I've Been Haunting Your Rave
Alison Clancy & Light Harvest Studio: Motion-Capture Choreography Meets Architectural Projection Mapping
One of the more thrilling projects I've worked is co-writing, choreographing, advising and performing motion-capture choreography for Light Harvest Studio's massive video-mapping pieces. These collaborations with visionary artistic director Ryan Uzilevsky have been projected on buildings and at music & art festivals all over the world. It's hard to get a sense of scale for these massive projects on small screens, so I've been reticent to try or explain it to anyone, so thank you CBS for creating athis feature:
If you've had a giant flaming goddess looming over you at rave (Burning Man, Robot Heart, Central Park, Lightning In A Bottle Festival, etc.) in the last 4 years... surprise it was me, partying with you.
If a sparkling, antlered, man-creature scaled your favorite museum, you were graced by my all time favorite dancer, Flex Is Kings legend, JayDonn:
Light Harvest Studio was the first collective to integrate animated, motion-capture choreography into large scale, architectural video mapping. The process involves building scale-proportioned scaffolding models, of specific buildings, in motion capture studios. Then we choreograph and perform to interact with these models while wearing motion capture suits. This allows dancers to interact with scaffolding as if we are interacting with the building itself. In our piece The Awakening JayDonn builds, destroys, and reimagine the massive structure multiple times.
I met Light Harvest’s Artistic Director Ryan Uzilevsky when I was 19. I put on a blank white mask and performed a bizarre dance solo for him in my East Village studio. We've connected at random points in time to make weird shit ever since.
Also featured in the CBS video is the death defying arial of Anya Sapozhnikova, dancing by Chelsea Ainsworth and Lauren Stucko, and the work of many talented designers, animators and projection technicians. Special thanks to Luma Projection Arts Festival.