Variable Theremin Collaborative

(not me, because she was way graceful/cool)

How cool is this - I just "played" a theremin! By play, I mostly mean flail around a stage, but still cool.

Theremin: instrument with 2 antennae that react to movement. One antenna controls pitch; the other volume. And you play it without touching it.

But wait - there's more! It gets even cooler! This is an e-theremin! Developed by The Variable Theremin Collaborative, which is funded through Arts for Ohio in cooperation with the @Lab (which is chock full of cool tech toys and sexy computers). I have a rough idea how it works. There are two cameras to capture movement. The motion is put into a computer, multiplied and turned into mHz. Half of the stage is pitch, the other volume. But with two moving bodies, the computer regularly gets "confused" and averages the movement into a new sound.

Add to this a percussionist, a cellist, a violinist and a sound mixer.

It's this crazy synergistic loop! The dancers generate movement, which generates sound in the theremin. The musicians improvise based on the theremin and/or the dancers. Visuals are projected, generated from a feedback loop. And when the exterminate all the bugs, there will be a motion capture body suit involved! It's the ultimate in multimedia interaction.

(playing in the @Lab)

When it was my turn, I was up with an older guy who moved subtly. As I am very much not a dance soloist, I tried to react to him or the music (this is why I do ballroom - I am never the only person up there making an ass of myself). It begs to be played with/by contact improv-ers. When I watched the other people, including the trained dancers, I was much more interested when they interacted with each other or the music than in their own zone. I mean, all by itself, it was a cool dance performance. The music was a little crazy, but since I knew why, it was OK. And it was hugely apparently who was the senior dancer, since she was so much freer in her body, and had a much larger movement vocabulary. But junior girl gets points for pinch-hitting when the original dancer didn't show.

on Pandora: "That's the Way We Get By" - Spoon