“"This is the founding work of OP_ERA. The dancer locked within a virtual geometry, becoming the object of a study of her movements on stage rather than a performer giving a performance. The spectacle consisted of the computer-driven processes which were created by the dance moving through space."” — Jorge La Ferla
OP_ERA was the founding work — the first staging of the question that would endure for the next six years. It premiered in 2001 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, as part of Dança Brasil 2001. Two performances. One dancer: Ivani Santana.
The architecture was theatrical, not yet immersive. A cubic stage with three projection screens arranged orthogonally, plus a fourth transparent screen at the proscenium, between the dancer and the audience. The audience sat in the house and watched. The dancer alone interacted with the work, through sensors embedded in the floor of the stage that read her movements in real time.
The piece was structured as a passage through dimensions. At the beginning, Ivani Santana lay on the stage floor, parallel to the audience — visible only as a point in space, the top of her head. As she rotated her body, the point became a line: dimension one.
Standing up, she entered the plane of the rear screen — dimension two, two-dimensional images projected only on that surface. Then images began appearing on all three orthogonal screens and on the transparent fourth screen at the proscenium, and the stage became a cube; the dancer moved freely through it, the images traveling from one screen to another.
Dimension three. Finally, in the fractal interval between the third and fourth, time entered: the screens filled with multiplicities of emergent Lorenz attractors. Throughout, the soundtrack — composed by Fernando Iazzetta — and the images responded in real time to the choreography.
Arlindo Machado described the work as "a kind of mathematical Odyssey, in which the dancer plays an Apollonian Ulysses confronting an army of forms and colors, across four dimensional worlds." The essence of the entire OP_ERA project was already there: the body as agent inside a model of space-time, mathematics rendered as environment, perception as the actual medium of the work.
What changed afterward was where the body stood. In 2001, the body was on stage and the audience watched. From 2003 onward, the audience was the body, and the stage disappeared. The cube remained.
Material / Technique
Performance-based interactive installation. Cubic stage with three orthogonal projection screens plus one transparent proscenium screen, floor sensors, real-time audiovisual processing software, octophonic sound system.
Year
2001
Format
Performance work. Two performances at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro.
Collection
Courtesy of the artists.
Cultural Support
Mônica Moura
Choreography and performance
Ivani Santana
Sound composition
Fernando Iazzetta
Photography
João Caldas