Make Way on the Dance Floor
San Francisco is a city with a rich legacy of blending live performance and experiments with technology. For the last eight years, the Women on the Way festival has been a part of that tradition. Organized by the aptly-named Footloose organization, whose emphasis is on emerging and established women artists, the festival celebrates dance as a form of collaborative expression within a community and has adventurously embraced new media as a component of these expressions. The WOW festival is an annual highlight of those efforts, and this year it will bring to San Francisco an ensemble of talented artists. Throughout the month of January, sound artist Sean Clute and choreographer Pauline Jennings's dance company, Double Vision, is presenting two interactive performances, "Cycle" and "Three Canons and Mise en Scenes". On January 18, Laetitia Sonami and Les Stuck will present an intermedia performance entitled The Appearance of Silence, (The Invention of Perspective). Stuck is a sound and video artist who has collaborated with a number of notable performers and Sonami is a multi-talented composer, dancer, choreographer, and installation artist. Their project refers to the ways in which perspectivalism, as an invented way of seeing, is thrown off by new technologies that arguably flatten our depth of field. The piece will use the body's relation to a series of abstract sounds to tell the story of fidelity in vision and music. At center stage will be Sonami's famous "lady glove," a midi-studded black lycra glove whose sensors respond to movement with sound, creating a dynamic push/pull relationship between the dancer and her score. Video and sound excerpts on Sonami's website chart the evolution of these experiments in her work. - Marisa Olson
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