Connecting Art,Technology and Dance

MassMoCA, one of our region’s premier visual art museums, and Jacob’s Pillow, one of the country’s most important dance centers, are co-presenting a piece next weekend that combines two of the most innovative artists working today in both fields. Three years ago, Gideon Obarzanek, founder and artistic director of Chunky Move, an avant garde dance company from Melbourne, Australia, met Reuben Margolin, a San Francisco-based visual artist known for room-sized motorized kinetic wave-form sculptures, at the Poptech conference in New England. Obarzanek recalls, “that evening we were mutually complimenting each other, and he suggested we work together. I’d been using high-tech interactive systems. His work is more mechanical, 19th-century industrial design.” Obarzanek went to visit Margolin’s workshop in Berkeley, and they began experimenting, improvising dance with strings and a suspended matrix. They began collaborating, long-distance, to create a work in which Chunky Move’s dancers would interact with an enormous, moving sculpture. “My initial idea was that the sculpture would be built while we made the dance,” Obarzanek said via phone from Melbourne last week. “But his work is very complex and precise and requires complex, mathematical plans to construct.” The resulting sculpture, according to Margolin’s website, has “similarities to a torqued square wave, but rather than adding two sine waves, one axis is tied to the dancer’s arms, and the other axis is tied to the legs. These twin movements allow for a wide range of expression in the sculpture, and the strings can also be distributed between multiple dancers. Gideon figured out how to play it, give it meaning, and somehow incorporate it into a performance. Gideon wanted to build the sculpture on stage, and so I designed an articulating magnetic joint so the paper elements could quickly snap together.” Using these magnetic joints, the dancers connect 220 pieces of the sculpture to assemble it during the performance. “Dancers are extremely well-suited for this,” Obarzanek said. “They are able to repeat complicated movements exactly the same way, every time.” The resulting choreography has been described as ranging from “kaleidoscopic patterns to frenetic, body-flinging chaos, from simple walking to a mellifluous duet of action and reaction, the movement vocabulary…is ever-changing.” “Connected” is Obarzanek’s last work as artistic director of Chunky Move. He is leaving to focus more on writing, as artist in residence at the Sydney Theatre Company. Ella Baff, executive director of Jacob’s Pillow, praises the company he has built. With every piece, she said in an interview, “they invent something completely new, completely unexpected from the last thing.” A work might be “rigorous explosive movement, or a narrative told in action,” but always exciting. Chunky Move will be at MassMoCA in North Adams, MA, on March 24 and 25, and at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, on March 30 and 31. MassMOCA:www.massmoca.org or 413-662-2111. Wesleyan: www.wesleyan.edu/cfa or 860-685-3355.