[h]interland GDA, and touring as [h]interland 2.

Site-specific, multi-media piece, commissioned by and for Greenwich Dance Agency. My research enquiry was complex: how to push forward, creatively, the already-established interest in telematics/live performance and cultural difference? I wanted the piece itself, and its spectators, to 'travel between different lands', while simultaneously occupying a given multi-cultural space. I combined, in the event, a real-time webcast of performance from Bangalore, digitally manipulated film of the same dancer in urban settings, plus the presence onsite of live dancers, singers and spectators. In site-exploratory terms,live dancers used balconies, lifts and the stalls as performing areas in the dance agency building, with a series of variously-positioned large-scale film projections, matching or dominating the proportions of materially present performers. The incidentals of the site, together with live, real-time and mediated image-material from India, co-operated to conjure up mainlands/hinterlands of different kinds. The dispersed/juxtaposed contributions of performance elements equally enacted a timely signature-specific ‘dance-performance' hinterland. The relationships (real/virtual) allowed within a highly particular, internally differentiated space, allowed me to thematise the challenging intermix of social and aesthetic contexts. In compositional terms, I focused on expert cross-media artistic collaborations within 'dance': I brought together the (materially present)professional dancers, Sowmya Gopalan and Mavin Khoo, with live transmission of performance by Chitra Srishailan in Bangalore; input from live vocalists, Buttrich and Fuchs; the live webcast work of artistic & technical director, Braun and lighting design by Carter. Other collaborators included Donnacha Dennehy; Bangalore film director, Pete Gomes; visual design, J.Parker. Funded by the Arts Council, Dance Umbrella and the Greenwich Dance Agency.
The making processes specific to (h)interland were the subject of a webposting on the ResCen website which explored some of the research concerns and the issues that arose in the making of the work. The DVD records [h]interlands 2 at Robin Howard Theatre.