I received a package in the mail last week. Below the contents: pieces of thick, copper-colored foil; Vials of water, air, and gold paint; a booklet with photos of gold-painted dancers amid huge, crumpled pieces of the same foil; and a Google Cardboard viewer to turn my smartphone into virtual reality glasses.
This was all set up for the “home experience” of The Other Shore by Seattle-based dance and arts team Zoe Juniper (led by choreographer Zoe Scofield and visual artist Juniper Shuey).
The booklet proved to be an essential element because it contains QR codes that link to performance videos. On Tuesday evening, after a zoom presentation of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (which commissioned the project from Carolina Performing Arts and shipped the boxes), some of the links became active and some of “The Other Shore” could be explored. (If you haven’t bought a box yet, you’ll have to be content with my report for now.)
Virtual reality experiments are still rare in dance, and for me parts of the “The Other Shore” experience were excitingly new. The work is divided into two sections – Book 1 and 2 – but so far only sections of Book 1 are available. This is a series of 25 minute solos filmed with a 360 degree camera. Seeing them in VR gives new meaning to in-your-face dance.
The instructions recommend a swivel chair – a good idea as your perspective is centered and you often have to keep turning to keep an eye on a dancer circling around you. It really feels like you and the dancer are in the same room, almost touching. The intimacy is intense.
This room is a bit strange, however, littered with huge pieces of crumpled gold foil (a trademark of Zoe Juniper). The three published solos follow the same basic order. The dancer slips out from under the foil, arranges it, gets himself wet with a bowl of water and then pulls a pot of gold paint from a hole in the bottom and smears himself with it all over his body.
As this structure repeats itself using the same music, each dancer becomes differentiated and goes through a distinct transformation that manifests itself physically. In order to further differentiate each performer, we also receive a separate audio track in which the dancer’s birth story is told by his family members.
There is a certain tension between the mundane nature of these stories and the mythical claim of the work, between the everyday materials that are sent to the audience (to make the virtual experience more tangible) and the numinous intention (the title, the mystery of birth, the Suggestion, the divine essence from the navel of the world).
So far, all of the golden packaging promises more than it contains, although the technology does show potential for ritual magic. When I tried to watch without the VR glasses, I was much further from being bewitched.
The previous zoom presentation of various clips and montages was even flatter, almost a disservice to the project. But there was a look at Book 2, a series of group pieces where the viewer’s perspective is below the dance, lying on the floor and looking up. Even without VR glasses, the footage showed some exciting fun house mirror effects.
So there’s more to be expected as more videos will be released in the coming months. A live version will debut in Seattle next year, but Zoe Juniper has already shown that there are other shores of the home dance experience worth exploring further.
