#hallerstein

‘Hallerstein’ Performance 2009

SNG Slovenian National Theatre Maribor

Maribor, Slovenia, October 2009

Dance performance with real-time motion-capture data streamed into Unreal Engine 2004, dancer controlling a virtual chinese-theatre puppet, within real-time virtual scenography in Unreal, juxtaposed with artistic paintings and live calligraphy.

Direction and dramaturgy: Vlado G. Repnik

Integral new media concept: Aleksandra Kostič

Artistic painting and calligraphy: Huiqin Wang

Virtual scenography and interaction design: Ivor Diosi

Choreography and dance: Edward Clug

HALLERSTEIN AS ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

The story of Hallerstein serves as a source of artistic inspiration. The artistic world intertwined in it embodies the universal contrast between diverse languages, cultural and historical barriers, the relation between the traditional and the modern, between science and art, between the East and the West, between European and Chinese cultures, between the left and the right, up and down, between the depth and the surface… The integration of contrasts is the fundamental key to understanding the world in alchemy, tarot and artistic creations of the 20th century art avant-garde guru, Marcel Duchamp.

The Hallerstein performance is not oriented towards dramatic tension originating in historic background, which tells about the traditionalist Chinese refusal of European culture and politics and the subsequent European own refusal of the enlightened Jesuit order. Rather, the representation of artistic visions in visual art as well as dance and music is based on the changing state of things that do not relate to the human guilt, to the cause and consequence as brought to our awareness. Various aesthetic spiritual bodies are found floating on stage, moving through virtual space and time in occasional integrations of control and submission. Observation of space was also the final way out for Hallerstein, too old to return to his homeland, although longing to do so.

The multilayered approach connects several fields of aesthetic observation into a stage performance. Visuals works of art, graphic works, calligraphy and paintings by Huiqin Wang depict characters, letters, scientific symbols and portraits of Hallerstein - although there is no historic image of him to be found in archives apart from some descriptions - at the same time serving as parts of the scenery. Furthermore, the use of video, three-dimensional graphic objects and environments, animation and the seeming infinite virtual space serve to replace the physical environment on stage.

The virtual shade puppet is manipulated by the dancer through a system of digital data transmission of sensory spatial movement tracing. A traditional Chinese two-dimensional puppet of huge dimensions is moving across the screen in infinite spatial loops slightly reminiscent of cosmic endlessness yet oriented and bound to the dancer exclusively. Edward Clug thus discovers its boundaries as well as his own, extending between power and submission, between spatial freedom and limitations, between curiosity and experience, between discovery and desire to return to the initial position, between escape and entrapment - a series of symbolic and psychological contrasts in movement. As he breaks free from the puppet and begins to move without the sensors, his seeming freedom in the second loop is again caught within the limitations that the human body and mind cannot cross.

The basso profondo voice of Cameron Bobro, the timeless narrator of Hallerstein, interprets the story through songs and tunes of centuries past and through traditional music, both European and Chinese. Jesuit music approaches are intertwined with the Chinese, both being based on philosophy. Bobro, a creator of orchestration, transforms those into microtonal music based on numerous colourful tones that are to be found between the black and white piano keys.