Valeria Caboi

It is a choreographic research project that uses technologies that most people will have at hand (smart phones and computers connected to the Internet, small projectors). During the research period the project facilitated workshop sessions where dancers from different points of the world interacted together without physically meeting, with the aim of creating choreographic material over a distance.

The project comes from an idea of dancer and choreographer Valeria Caboi, who has been researching into the relation between technologies and the body physicality in live performance, studying dancers reactions when they meet the untouchable representation of other performers (in films and real size projections).

The process:

To collect material we proceeded this way: in every session we met a performer, or a group of performers. We projected on a wall a recorded video of dancers we worked with

somewhere else, and we asked the new performer to interact with it. Than we switched off the projector and filmed the sequence of movements that came out of the session. The new video we made was used with other performers in other places. The Red T-Shirt is the only physical object, a symbolic constant that all the participants have in common during the sessions.

So far the sessions took place in Italy, Portugal and England and included the following participants: Francesca Bertozzi (Italy), Sara Bernardo (Portugal), Kindall Payne (U.S.A), Maria Aguayo (Spain), Johan Philippe (France), a group session in Florence (Italy), with Pietro Pireddu and many participants from the audience, and a Live performance in Naples (Italy) in the Independent Arts Festival ALTOfest. Now is the moment for the participants to finally physically meet and make a real show using the gathered material.

We strongly believe that in the near future this new way of choreographing could become a common technique for making performance. We are assuming that life is changing: travelling, student exchanges, emigration. All of this is related with new ways of communicating, and it affects live performance arts too.

This way of using the Internet and technologies such as smart phones, computers and projections, contributes to the cultural and artistic exchange between different countries: with the Red T-Shirt Project approce, it is easy for people that have a very different background, age, language, culture, to communicate trough the dance language, without ever having met.

Also, the project involves both dancers and non-dancers, in an attempt to reach out to people that would not normally have direct contact with dance.

                                     RED T-SHIRT PROJECT PERFORMANCE

• CHOREOGRAPHY: After two years of research, the Red T-Shirt Project is ready to turn the gathered video material into a choreographic creation. A food for thought, through the dance language, about loneliness in the social network Era, in which we can communicate with the world while our organic body suffers a physical isolation. Dancers on stage will interact with video-projected people of all ages, races, cultures, movement stiles, professional performers and non-dancers, everyone wearing a red t-shirt: the only material object in this virtual and multiple dance meeting

• LIGHT DESIGN:

  The light design's concept is tought around the two types of presence on stage: the physical present dancers and the filmed dancers. This will create a difficult and exciting dialogue between the cold lights of the projections and the stage lighting.

  SOUND DESIGN:

  The sound design will use the real body and breath sounds of the dancers on stage and dancers in the videos. The mix of the two will create a sometimes comfortable, sometimes annoying contrast between the clean and perfectly recorded sounds in the videos and the dirty and imperfects sounds on stage. There is the open possibility of using the audience sounds as well.