Twinning Machine: Second Iteration

New Twinning Machine collaboration with Rhosam ("Sam") Prudenciado. This time occasioned by the 2010 Fete dela WSK. "WSK" is pronounced "Wasak" whose literal meaning in Tagalog is "broken," or "crazy," but which means something like "bad" or "badass" in 2010. A hip, colloquial term of approval, like the terms "hayop," "hanep," "astig," and "ayos" before it. Fete dela WSK is, in the words of its director and chief architect Tengal Drilon, " a festival of post-music and sonic bricolage," which took place in Manila from 19Nov to 28Nov 2010, about which I'll go into greater detail in another post.

(See here for my notes on the first iteration.)

I'd like to thank Myra Beltran, DanceForum and the Contemporary Dance Network of the Philippines (of which Sam is a member) for their support, and the grant of the space and time to explore this enterprise, which is essentially an effort to make a dancer dance with himself. Sam and I do this with the use of the Twinning Machine --an original program that I coded with Processing-- basically a video sampler with a live camera input.

Of course, I reserve my biggest thanks for Sam, without whom this would have been impossible or worse, unwatchable. Video feedback is a noisy and dangerous beast. It fills the screen with bodies, and if the choreography is cluttered, it can easily turn the screen into visual sludge. Sam's style of alternating modular variations of a single graphic gesture (most clearly illustrated in 7:00 to 7:35, where he basically stands in various locations on the stage) with sections of "lead guitar" is particularly suited to the idiosyncracies of the program. I really also like the way he will sometimes do things backwards, in order to complicate the reading of the images. Whether they are moving normally or in reverse becomes harder to tell when the dancer himself is prone to walking backwards.