WE Create Ice - exploring wilderness via screendance

• Main Authors: Salzer, Heike, Baer, Ana
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Screendance; Romanticism; Wanderlust; Rigby; Iceland
• Online Access: https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/fddf54aa-84b4-4f72-a8ac-d7d7e4a25c56

WECreate ICE - exploring wilderness via screendance The performance WECreate ICE is a transdisciplinary collaboration between screendance artists Ana Baer (US) and Heike Salzer (UK) produced in 2015+16 under the umbrella of transcontinental company WE Create Productions. The performance utilizes dance and video projection to create captivating kinaesthetic poetry, taking the audience on a multi-sensory journey. Consisting of a life dancer and multiple video projections the performance aims to create visual/aural metaphors of lived experiences, captured during an excursion through Iceland, one of the last untouched nature environments of Europe. Guided by Salzer’s notions of Wanderlust and Romanticism (Körner 2014, Rigby 2004) the team travelled through Icelandic wilderness, mapping and reading geographical sites via site specific screendance making (Norman 2010). The Wanderlust method proposes a new approach of screendance creation, as site specific landscape screendance, arguing the re-occurrence of romanticisms in the 21st century. By investigating Baer’s concepts of Liminal Spaces in screendance the authors consider multiple ‘in between’ spaces they have encountered: the spaces between the imaginary/real, between the site/dancer/camera, between negative/positive space in video, between the editing timelines and screens, between the co-authors editing and rehearsing on two different continents, and finally the threshold between life performance and video projection. Experiencing and passing trough the various in between spaces has made a huge impact on the makers practice. Consequently, the authors are interested in the concept of collective experiential research methods and how trust, empathy and subconscious negotiation with sites and artistic collaborators have played a role in the creation of the work.