Guerilla Dance Project has been operating as a dance company for 2-3 years. Laura Kriefman is also a Clore fellow.

Laura began by showing a video  that spanned the length of Guerilla Dance Project, tracing its development, from dancing with everyday objects, to sound-triggering objects and embedding dance into everyday life. The projects are often based in public spaces and exist half-way between a game and a performance.

Guerilla Dance Project’s approach is diverse in its ambition to liberate dance from formal environments, making sound and dance surreptitious and portable. This is made possible by a wealth of collaborators, not only dancers but scientists, technologists, composers, international collaborators, organisations and buildings

Their residency at the Pervasive Media Studio last year enabled them to discover a wider audience and encouraged them to realise the power behind their research; extending and opening up their approach to working and collaborating.

Laura described three key projects for Guerilla Dance Project:

Danceroom Spectroscopy
In this project dancers or members of the general public affect particles projected onto a screen in real-time.

The more you interact with the people around you, the more you affect the particles, the more visually interesting the projections are and the more captivating the experience is.

This project subsequently has been commissioned for the Cultural Olympiad, to be displayed at Weymouth, a 360 degree installation, with an accompanying performance.

 
Rolling Stones

This new project includes a set of fiber-glass stones, painted to look like marble, The largest can be sat on, the smallest you can hold in one hand. The stones make intriguing sounds once you move and play with them. As you explore the stones you work out how you and the others around you can make the stones talk to each other, or create soundscapes.

From the outside, you are watching something between a game and a dance, you are watching everyday movement, guided by sound and play and elements of dance.

Their aim was to find and use technology that was light, agile and small enough to be used with any object. For this talk, Laura attached the tech to her chair and to a book before the talk, and demonstrated the way they create noises: when the chair spun, slid or rocked it triggered different sounds. Different sounds and effects can be assigned to different data streams such as the movement of the object.

The tech that is involved IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit). Multiple sensors including accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnotometers gather data and send it via XD (a radio frequency). The information is processed through Max MSP and Ableton Live. XD was chosen because it is more reliable than using wi-fi, and you can use it in a wider variety of environments with up to 4km of range. They hope to eventually eliminate the computer from the whole system. The stones do not currently have internal speakers as they did not want to compromise the strength of each stone. Instead the sound comes out of one stone which is a large disguised speaker. Experiments proved that as long as the sound source was not too far away, users still associated the noise with their own stone.

The composer she’s working with, Joseph Hyde has created a score of different sounds and music that work well together in multiple combinations. He is particularly interested in whether the soundscape will still sound good if you put lots of sounds and elements together.

Laura is now developing a choreographed show using the stones, in the same location that they are installed, to contrast participation from the audience with a professional interpretation of how the stones might be used, further exploring the companies ethos of putting the dance back into everyday life.

SXSW panel discussion

In July 2011 Laura proposed a panel for SXSW Interactive. Along with Pervasive Media Studio collaborators Victoria Tillotson and David Glowacki she discussed the joys, problems and benefits of collaborative practice. Laura stated: “It is a very different way of working, which stretches you and delivers results”

A dance company presenting at an interactive festival could be considered a strange placing but there was a surprising amount of interest and discussions around their work, underlying the universal nature of collaboration.

For more information about Laura and the work of the Guerilla Dance Project visit http://www.guerilladanceproject.com/