WHITE

Major choreographic work exploring the interface between live performance and film. WHITE represents an initial combination of live performance and filmic image, marking a particular developmental stage in the researcher's ongoing enquiry into the choreographic discipline and visual arts. The work explores live performance specificity, staged with pre-recorded, filmed material. Dancers worked in counterpoint to the images behind them. Collaborators were C.Balfour (lighting design) and C.Lane (filmmaker), with three dancers. M.Otter's simultaneous live projection showed the performers' magnified images looped back across the screen behind. The compositional innovation lies in the fact that each of the three/four performers simultaneously present on stage and film-projected, maintain the personal pathways established, so that physical or emotional interaction is prevented; the work seeks, instead, to allow spectators to engage with and ponder on certain sorts of understandings about the human within extreme spatial settings. The piece asks questions concerning the unexpected, the contingent and the 'emergent', in professional dance-making; in interdisciplinary terms, how filming might relate to these choreographic factors. In thematic terms, WHITE explores the question of survival in the Siberian Arctic and reports of the final days of Scott's ill-fated Antarctic Expedition. Research and production were funded by Walter Heun of Tanzwerkstadt from a variety of German and international sources, including Muanich, Joint Adventures, the South Bank and Vienna, tanzquartier Denmark Dansen Scenen and Croatia International Dance Festival in Zagreb and Lucerne. The performance-technological bases continued to be refined and developed throughout in response to changing expert input. The piece was funded and developed, and staged internationally, on the basis of these funding bodies' expectations concerning Butcher's ability to make challenging new work in professional/ creative registers. For analysis and images, see Butcher and Melrose (eds), Rosemary Butcher: Choreography, Collisions and Collaborations, Middlesex U.Press 2005.