iMove
iMove
Voci Dance
Choreography by Genevieve Bernard and Anna DeMers
Big Orange Studio 1121 N Mills Orlando, FL
At last – theater for the 21st Century! No dour John DiDonna telling you to “Turn off the phone”, but a place where your twitters are projected on a large screen while Wii bowling and Atari 2600 Pac Man occupy those not involved in texting as furiously as possible. This Art Happening takes place in the Big Orange Theater, a garish yet mysterious building in the ViMi district of Orlando. Recently a galley, it’s now a giant performance space that looks like a film set with bad acoustics. A white infinity wall occupies one corner while a DJ mixes from a scary looking loft and the Arteratti drink white wine and mingle.
As dance time approaches, local performance artist Brian Feldman wordlessly draws the crowd’s focus with a spinning Minnie Mouse LED flasher. Impossibly thin women with miner’s lamps come out and dance mysterious choreography as we jostle to see. The floor is cast concrete, which can’t feel good in ballet slippers, nor to those of us sitting cross-legged to get a better view. Dance numbers moved around the space – a good vantage came to everyone eventually, but as soon as you think you’ve nailed a primo location, the dancers flitter away like last years mortgages.
Electronics dominated the performance. One number projected a dancer on a screen right next to her and applied video effects to her motion on the fly. Another piece projected a film on the infinity wall featuring 4 dancers and their laptops rotating in an elaborate Busby Berkeley routine backed by Xavier Cugat-style music. This was a room dominated by iPhones and iBooks and iPods and iWine.
As part of the larger ArtsFest event occurring this week, a block of free tickets went to the general public. I’m glad they showed up, it proves that this sort of hipness can attract a broader audience, and there’s more to area entertainment than theme parks and cast concrete monuments.
For more information of Voci Dance, visit http://www.vocidance.org or http://twitter.com/VociDance
February 9th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Hmmm. Al, Al, Al,. . .Not dour. Actually the word would be responsible my friend. Seems that right before I informed the audience members at Joe Turner’s Come and Gone – a very different experience than this production – about turning off their phones since they were texting throughout the show, that you were bemoaning the use of phones in a theatre and praising Europe which does not allow it! Hah!
Different circumstances my friend. Different show. So I would not say “Dour” expecially since I was thanked by the cast for doing so and not a glow occurred during the second act of the performance, when during the first act – various areas of the theatre glowed with students texting throughout.
Twitter away unde wonderful circumstances such as these were and YAY VOCI – but do not sit there with phones on during a theatrical production.