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Interview with Mark Coniglio of Troika Ranch Francesca Ezzelino

Troika Ranch is an innovating digital dance theatre company based in New York. Its founders are the choreographer Dawn Stoppiello and the computer programmer / media artist Mark Coniglio, whose research is mainly focused on the interaction between human body and digital media. In fact through particular technical devices the dancers have complete control over music, lights and video images, which change according to their movements.

How did your collaboration start?

Dawn and I were in a class for composers and choreographers at California Institute of the Arts in 1987. This class was directed by pioneer electronic music composer Morton Subotnick, and the dean of the dance school Christyne Lawson. It was an amazing class, in that we were really asked to investigate the power of music over dance, and vice versa ­ trying incredibly varied combinations of music and movement created by the students taking part in the class. As part of this process, there was a week where dancers made phrases, musicians made short compositions. And Mort and Christyne would put them together at random, simply pointing to a composer and choreographer and saying “you and you ­ go!” Our first collaboration began simply as a results of this random pairing. But Dawn and I instantly hit it off, as we immediately found that we saw eye to eye on a number of aesthetic ideas. This led to our first major work as students, “The Need” which was performed at CalArts’ Modular Theater in 1989.

How did the dance world react to your innovations? Was there curiosity or scepticism at the beginning?

I think that the dance world didn’t know about our work at the beginning. The people that were doing the most work and research in the field of gestural interaction were musicians and composers ­ which is the tradition I grew out of. (I’m talking about the early 90’s now.) We did have a web site very early on, and that started getting the word around, for those who were savvy enough to be on the web at that time. I think that our reputation grew both from our work and from the numerous workshops that we began teaching in the mid-90’s. That’s where the word of mouth really began to spreadÉ as this got us over to Europe, where there was far more energy focused on dance and technology work.

Your work incorporates different disciplines (dance, theatre and media): does this allow you to reach a wider public or does it make more difficult to understand your shows?

I think it allows us to reach a larger audience. As it is, I would not say that the “hard-core” audience is our primary audience ­ this may be because we don’t put dance first, but use an equal alongside the theatrical and media materials. Instead our audience, like our work, is a mixed group of those who are interested in visual art, theatre, media art, as well as those interested in technology in general. Because of our content-based approach, where there is an idea or narrative theme that is being exposed through the abstract materials, it may be that those who love theatre may be our best audience. But we’ve always been quite proud of this, as many who will come to our shows will tell us that they’ve not ever been to a dance concert before, as the form didn’t interest them, etc. To think that we are introducing them to dance, and perhaps piquing their interest, has always been a pleasure for us.

The difficulty in our work for viewers may come in the abstraction of our narrative ideas. It is always clear that we have a narrative intention, but we never make it explicit. Instead, our hope is to make complex relationships between the materials, that suggest tensions and conflicts, and to let the audience read their own concerns into these relationships. While we keep them within a general world, the final interpretation is up to them.

Through your technical devices, music, lights and video images change directly in relation of the dancers’ movements. However in some of your works, for example ‘In Plane’ and ‘Surfacing’, the image on the background looks like an enemy for the dancer rather than just his double. Is there a conflicting relationship between human and electronic or the latter always follows the former?

In “In Plane” in particular, the video image did serve as a competitor to the dancer. The notion in this piece was that the dancer had human limitations, as well as physical ones like gravity, that could not be overcome. The video doppleganger could float in the air, go in slow motion, and otherwise do things that the human body would find impossible. But it was trapped in the two-dimensional plane of the screen ­ thus the title “In Plane”. This distinction was emphasized at the conclusion of the piece, when Dawn Stoppiello (who performed and choreographed it) jumped over a track that spanned the downstage lip of the stage, exiting her three dimensional constraint and breaking the “fourth wall.” The implication was that she somehow triumphed over the her virtual companion. This exploration of “man vs. machine” was a theme that could be found in a lot of work made in the early-to-mid-nineties, as we were all considering the explosion of the Internet, etc.

I don’t think, if you saw “Surfacing” in person, you would feel the same about it as “In Plane”. The music and visual components in Surfacing have a much more human feel, as does the choreography. “In Plane” consists mainly of running, jumping, and falling. “Surfacing” is much more tender in several partsÉ and so I think the feeling you get from the echoes of the performers seen in the screen is more like an amplification of number ­ seeing a mass humanity emerge from the four performers.

What do you decide first when you prepare a new show, the movements of the performers or the effects you would like to obtain through them?

There is no formula. Certainly, my own technical interests will lead us in certain directions, e.g., the use of camera tracking in 16 [R]evolutions. But typically, our shows begin with a single word ­ the most recent case being the word “evolution”. From there, Dawn and I will develop ideas that focus on this word, and start keeping heaps of little 3x5 cards with impressions, movement ideas, random thoughts ­ whatever comes to us. Upon looking back at these, we see which ones begin to resonate and act on them, and that, more than anything, determines what will end up on the stage. A good example from 16 [R]evolutions is the section in which the dancer “paints” ribbons of colour using the camera tracking system. I had written on one card “Dance dances her own DNA.” I then set out to make a technological solution, but I only took some initial steps when writing the actual computer code. We would then head into the dance studio and try it ­ to see what properties the digital materials suggested, both its inherent properties, and the way in which one had to move to generate the imagery. I would then change to code, adapting it to what we saw, to make it more responsive to certain movements, etc.

Do you think the body is the greatest form of communication?

Yes. We all have one, we all move with it, experience physical pain from injury, make love, etc. It is a common bond that we share with everyone, and has no mediation. Even a painting is a technological mediation between the thoughts of the painter and the eye of the beholder. Even when two people do a completely “abstract” dance, the implication is of a relationship ­ because we ourselves instantly feel a relationship when we encounter another body.

Can you talk about your last work, ‘16 [R]evolutions’ and explain the title, which is quite particular?

Well, as I mentioned above, it began with the word “evolution”. So the title is simply a play on that, as we reckon that each evolution is in fact a revolution. The number sixteen is mostly there to imply multiple stages of evolution, though somehow it for us makes an oblique reference to John Cage’s “16 Dances”, in which Dawn performed for Cage’s 70th birthday celebration in Los Angeles many years ago. (Our work holds little in common with Mr. Cage stylistically, but we are certainly admirers.)

Our original notion was to trace an evolutionary path from a single cell to our current state. But as our research continued, we began to focus simply on the polarity between two states of being: animal and intellectual. The animal being appears brutal in its survival tactics, but maintains a pure and heightened awareness of its surroundings. The intellectual being has repressed the wild animal drives to allow social order, often to the point of abject disconnection. But, the need to reconnect with our animal instincts is in us (as evidenced perhaps by the popularity of reality television programs that provide a banal simulation of the evolutionary path toward dominance). In the end, 16 [R]evolutions is our personal reflection on the positive and negative aspects of our animal/intellectual selves.

In terms of the technology, real-time motion tracking allows the dancers to interactively manipulate the digital media as they perform 16 [R]evolutions. The tracking system is a low-tech version of the motion capture technology used for Hollywood movies. Using a single camera pointed at the stage, free software called EyesWeb creates a twelve-point "skeleton" that follows the silhouette of the dancer's bodies. The position and trajectory of each point is passed to Isadora, the real-time media manipulation software designed by me (Mark Coniglio). Isadora generates the visuals and manipulates aspects of the sonic score by interpreting the movements of the skeleton, allowing an intimate linkage between performer and media. If you'd like to better understand how it all works, please stay after the show when we will allow members of the audience to try out the mediated environments in 16 [R]evolutions.

I have noticed that in many of your works you consider the relationship between past and present and the evolution in general as something dangerous. Is it true? And so how does this relate with the use of technology in your shows?

I don’t know if we show it as something dangerousÉ but certainly to be considered carefully. Nothing is black and white in my book ­ technology offers us many wonderful opportunities to express ourselves as human beings, to make contact, and to share ideas and information. But, technology can also serve to make us lazy in these same areas if we do not make use of it wisely, and I do see that as potentially dangerous.

That being said, I suppose that the tension in our work does often come from a conflict between past and present, in one form or another. Certainly, in The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, this was quite explicit, especially because of the heavy use of text that made this point so apparent. But in Future of Memory, I would say that this was, if present at all, quite muted. Though we didn’t really see it while making the piece, Future of Memory was more our personal reflection on being in New York during 9/11. It was more about what happens to memory as we age ­ what stays with us, what gets lost, painful memories that unintentionally change as our psyche struggles to integrate them into our personality. 16 [R]evolutions really isn’t about technology serving as an engine of losing touch with our animal nature, but simply that tension between intellectual and animal. Technology in modern life figures into this certainly, but in the section that abstractly portrays one of the characters “breaking free” from her deadened intellectual state; a technological metaphor of freedom is used, as she paints the world with her body. (As described above.) The imagery is very digital looking in a way, but also organic because it emanates from her movement ­ a hybrid actually. And perhaps that is the overriding metaphor, one that implies that integration is the real place of self-fulfilment.

How do your ‘Guerrilla Performances’ tie in with the rest of your projects, as they do not seem to use any technological devices?

Well, they actually did have technology, one way or another. The most significant being, when we did our performance at the Holland Tunnel, I had a small, radio transmitter that was broadcasting my music. A sign advised the drivers which frequency to turn to be able to hear my composition on their car radios. But I’m afraid we haven’t really done any of these recentlyÉ which is too bad as they were really fun to do. It would be interesting to see how far you could go in a post 9/11 New York City ­ we were almost arrested when we did one on the Staten Island Ferry.

Do you think your research will ever come to an end?

Ha-haÉ no. The technology and sensory systems we now use come no where near measuring and representing the articulation the human body is capable of. As a composer, I consider the violin a wonderful device: the tiniest and subtlest of movements can create a meaningful audible result. When the systems we use with dancers reach this level of sophistication, perhaps I will take a rest.

http://01sj.org/content/view/215/52/