Canadian Premiere of Experimental Media Performance

Cinematic Maneuvers is a collaboration among Quebecois film maker Pierre Hébert and Vancouver-based animator Aleksandra Dulic and composer-performers Kenneth Newby and Martin Gotfrit. The project is innovative in many ways, bringing the creation of cinema out of the movie and recording studios and on to the stage. The artists use media instruments of their own design in the form of innovative software which allows the ensemble of artists to actually perform an animated movie with soundtrack, live on stage.

Cinematic Maneuvers promises to challenge established notions of the nature of both cinema and the process by which it is created. The mix of animators and musicians collaborate to create a media performance that is situated in the moment of its performance. The artists recognize, or rather reiterate the role of the body in performance using new technologies to allow them to create a form of cinema in the moment. This situated media performance is an exciting window into the emergence of a new form of cinema that combines elements of media performance drawn from traditions such as the shadow plays of Indonesia with the expanded resources of computational media. The result is a compelling opportunity to share in the moment of spontaneous creation with the artists as they take flight over the course of the evening concert.

The Computational Poetics Research Group -- Aleksandra Dulic, Kenneth Newby and Martin Gotfrit -- have been developing a body of media performance techniques for the live performance of animation, music and sound design. Scenes from Out of the Labyrinth was presented in early 2006 at the Elektra Festival in Montreal and Pasiphae’s Dream was recently presented at the India International Center in Delhi, India. Their approach to media performance is resulting in the emergence of intelligent instruments for situated media that support the exploration of cultural encodings and the skilled performing body in the context of technologically expanded performances.

The instruments for situated media performance utilized in Cinematic Maneuvers become objects through which the artist thinks as much as acts, acting as they do as a nexus for not only the production of artistic sensations but also philosophical concepts and scientific understandings of the phenomenal world that the instrument mediates. They balance improvisation with composition in an effective expansion of the traditional means of performance, a marrying of cultural information in the form of media practice with the context of the performance itself and, further, with philosophical speculation resulting in a prismatic moment in which a set of performance gestures become probes of thought extending the reach of the instrumentalist out beyond quotidian understanding to new conceptions of their medium and its relation to the world.