Video image as Digital creates phantasmagoric an organic space, by your production and performance. As it’s completely different from projection mapping only projected to walls of buildings, I feel the possibility of digital is very spread. Please tell me the theme and concept of Adrien M / Claire B.

Adrien: Along with juggling during the latest years I have developed a toolset for video creation called eMotion (for electronic motion) based on my stage and juggling experience. It addresses our recurrent query with Claire: how to create a technological infrastructure that continuously puts the human being at the center of the creation? Beyond the fascination for images we want to use the huge variety of possibilities offered by nowadays tools but at the same time instill errors into them, fragility and perhaps poetry so that the post digital show era will be entered, technology being no longer an alibi.

“XYZT, Les paysages abstraits”, Paysages Abstraits, exhibition, 2011, © Laurence Fragnol

Our research for a live digital world is mainly based on the following:

1. A thoughtful digital technology for the benefit of performing arts.
In order to preserve the force of the live presence on stage and then transpose it to the digital medium, all images are generated, computed and projected live.

2. The idea of digital writing and performance of digital scores.
Through a musical approach to the images and an instrumental approach to the computer program, the experience of the moment is emphasized.

3. Interactive ways of overcoming the technical challenge.
Using capturing systems from video game technology (for their power in calculation and reactivity) combined to a work of virtual puppetry (for the value of human intuition and its dreaming ability) allows us to offer the audience this sensitive experience.

4. Use of the unconscious experience of movement.
The computing and mathematical models come from the observation of Nature. This private and unconscious experience of movement creates an imaginary world where abstract graphic forms turn into evocative worlds.

5. The structuration of coincidences.
The gestures interfere with the images to engender verisimilitude and coherence.
In concrete terms, the implementation of these principles is the result of a close relationship between computers, electronics and software all through the eMotion computer program. eMotion is an appropriate tool to experiment the relationships between virtual elements and data taken from the real world. Based on physics models, it is at the core and the beginning of all of the company’s works. Although the project results from researches on juggling, it goes way beyond its original topic while proceeding from the concrete and sensitive connection to matter, body and movement.

“Hakanaï”, dance performance, 2013

Please tell us about the performance of “Hakanai“. In addition, you explained that the title is derived from “ephemeral (hakanai)” in the Japanese language, could you let me know the encounter with the word?

Adrien: “Hakanaï” is a haiku dance performance for one dancer performing in a cube made of moving images projected live by a digital interpreter. In Japanese, the “Hakanaï” ideogram is the union of two graphic elements, one referring to man and one referring to dream. It is used to define the ephemeral, the fragile, the transitory, the intangible essence of matter. We first encountered the word “Hakanaï” in a french newspaper, and it fell on us as an evidence: it was describing exactly what we were looking for, in just a single word.

Claire: This word together with a white tulle-covered cube represents the starting point for the creation of this piece. The four projector-device reveals a graphic universe in constant evolution on the tulle. Performed as a “digital score”, the disposal is generated and interpreted live. The dancer’s body enters into a dialogue with the images in motion. These simple and abstract black and white shapes behave according to physical rules that can be recognized by the senses and to mathematical models generated from the observation of nature.
The audience experiences the performance in several steps. They first discover the the installation from the outside. As the dancer arrives, they gather around to watch the performance. When the choreography has ended, the audience can then take some time to wander amongst the moving images of the structure.

“Hakanaï”, dance performance, 2013, © Romain Etienne

Adrien: Through a minimalist transposition, this piece is based on images drawn from the imaginary realm of dreams, their structure and substance. The box in turns represents: the bedroom where, once the barrier of sleep has been passed, walls dissolve and a whole new inner space unfolds; the cage, whose limits one must relentlessly test; the radical otherness, as a fighting place with an intangible enemy; the space where the impossible has become possible, where all physical points of reference and certitudes have been shaken.
Two worlds convolute through the encounter of gesture and image. The synchronicity between the real and the virtual dissolves and the boundary that was keeping them separate disappears, achieving a unique space carrying a high oneiric charge.

“Cinematique”, dance performance, 2013

“Cinematique” is also very introspective and impressive production. What kind of background or story does it have?

Adrien: Juggling being a specific case to me, it is finally motion in its diverse shapes that inhabits me whatever the objects and bodies’ reality or virtuality. Experimenting motion as a source of emotion has been the guideline of “Cinématique”: it was intuitively built around those dreamy digital landscapes where bodies play with objects. During this meandering process I have chosen to get rid of the superfluous. The scenography has been extremely simplified to
make a huge space of possible: the blank two pages of an open book still to be written.I have
striven to move on from a concrete narration, following my profound and relentless desire to
 “create a medium for the widest possible imagination,” in a nutshell to give the audience the opportunity of a total immersion into the show.
“Cinématique” is an invitation to travel, dream and play. That piece of dream we all have had in our inner self since childhood can resurface at any time and disrupt the rational principles that structure and guide our modern lives.
It is a journey across virtual materials making up as many landscapes. Lines, dots, letters, digital objects projected onto flat surfaces weave poetic spaces that fit bodies and gestures. The imaginary transforms the opaque and the flat to reveal the freedom, the desires and the infinite we all carry in our inner selves, through transparency and motion.