COLLAPSE (suddenly falling down)

From the UCDavis News Service:

Science and art merge with dance in a pair of upcoming productions at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. COLLAPSE (suddenly falling down), a new work by choreographer and theater artist Della Davidson, explores the breakdown of social orders and ecosystems in a production comprising dance, spoken word and three-dimensional, computer-generated images the audience can view through special glasses. The production is by Sideshow Physical Theatre, the resident professional company of the Mondavi Center and the Department of Theatre and Dance. COLLAPSE (suddenly falling down) is the first production in the Mondavi Center’s new Creativity Project. Said Davidson:

“This piece has developed very collaboratively, in a process that involved several members of the university’s science faculty, and with the 3-D computer projections, which the performers onstage can actually interact with, it’s going to have a different look and feel from almost anything that local audiences might have seen before.”

The images from UC Davis’ W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences, or KeckCAVES, would typically be used to study landscape changes, yet proved a perfect way to integrate images of ecological change and decay into Davidson’s stage presentation.

She collaborated with several faculty members: Louise Kellogg and Dawn Sumner of geology, James Crutchfield of physics and Michael Neff of computer science, plus research associate Gerald Bawden of geology and Oliver Kreylos of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering.

Ellen Bromberg led choreography of the LiDAR scans.

See more videos at CollapseUCD on YouTube.

• Paper in Leonardo
• Isadora Duncan Award for Visual Design