Landing/Place

Landing/Place concerns the impact of the unfamiliar alongside the everyday (picture any collision of images that tells you you're not at home). One's presence in a known landscape is a kind of self-portrait, and the lively exchange of competing ideas of "place" is at the heart of our social interaction. With dance for the camera, interactive digital media and live performance, Landing/Place explores sensory, spatial and cultural dislocation, the yearning towards order in the apprehension of difference (is there an emotional experience that can be quantified? Is there a technology in how I see what I see?). After premiering in 2005,
Landing/Place, choreographed and directed by Bebe Miller, was performed through 2007 by Jeanine Durning, Kathleen Fisher, Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Darrell Jones, David Thomson and Keith Thompson with live music by Albert Mathias. Lighting design is by Michael Mazzola, dramaturgy by Talvin Wilks, digital animation by Vita Berezina-Blackburn, and video design by Maya Ciarrocchi. Contributing dance artists include Sarah Gamblin, Ted Johnson and Karl Rogers.

For Landing/Place the space is configured with upstage and downstage scrims carrying large scale media projections. These two views display real-time manipulated video and digital animations. The projections act in conversation with the dance and present images that conjure mood, place, and temporality.

Landing/Place was co-commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center of the University of Maryland, the Bates Dance Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, and Danspace Project. Between Fall 2005 and Summer 2007 it was presented at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Dance Center at Columbia College, Dance Theater Workshop, REDCAT in Los Angeles, CA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, Portland, OR's PICA, Middlebury College, Weber State University, Crash Arts/Boston ICA and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.