SOMASONGS – MORE LIGHT (Aarhus Festuge) DOKK1 Transissions 2015 – FESCH.TV

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Special thanks to all the team who supported director Daniel Belton to realise this project at scale for the Aarhus Festival. The music is by Jan-Bas Bollen with Steve Heather and Daniel Belton. Henrik Elburn masterminded the mapping for this grand site at DOKK1 (Aarhus new media centre and library). 10 projectors across three rooftop locations each beaming 21K lumens carried the three facade moving image design. Audio and video was wirelessly transmitted through a network engineered and installed by Proshop Europe. The show ran in loop over a week reaching audiences of thousands during festival nights. Heartfelt thanks to Jens Folmer Jepsen (2015 Festival Director) and his staff, Henrik Elburn, Jan-Bas Bollen, Jac Grenfell, Tom Ward, Donnine Harrison and the crew.

Ghosts in the Machine (Review)
„At the beginning of Soma Songs, two male dancers, dressed in white overalls, move in nimble fashion along the wall of a limestone quarry, not so much representing labourers at work as symbolising a line of energy, like a ripple of light, being emitted by the high white wall. Soma Songs is a multimedia touring dance performance that takes the form of digital video projected onto three separate screens and was supported at its premiere by a platform of live music. It’s part of an ongoing series of dance works – the 15th in 12 years – put together by choreographer Daniel Belton and his collaborators, known collectively as Good Company. Belton’s recent pieces show an obsession with what might be termed technological mysticism (that intersection where the ghost in the machine blends with the human spirit), which is expressed through (or compressed into) the power of dance. Soma Songs, all film sequences, resembles something sewn together out of scraps of gossamer: it’s delicate and ethereal. A sawn block of stone becomes by turns a stumbling block, a puzzle block, a juggling block and a building block: it’s a cosmic cube, a cornerstone of the universe. The dancers (Belton and visiting Brit Tom Ward), positioned mostly as white blurred figures against a dark background, so spectral that they resemble holograms, dance rings around the cube like forces that have been released from within it. The music, put together by Dutch composer Jan-Bas Bollen, evokes core samples, sound waves, a planetary hum. There are scrapings on stones, the clack of sticks. Bass guitar thrummings are augmented by tapped tuning forks, and hands being waved over infra-red sensors to trigger bursts of white noise. Digital artist Jac Grenfell fills in the video screens with computer-assisted designs of half-circles, circles, angles and grids: the cube turns into a 3D jigsaw, its component parts disassembled then reassembled by the dancers. These dancers, made to vibrate mesmerisingly like hummingbirds, or stage fits like psychotics in strait-jackets, pull their own dance phrases apart, then rebuild them, their time-lapse movements reminiscent of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s gridded photographic sequences designed to accurately demonstrate human movement. By the end, the dancers arrive at a state of anti-gravity still clinging to their cube mother-lode, which now resembles a spacelab. Two figures in space, they are stranded there without lifelines. The effect is haunting, and brilliantly realised“ Original premiere review by David Eggleton for New Zealand Listener Magazine, 23 Jul 2005.