kinoDance

contact: infokinodance.com

Kinodance Company is an interdisciplinary artist collaborative founded in Boston in 1999 by choreographer/dancer Alissa Cardone, filmmaker Alla Kovgan and visual artist Dedalus Wainwright out of a passion for the kinetic arts, experimentation and a strong belief in the power of interdisciplinary collaborations. Since 2004, core members include choreographer/ dancer Ingrid Schatz and lighting designer Kathy Couch.

 

Among Kinodance’s creations are intermedia and expanded cinema stage performances, installations and films. Critics described Kinodance performance as “stunning”, “mesmeric”, “…a daring and dramatically theatrical experience”, “…a breathtaking synthesis of live and filmed dance”, “mysterious and vivid, formally sophisticated and painterly…”

 

Kinodance endeavors merge boundaries between dance, cinema, visual art, and sound, aspiring to develop a common language of interaction among art media. Choreography of elements is the term that Kinodance came up with to formally describe their creative process.

 

Kinodance’s projects have been presented nationally and internationally and supported by NDP/NEFA RDDI Dance Lab, Downstreet Arts/MassMOCA, LEF Contemporary Work Fund, Summer Stages Dance, Bank of America Celebrity Series, Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation), Trust for Mutual Understanding, Monaco Dance Forum, World Music/ CrashARTS, Harkness Center Space Grant Project (New York).

 

Kinodance Company was selected as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch” in 2008.

 

Performances

Light, alive in its many forms, the Film Frame, the Lumia Box, Silent Cinema with live accompaniment, and the film “Blade Runner” are the inspirations for “FUSE”.

 

Kovgan’s images are often eerily evocative, like the displaced blue flicker from a TV in another room. Even when the action becomes frenetic, it’s hypnotically so. And some of the most powerful work comes in the slower, more ambient sections, which build to a surprisingly emotional pitch.” – the Boston Globe

 

Wonderful, a tour de force!…a wild meditation on the TV set – George Fifield, Director of Boston Cyberarts Festival

 

…it grows with more viewings. There is a lot going on there. You bit off something big and should feel nothing but pride…”  David Henry, Curator, ICA Boston

 

Strong dancing, great score, incredible sets and video.”  Maure Aronson, Director of CrashArts/World Music

 

At times the dancers look imprisoned; at other times they’re empowered, as they effortlessly swing up, catch hold of the ceiling, flip upside down, and hang like bats. It all adds to a state of beautiful unreality.” – the Boston Globe

 

…elements have been so carefully blended that what happens is mesmeric.” – the Boston Globe

World premiere: ICA, Boston, April 2008.

In 1754, between absurd attempts to apply his aging worldview to natural occurrences, the French Jesuit monk Father Louis Bertrand Castel, also a mathematician and physicist, invented the ocular harpsichord or color organ. Twice the size of a grand piano, this miraculous object was comprised of 144 musical keys, 240 levers and pulleys, 60 reflecting mirrors, and 500 candles.

 

Dazzling although awkward, it was precursor to both disco ball and MTV in its ambitions to inspire visual ecstasy. Castel genuinely hoped that some day every Parisian household would possess one of his instruments.

World premiere: ICA, Boston, April 2008

Described as “Geo-psychic” by the Boston Herald’s critic Ted Bale, Denizen is inspired by the masterworks of the great Armenian filmmakers Sergey Parajanov and Artavazd Peleshian. Denizen is the artistic response to their films, a way to engage in an imaginary conversation with these filmmakers about the stories they tell, the places they portray, the rituals their characters embody as well as the creative principles they used to make their films.

 

The layering of emotionally potent choreography, exotic imagery, sounds, and staging add up to a daring and dramatically theatrical experience.” – Boston Globe

 

…stunning… “Denizen” integrates film, a scenic design, and especially lighting into the dance to create a theatrical experience with enormous dramatic impact… A breathtaking synthesis of live and filmed dance.” – Boston Globe

 

Denizen is lush and sensual, mysterious and vivid, formally sophisticated and painterly… Ted Bale of the Boston Herald

 

…Idiosyncratic half-folk, half-alien…transforming the potentially alienating language of postmodern dance into a hauntingly familiar experience…” – The Weekly Dig

 

World premiere: Bank of America Celebrity Series, Tsai Performance Center, Boston, May, 2007

SECRET STREAMS is an intermedia performance investigating the essence of motion – the unifying power between dance, film, and kinetic sculpture. Inspired by the spiritual writings of esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner, Secret Streams gestures to the fragmentary nature of memory and the ephemeral qualities of movement.

 

There is something inherently cold, indifferent, mechanical, calculated about technology/ video that mutes the emotional, human impact of dance video works. Kinodance Company’s work – with its deft weaving of live action and projected imagery – is opening important remedies to this predicament.” – Jim Coleman, choreographer/professor of dance, Mt. Holyoke University

 

what you all achieve in terms of suspending time, looping back on time is remarkable” – Richard Colton, director of “Summer Stages” dance festival

 

World premiere: St. Petersburg International Dance Film Festival, Russia, November 2004.

BODY TALES communicates without words in the conversations of body, image, object, light and sound. It operates under the idea that performance reveals the psychological needs of a society and through abstractions of “the real” and “the imagined” attempts to find understanding in the confusing miasma of our current world. BODY TALES runs from extremes of choice and stays in between – in the place where chaos, creativity and confusion exists in an attempt to find answers. The elements of Body/Image/Sound/Objects strive to create a transforming landscape to mirror the landscapes of our world, ever changing, ever tenuous. BODY TALES claws at the surface of the skin and dives down deep, grasping for the soul, swimming fast to the surface with the hope of some truth in hand.

 

World premiere: Mobius Gallery, Boston, MA, November 2001

Installations

Addressing themes of intimacy, communication, and relationship where distance is the premise, Seekers looks at how modern day communications have redefined the search for connection. It considers to what degree an online profile is able to capture the complexity of an individual’s unique set of experiences  can you really get to know someone online?

The history of silent cinema, projector devices, and a curiosity about the persistence of vision are sources of inspiration for The Refractive Kinescope. Conceived as an organism that puts the viewer in the belly of a film projector, it offers metaphorical interpretations of film experiences and exposes the choreographic nature of early cinema.

World premiere: Gallery 51 Annex, North Adams, MA (2009)