FLY, 2013
A Choreography and Digital Animation Collaboration at LA><ART
By Flora Wiegmann and Miljohn Ruperto
Debuting April 25-27th at LAXART
After a few seconds they’ve come to a tactical decision and they begin to do what they can, to buzz and try to lift themselves.
For FLY, Wiegmann and Ruperto have conceived of a work that uses six performers to reenact Flypaper by Robert Musil (1880-1942). Musil’s essay Flypaper painstakingly describes the struggle and incipient death of an unlucky housefly stuck upon a ribbon of flypaper. In a new adaptation, Flora Wiegmann has choreographed six dancers to move as fly appendages, reenacting the plight of Musil’s creature. Pauses in the dance score open to a lenticular LCD screen. Mounted on a plinth, it displays an insectile animation mirroring the choreography. In these various registers of scale that begin with Musil’s fly, corporeal movement is staged, captured and distributed in separate approximations of size, form and life force.
In order to make this work, six dancers’ movements were recorded in a motion capture studio and eventually assigned to a digital model of a house fly. The resulting video is a life-sized image of a fly, powered by human action.
