poetry of the body, to touch the most secret depths of the human soul are characteristic for this trend. In the history of development of the art of dance it was the dance of the primitive era only that had the power to perform these tasks.
But even the primitive syncretic art was not destined to do what only art Nouveau dance did, that is to crystallize dance as an absolutely independent art, separating it from the spirit of music, which it was subject to through the course of its history. Mary Wigman is the first dancer who gave up musical accompaniment in her performances. Her dance was subordinate only to the internal rhythms of the body and the rhythms of the human soul hidden from the others. Art Nouveau also makes dance free from the plot that
came to this art from literature and became fixed in ballet, in which the libretto, a literary work, had always been its basis till the early XX century. Thus, working in tandem with an outstanding representative of the American avant-garde John Cage, Merce Cunningham, an American dancer, developed the "random method" in choreography - dance structure, elements and specific movements were chosen by the will of lots. J. Cage's task was to create a piece of music that could match M. Cunningham's choreography when music turns out to be subordinate to the art of dance.
All the ideas and techniques mentioned above found their further development in contemporary dance. In our opinion, there are three vectors of the contemporary dance development. The first vector is dance transformation into a full-fledged sport. This is a path for ballroom dancing. Having originated partly in the European salon culture, partly in the cultures of the peoples of Europe and South America, partly in the jazz culture of the 20s-30s, ballroom dancing became a sports discipline with its own terminology, rules and evaluation system. The second vector takes us back to the prehistoric era when dance was an integral part of various rituals, a means of immersing in the trance state, opening the way to the world of spirits. The idea that dance can express the darkest sides of the human soul as well as that it is through dance one can get rid of them, lying in the basis of Mary Wigman's expressionist dance as well as of Japanese Butoh dance, dates back to the primitive ritual dances and shamanic rites. The idea of returning to the primitive rhythms, the rhythms of nature and the human body, which is unconscious and requires no strenuous spiritual work, is in the basis of modern club dance styles that are out of the concept of art as they belong to the consumerism culture.
The third vector focuses on the use of the latest achievements of science and technology in dance, interweaving of various kinds of art-technologies into the dance texture as well as on the synthesis of modern arts in dance. The matter of our interest is the cultural analysis of the third vector in the development of modern dance art.
Discussion
The descriptive-historical approach is most revealing for understanding of dance as a sociocultural phenomenon. According to this approach, dance is a product of a particular culture and a certain social environment; the art of dance development is dictated by the society development. In the context of this approach the phenomenon of dance is viewed in its historical dynamics.
In his work "The Origin and Development of the Classical Dance Technique" (Blok, 1987) L.D. Blok, a historian and theorist of the ballet, sets forth an idea that the origins of classical dance lie in the antiquity since, according to archaeological findings and written evidences available, there were such elements of classical dance in the art of dance of this era as turnout, plie, grand battements. The history of dance, according to L.D. Blok, can be presented as a horizontal vector, consisting of a set of points - classics, from classics of antiquity to Marius Petipa's classics. The last point of this vector, according to L.D. Blok, is the emergence of dance modernism that was logical as the beginning of the XX century was a crucial period not only in the history of dance but also in the history of mankind. According to this point of view, art Nouveau dance is regarded as the classics towards contemporary dance. However, one cannot consider contemporary dance as a phenomenon resulting from the European dance linear development. Contemporary dance is a vertex point where the rays of development come together, the rays coming from all earlier
"classics". Primitive dance and antiquity, classical ballet and art Nouveau dance, to some extent, determine the birth of contemporary dance.
Dance is understood as a specific language which was probably the first language of humanity. Understanding of dance as a language of facial expressions, gestures, body movements leads to the idea of natural origins of dance. It also leads to the idea that dance as a nonverbal language was formed before a man became aware of himself as a human, that is before the advent of human consciousness as dance in one form or another is widely found in the animal world. An attempt to convey a signal, containing information about the dancer's physical health and readiness to procreate, to the recipient through postures, movements of the body and gestures is probably the first function of dance that emerged at the dawn of humanity. Since then it has acquired new features, its understanding as a mere sexually oriented phenomenon is left somewhere in the beginning of the primitive age, however, this component of dance as a semiotic system is still preserved. This explains the emergence of a huge number of dance techniques and styles, aimed at the dancer's sexuality demonstration, in the paradigm of modern culture of consumerism: strip-dance, go-go, etc. which are also modern dance components.
With the advent of verbal means of communication the language of dance did not lose its importance. Dance serves for conveying thoughts and feelings that are beyond verbal expression. However, with the development of the artistic culture a semiotic space of dance began to include the sign systems typical of other arts, including literature. So, Rudolf Laban conducted his performances to the accompaniment of the choral recitation of poetry. Dance is no longer inscribed in the frame of the stage or the studio; it can form a space it is enclosed in. The origins of this idea can be traced, in particular, in the
activities of Isadora Duncan's schools, in which the classes were held not in a stuffy dance hall, at a ballet bar but on the lawn or in the park.
One of characteristic features of modern artistic paradigm is recognition of the exhaustion of the traditional culture, inability to create anything new within its limits. Understanding of it leads to the search for an artistic method that could make it possible to overcome this crisis. Use of modern technologies in art is one of such methods. The development of video and audio technologies in the 60-s - 70-s of the XX century, computer technology - since the 80-s and the emergence of the Internet in the late 80-s of the last century has had an enormous influence on the development of modern cultural paradigm. The following features are characteristic for contemporary artistic activities:
- media character;
- relevance;
- conceptuality;
- actionism;
- search and introduction of new technologies of an artistic image creation;
- commercialization;
- mass character;
- application of the latest achievements of science and technology;
- entertainment.
In the era of post-industrial society information becomes the main value. As a result, mass media become one of the most important elements of modern cultural paradigm. For a long time, since the Dadaists' and the Surrealists' days the art has been penetrating into the media space and using it for its own purposes. Mass media are one of the catalysts for the modern art development as they provide a continuous flow of information. Due to such flow the latter quickly becomes obsolete, and, therefore, there is a need to replace it with new one. Mass media also contribute to implementation of such features
of modern art-technology as mass character and commercialization.
However, contemporary art has ceased to be only an attribute of a culture of consumption. Art technology should be conceptual, that is scientifically, philosophically, aesthetically and socially justified. In accordance with this ideological-metaphysical framework specific artistic goals are set forward. Their achievement is possible due to one or another art technology.
Mass character of modern culture is achieved not only by means of its translation and spreading around through the mass media but also by engaging potential viewers of the work of art in the act of creation. These result from various actions held by the contemporary figures in the field of arts. Actionism is a desire to blur the line between the artist and the recipient of the artistic image, between the real world and the world of the artistic image. At that the emphasis shifts from the work of art proper to the process of its creation, thus turning the act of creation into an act of mass co-creation. The works of contemporary dance is an artistic action, even if the place of the event is not a town square or some other place of mass or accidental concentration of people. Modern dance is always an attempt to blur the line between art and reality, turning the process of a piece of dance perception into a process of co-creation.
It is worth while focusing on such areas of artistic activity that belong to the category of modern art-technologies as mapping and video art, the areas being widely used in the "Chunky Move" group's creative work.
Video art is a contemporary art practice that uses all the possibilities of translating video to express artistic ideas. Video art is not only a commercial product. It also focuses on being displayed in the art space and is often designed for the trained viewers.
The English term "mapping" originated to nominate various methods of applying textures to a particular virtual object. That is, originally mapping was meant to designate a computer design technique. Whereas the main task of computer mapping is to give a two-dimensional object a three-dimensional illusion, to make the artificial, virtual look like the real, the task of video-mapping with a real three-dimensional object existing in the real world (but not in cyber space) as a subject of art technology application is to turn a selected object into a surreal one, having entrenched it of visible ties with reality.
Today several types of mapping can be distinguished:
1. Architectural mapping can drastically change the appearance of the building, transform an architectural object into the most bizarre forms, make an object move and sound. Architectural mapping is often used as a form of mass entertaining events in the open sky.
2. Landscape mapping is a projection on the objects of animate and inanimate nature: the surface of the mountains, crowns and trunks of trees, surfaces of rivers and lakes.
3. Interior mapping makes it possible to transform the interior space of the building, prepare it for organizing artistic actions.
4. Object mapping moves any object of the surrounding reality, including the human body, into a magic virtual world.
As an integral part of modern culture, dancing actively uses art-technology as well as figurative-expressive means of other arts. Art technology makes dance relevant, provides for the creation of new artistic forms in which the human body is no longer the sole creator of the artistic image: light, three-dimensional video projections, tools of computer graphics and video editing link on to movements, changes of dynamic postures, gestures and facial expressions.
"Chunky Move" dance group was founded in 1995 by Gideon Obarzanek, an Australian choreographer, in the city of Southbank that is a suburb of Melbourne. The group debuted at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 1995. Their dance "Fast Idol" created a furor. Soon "Chunky Move" earned the reputation of one of the most extraordinary and progressive art groups in the Australian culture. According to the group's official website [Chunky move], "Chunky Move" constantly strives for all that may be new in contemporary dance. The work of this dance company includes creating new performances, installations, and works aimed at being translated by new media. It is worth while noting that in Russia the fame of the company was achieved through the Internet. Their touring space is wide and includes the countries of Europe, Middle and Far East, as well as the United States of America. In 2003 "Chunky Move" came to Russia to the annual contemporary dance festival "DanceInversion", organized by the Directorate of The Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre.
"Chunky Move" dance company consists of Tom Wright, a playwright, Frank Tetaz and Bill MacDonald, composers, Niklas Poianti and Ben Cobham, light designers, Damien Regrets, Michelle Heaven and Erna Omarsdottir, choreographers, Fraider Vess and Michelle French, specialists in interactive systems in dance performance, Jodie Fried, an interior designer, Lewis McCartney, a costume designer and a brilliant troupe of dancers. Thus, "Chunky Move" is like any modern theatre troupe, although not all the theaters of the world have got experts in video-mapping or new media resources. However, all these people are united by dancing and they call themselves a modern dance company no matter what.
The "Chunky Move" dance company works can be divided into three groups:
1) stage works;
2) dance and audio-visual installations and performances held in the company's specially equipped studio and staged for a limited circle of
viewers;
3) works, combining dance and video art and staged for the audience of an infinitely wide range that is possible through the Internet.
Stage works are a unique combination of choreography, stage sets of a symbol character, and a sophisticated light and laser show. Every movement of the dancers is accompanied with the movement of a searchlight or laser; the light and the dancer's body forming an indivisible whole. If the stage is of a proper character, dance performances are with the object mapping, the object being any item in the set design, the back of the stage (in this case it is pointless to distinguish between the object and interior mapping) or a dancer's body. This turns it into a perfect artistic image and makes it possible for the viewer to plunge deeply into the world of dance work, have its better feeling, forgetting about the existence of the ordinary world.
In the dance company's studio works they use different kinds of installations, playing the role of scenery, and the interior mapping technology, making the studio space multidimensional and surreal.
The process of creating the dance company's media performances also takes place in a specially equipped studio. The process of birth of the artistic image in the dance is transformed into a video format, on the open space of which the video art means are added to the descriptive and expressive means of dance.
However, one should not forget that "Chunky Move" is, first and foremost, a dance. Their dance art is a combination of different techniques, including modern break dance, classical ballet technique and also the pantomime elements. However, the basis is dance techniques prevailing
in the art Nouveau dance. The widespread use of parterre technique, accented tension of dynamic postures, and expressive and at times grotesque facial expressions makes it possible to talk about the expressive nature of "Chunky Move" dance. That refers us to the traditions of Mary Wigman's dance expressionism. In fact, the use of modern art technologies by "Chunky Move" dance company is manifestation of their expressive creativity, revealing the cry in the dancer's body. Music pieces accompanying their performances add to the expressiveness of the artistic image. These are minimalist or trance ones, mostly electronic, composed for already existing choreography. The music is aimed at fixing a certain rhythm the dancers should follow. Its objective is to plunge the recipient into a certain meditative state that helps to put off all the feelings except those which are evoked by the dance.
Similar to Martha Graham's dances there are no gender distinctions in the dances of "Chunky Move" group. These are not a man and a woman that should exist in the dance, but a dancer and his body, which is an ideal means of expressing feelings and thoughts, and, hence, devoid of such petty conventions as gender differences.
From the first glance it may seem that dance performances of the "Chunky Move" dance company is a talented improvisation. However, each dance of Australian ensemble is a complete show with complex drama, even if it lasts for no longer than two minutes. Each movement is true and included in the score of the dance, where there are audiovisual accompaniments along with the dancers' part.
Two pieces of the Australian dance company's creative work will be given a detailed analysis below.
As for "Glow", its world premiere was in 2006. This English word can mean 1) high fever, heat; 2) light, glare, glow (from a distant fire, sunset). The beginning of the play plunges the
audience into pitch darkness. Only some flashes of ghostly blue light illuminate the dancer's figure in the fetal position. Using parterre technique, the dancer changes a number of body positions, the light flow carefully envelops his figure, repeating his every move, following every movement of his feet or hands. And then, finally, the dancer sits down. We see his facial expressions - a grotesque expression of surprise, confusion, but at the same time, joy. The light flow begins to fall into formless light spots transfused by straight lines of blue light. The dancer falls to the floor again but his face down. His movements now are exclusively in the horizontal plane, they are sharp and sudden, as though he were trying to catch the light in his hands and put it back together again into a single beam of radiation. Finally, he rises to his feet, and we see more controversial emotions on his face - this is wild joy now, combined with hellish suffering. He throws up one hand first, then the other one, each time turning the face towards the movement of the hand. At that we see two faces of the dancer: joyous and suffering. And everything is in darkness again. The stage floor is flooded with white light. The dancer while in the parterre position starts making circular movements of the body, now and then changing the axis of rotation: outstretched arms, then the head dropped face down, then feet. The dancer seems to be drawing with his limbs on the stage, the pictures being volume, light-bringing, consisting of numerous rays that emanate from the dancer's body. This illusion, created by mapping technology, is perfectly readable even in video format, although the dance itself was for performing on the stage. The dancer is again lying in a blur of blue light for a while, but darkness falls on the stage again. Suddenly the darkness is pierced by volume lines that create a net inside a cell, a cell being the dancer's body. The cell shrinks making its victim writhe with pain, then stretches, giving him / her a chance to
breathe out. In the end, the dancer cringes, hiding his / her head in his / her knees. We see his / her fear and frantically shaking hands. But now he straightens to his / her full height throwing off this net. The darkness falls again. The whole stage is transfused with volume streams of white light through which the dancer is moving. The darkness falls again. The stage appears out of darkness. It is spotted with some vague, subtle contours of a human body. The dancer is inside one of them. It is one the contour of which exactly matches the form of his / her body. After some expressive movements, imitating death throes, the dancer freezes, unnaturally outstretching his / her arms with his / her head bowed.
Interpretation of this dance as a reflection of the sun dying at the sunset would be the most simple and obvious. Yet, according to the author, Gideon Obarzanek, the relationship between the dancer and the graphics on stage is a reflection of our constant struggle with inner double, duality inherent in us from the primitive era. Ghostly glow is a dark alter-ego hidden in each human, and the task of every human is not to let the fire occupy the entire soul.
Gideon Obarzanek defines the genre of "Mortal Engine" as a dance-video-music-laser performance. Its premiere was in January 2008. It was shown on the stage of the Sydney Opera House during the Sydney Festival of Dramatic Art. Later the video version of the performance was available on the dance company's official website.
The stage is in pitch darkness at first. Soon the darkness is pierced with two blue laser beams moving in a perpendicular direction. The rays merge, creating dim flashes of dusk light, and we can spot a figure of a man lying on the stage. The beams form a blue ring, rotating in all possible planes around the lying man. It is getting narrower while changing the vectors of rotation and soon tightly hugs the dancer's body. The man
is seen to be rising from torpor. He begins making movements which are full of the expression of rotation, the axis being the dancer's head. Various battements, somersaults and arm movements in parterre accompany the dancer's rotations. And here he dies in a bizarre and unnatural posture, which is a knot of human limbs - crossed arms and crossed legs, pressed against his chest. Then the knot unties. The dancer throws his limbs on the floor in smooth and graceful movements, thus opening up to the world. But from the right side of the stage a host of shadows moves towards a man. These are the dancers transformed into dusk light monsters by the mapping. The video projection in this scene is truly unique: the shadows are projected on the dancers' bodies, turning their three-dimensional bodies into frightening two-dimensional moving blots. The man tries to crawl away from the attacking shadows but to no avail - they overtake him and transform him into a creature like they are. The darkness falls onto the stage.
There appears a lying man on the stage, a green electric shimmer is radiating from him. The dancer's body twitches in time to the flickering light, and his face is a mask depicting endless suffering. The position of the dancer's body, his facial expressions and convulsive movements which are full of suffering suggest Christ's crucifixion and suffering at Calvary. However, creating a volume glow and turning the dancer's body into pure light, the mapping suggests that it is not a God-man whom we see but a machine-man whose mechanical nature makes his human nature suffer.
Next on the stage is one of the duets. It is impossible to know exactly if these male and female on the floor are lying or standing. The stage is in darkness, and the mapping that transforms their bodies into a mixture of clots of darkness and light, and camera movements eliminate the usual space. A man makes no movements, and his
face is emotionless. A woman's breast rises hard and abruptly, and she whispers something to a man as if begging for something, pulls her hand, turns away from him and leaves. The contours of two bodies are absorbed in darkness, the shadows come off them, the shadows still hanging (or probably lying) for some time above the place where the couple was.
Darkness falls from the stage, and there appears a motionless figure of a man with a black spot behind his back. One can hardly recognize the interlacing of two human bodies in the movements and contours of this spot. In the process of their movement on the stage, that are exclusively in parterre, myriads of small black spots, resembling some insects, come off the bodies. They flood the whole stage, contouring the lines of the dancers' movements and every movement of their hands or feet. Soon a live knot stops moving, and the dancers stand onto their feet. Two more pairs join their duet of shadows. Partners pass by each other in small steps and sideways, forming a round-dance of shadows.
There is a pattern of light rays on a dark stage. The duet is in parterre and moves from one end of the stage to another. Their bodies transform the original pattern: it is distorted in obedience to their movements and opens up the fourth dimension.
"Mortal Engine" continues the story of "Chunky Move" in "Glow" performance. This dance is the reflection of conflict between man and darkness inside oneself and the others, between the isolated world of consciousness and the outside world. The shadows and insects the dancers' bodies fall into, surreal flickering light, frozen masks of faces are a dark reflection of human nature. However, a man is gradually becoming not just a human - he becomes a death machine, gradually losing an ability to feel and love. The duets are also manifestations of the human nature duality, as well as a gradual merging
of confrontational origins that are natural to man, due to a dual nature of shadows and technical light. However, optimistic notes sound in the final of the dance: a corridor of green light, created by the mapping, that streams upwards, compresses the space of the stage to its size and leads the hero up to the sky. There, on top, out of nothingness, he pulls his other half, a woman or another part of his soul which is already dead. They rise above this world, turning into the streams of green light and leaving only some shadows on the earth.
Music, video projection, reacting to any changes of the human body, as well as specific choreography aim at showing a rapidly changing and shimmering world in which the boundaries of the human body is an illusion.
Conclusion
In creative work of "Chunky Move", a contemporary dance company, dance gets a sense of universal art that can master such arts as music and sculpture. The Australian dance company actively uses modern art-technologies that make it possible to expand the limits of the artistic image to infinity, blurring out the boundaries of space and bringing the audience into the worlds created by the choreographer. It is partly due to art-technology, that the art of "Chunky Move" is super-important, and active broadcasting of the company's performances through the channels of new media provides its mass character. However, despite such a close collaboration with modern technologies, creative works of "Chunky Move" are, above all, works of dance art. The dance of "Chunky Move" is philosophy aiming at finding answers to the oldest questions about the human soul.
In modern cultural space modern technologies have become one of the most effective ways to create qualitatively new forms of artistic works. Engaged in the art of dance, art technologies favour the expansion of the image
field available for this art. They complement the elements of expression that are traditional for dancing: emotional and dynamic movements, postures of a human body, gestures, and facial expressions. The example of "Chunky Move" dance company shows that with the help of mapping technology and video art dance becomes a cosmic entity, escaping beyond the bounds of earthly existence, bringing the viewers into
surreal worlds. The interactive graphic object can be both a stage set for dance performances, a means of the artistic space organization and a dancer's full partner.
Art technologies make a descriptive and expressive potential of the contemporary dance boundless, providing for the dance to embody a picture of a disastrous and broken modern world in a single artistic image.
References
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Традиции модерна и новейшие арт-технологии в современном танце
О.А. Мизко
Хабаровский государственный институт культуры Россия, 680045, Хабаровск, ул. Краснореченская, 112
В статье рассматривается современный танец в феноменологическом и семиотическом аспектах как результат слияния традиций модернизма и технологических инноваций постмодернизма, систематизируются сравнительно-сопоставительные материалы, касающиеся феномена современного танца, дана попытка унификации дефиниций, характеризующих явления современного танцевального искусства, проводится самостоятельный анализ специфики хореографических средств выразительности в творчестве австралийского танцевального коллектива «Chunky move», творчество которого не описано в русскоязычном искусствоведении. В заключение мы приходим к выводу, что современный танец, родившись как логическое продолжение танца модерн, вбирает в себя элементы танцевальных культур разных исторических эпох, в поисках новых художественных форм, танец обращается к помощи современных арт-технологий, что делает изобразительно-выразительный потенциал современного танца безграничным.
Ключевые слова: современный танец, хореография, модерн, постмодернизм, арт-технологии, видеоарт, мэппинг.
Научная специальность: 24.00.00 - культурология.
