KumKum -in development-
KumKum is a multimedia dance work which combines live storytelling, music and projections with cutting edge contemporary dance. It draws on traditional imagery, dance and storytelling, fusing them with modern styles, technology and ideas to create relevant contemporary creation stories. FIRST STAGE KUMKUM KumKum started as part of the Freshly Squeezed Development Residency curated by Stage Juice: http://www.stagejuice.com.au/freshlysqueezed/fsproject.php?id=50003 This residency brought together our three artists to create a ten minute performance on the theme of Island. This was seen at a showing at PACT Centre For Emerging Artists. This first stage piece was very rich in meaning, more than we could fully understand whilst creating it. The key to its success was in the clarity – we kept refining the elements back to their simplest form. One of the most unique and well received elements was the story told to dance, dance done to storytelling relationship we had - Raghav creating and performing a dance to a creation story being told by Alli - and we will be developing that further. Onto these live staged elements Jacqui created stunning projections - circles that grew and shifted color from red to blue, moving across the performance with the story, illustrating it and deepening the experience with further layers of meaning. The music Alli performed through the piece played into traditional story connection between music and the creation of the world and served to further the atmosphere of the projections and the mood of the dance. We had no set, little costume and every element was carefully chosen to serve a triple purpose; symbolically reflective of the themes, to move the story forward and to make the elements most visually clear and beautiful for the audience. Development We have just undertaken a Critical Path Research Development Residancy is going to enable us to fully explore and understand what this creation is about, answer the myriad of question the piece is throwing up, so that we can come to the strong, simple heart of the work and begin looking at how to express that. the dance In the original working of KumKum Raghav Handa’s choreography drew heavily on the ethnic styles of traditional Indian and indigenous Australian dance. In this piece the some moments were clearly one style or the other, and some moments a hybrid of the two, but the critical feedback we received suggested that the most intriguing moments were when these were fussed into strong contemporary movement, when the line between traditional and modern was hard to see. Raghav's intention now is to find a point of synthesis between these traditional styles, and to see how far he is able to contemporize them into something unique and relevant to his culture today. He is trying to find his own personal creation story, and answer the question ‘how do you prove your ancestry and lineage when you are no longer connected to your land?’ the story Alli Sebasitan Wolf will be creating the words of our story. She is interested in how stories make up our identity – that we are made of the stories we tell ourselves and the stories that are told to us. So she has been investigating heritage and creation from this point of view – delving into the importance of the stories coming from traditional cultures and modern science to tell us who we are – exploring what they mean to our connection to our history, our landscape and each other. From this she is writing the tale of our piece, the spine onto which the visuals and the dance will create flesh. So far Alli is also composing and performing the soundscape to our work – using an electric base and a violin bow she created a simple abstract soundscape to the performance. The place of music in storytelling, and as storytelling, is another point of entry into this work for her. Projection Jacqui Mills is creating the projections for this work. She is using this residency to find the relationships between video projections, the performance space and the performer, using projection as both visual imagery and as a light source. She will focus on defining the story of the dance and words through visual metaphors created through the relationships between light, image, the body, and the body in relation to the image in space, aiming to enhance these relationships through the projection design. Key to her work is its simple, elegant symbolism – using symbolic geometrical shapes and colours, imagery of the elements and the body she is able to direct the eye and emotional response of the audience with her projections.