“The Same Space” by Peter Leung

Peter Leung directed a dance-film work as an interactive experience. The piece was created over the last few weeks with five dancers from Dutch National Ballet who were filmed with three cameras. As in a real performance there is only one take. The platform that the audience can watch the performance from, developed by Daan Nolen (Sense Studio) offers the viewer the choice to edit their own experience live during the performance itself, as they can move from one camera perspective to another, allowing them to interact with the space.

With the dancers and composer Peter has been exploring themes such as choice, freedom, chance and perspective. The music for the performance film is created by Bertus Pelsner and consists of the dancers recorded voices and the sounds that they made during the filming. The idea was to bring their voices to the surface rather than setting the work to an existing score. In this way everything has been made for this experience. The dancers used timecodes on the monitors as references, as we filmed in silence so we could record the sounds that they made to use in the final soundscape. Peter manipulated the timecodes, as a reference to objective time, for example five seconds can feel more like thirty seconds, especially during this period and people’s experiences with lockdown.

"Having made ‘Gently Quiet’, a series of short dance film portraits at the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted to take the opportunity to research what it means to make a dance film performance. How can I keep an audience invested and interested over a period of more than a few minutes? How does an audience experience a dance work online in a way that feels live? With this project I hope to find out more about these questions and that we, as a dance sector, can keep growing artistically in the digital realm that doesn’t feel like a substitute for the stage."

https://nederlandsedansdagen.nl/nederlandse-dansdagen-digitaal/virtuele-residenties

This residency project is co-produced by Nederlandse Dans Dagen and Dutch National Ballet