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Music

A Poetic, Digital Theater Performance

French new media theater show Cinématique tours China.

Is the development of new media art pushing creativity towards an unknown future? Perhaps. But the performance below from French theater company Compagnie Adrien M, is certainly carving out a new terrain—literally and figuratively speaking. Since its inception in 2004, Compagnie Adrien M has been exploring the art of jugglery and its relationship to, and integration with, digital art and performance.

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For example, in their audiovisual theater piece Cinématique, they establish a new style of minimalist aesthetics through an atmosphere of digital projections blended with contemporary dance. The piece is an oriental philosophic tale where the dancers slide into and around cliffs, trudge through streams, dodge craters, and fly over mountains. The story these convoluted projections create not only hypnotizes the audience, but imply a spectacular dream-like environment through the uncertain boundary between virtual and physical reality.

Company founder, dancer, and choreographer Adrien Mondot says:

In recent years, while I was improving my jugglery skills, I developed a new tool for visual composition—eMotion. This set of tools are based on my stage experience, and there was this tendency to integrate unrelated elements (jugglery, dance, music) into one [unified medium]. I intended to push the boundary and let people explore the potential poetics in them, [and] this can be categorized as a new type of digital theater aesthetics.

Mondot’s eMotion provides a new way to augment visual performance. It allows the “live Photoshopping” of text, images, video, drawings, etc. to convey emotional meaning that complements movement and dance in a way that traditional projection mapping can’t. Read more about the technology here.

Cinématique, which won the grand prize at the 2009 Bains Numeriques festival, will tour in China this June through Chongqing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Beijing, Hangzhou, and Dalian.