IN|FORM | A Partnership of Equals
Photograph supplied by Metro Arts for production season, October 2022
Image credit Stewart Tyrell, PhotoCo
Contributed by Lisa Wilson & Nathan Sibthorpe
This article was originally published in 2019 (IN|FORM Issue #2) to promote the creative development of BUNKER.
This work will finally open to the public on Wednesday, October 19 2022 for four performances at Metro Arts.
Lisa Wilson and Nathan Sibthorpe discuss their cross-disciplinary collaboration as co-directors (and respectively as choreographer & video designer) on BUNKER, a new intermedial performance work.
We first met during the development of WIRELESS in 2017. Lisa was the co-director of this work, and Nathan came in during the final development as a video designer. During the process we discovered a strong interest in juxtaposing choreographic physical bodies with illusory virtual bodies. This was realised by moments of the work where we staged real dancers alongside their projected avatars.
This use of form left a strong impression on both of us after the project concluded, so we started discussing how else we could intersect our practices to develop something new and interdisciplinary. We wanted to consider both of our art forms as equal contributors from the very start of a process.
LISA: Often video and media design is something that comes in at the end of a dance process and feels like an extra layer that is added on top. With this new process, it’s been really rewarding to start devising a work with those elements at the core. Parts of our early development process so far have involved empty spaces with just Nathan and I playing with design concepts. That has been really useful in defining what makes this work unique.
NATHAN: I tend to resist the term ‘Hybrid Art form’ because to me that says the art forms are blended together in some kind of seamless fashion, and that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m more inclined to expose the seams between art forms – it’s important that we can recognise the different elements coming together in the moment because that’s what makes the performance theatrical. In the same way that two bodies interact as two parts making a temporary whole, I want to feel as though the design and media technology is acting as another dancer in the space – interacting but not necessarily integrated so much as to be invisible.
Knowing that we wanted to make a work that used dance, but also had media forms front and centre, we went looking for a starting point that spoke to both physicality and technology. We became really interested in the 2016 Hawaiian missile alert crisis, when false text messages were accidentally distributed to the population warning of an impending ballistic missile. The way that the people of Hawaii responded to this threat led us to our objective – to explore the physical threat of virtual alarm.
In BUNKER, these ideas have expanded to include broader physical repercussions of digital fear. We’re interested in threatening Trump tweets, Russian propaganda, ideological censorship, hyperbolic conspiracy, the fake news epidemic, and the designer bunker industry. We are reminded of our frailty in a world where utter destruction is not only possible, it is threatened offhandedly in a tweet. Where do we find refuge amidst the potential chaos? How do we construct the illusion of safety in a climate of fear? And when do we begin to believe the panic online? In developing BUNKER, we are exploring switch glass as a projection surface, introducing a new dimension to projection design by toggling between opaque and translucent qualities in rapid synchronisation with content timecodes. This medial feature serves our ideas by playing with binaries of visible/invisible, murky/clear, on/through, inside/ outside, and hidden/exposed.
I do believe that when forms come crashing into each other in a way that we haven’t seen before, it opens us up to a new way of perceiving performance. The most interesting moments we have found in this work only make sense in the space between the media design and the physical dance – not in either one single form.
LISA: When used sensitively, technology is capable of illuminating and embodying our internal landscapes and responses, which may otherwise be invisible. Through this use of form, we hope BUNKER will develop as a work that ultimately connects and resonates with an audience.
BUNKER has undergone a first stage creative development supported by Arts Queensland, Metro Arts and a ‘4 Walls’ residency supported through Ausdance Queensland and Expressions Dance Company
BUNKER at Metro Arts (October 2022) | Lisa Wilson | Nathan Sibthorpe