Double Vision

By Anita Hamilton

Like the Aurora Borealis streaking the midnight sky, a glowing apparition lights up the stage. It's radiant, wispy and ethereal. But you're so focused on the intricate moves of the dancers onstage that you almost miss the ghostlike figure before it vanishes a few seconds later. Was it just a dream?

It may feel like one, but in reality it's an animated, digital dancer, projected onstage in Biped, a hypnotic, groundbreaking performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In a single stroke, Biped brings dance, that most physical of the arts, into the digital age, engaging the audience with its playful illusions. It's digital wizardry at its finest, and you don't need 3-D glasses--or opera glasses--to enjoy it. The Cunningham troupe performed Biped at Lincoln Center in New York City last week. It will tour Europe in the fall and return to Chicago, Washington and other U.S. cities this spring.

Throughout the slow-tempo, 45-min. piece, danced to a haunting score by Gavin Bryars performed with synthesizers and stringed instruments, the virtual dancer reappears in various incarnations. Sometimes it's alone, bathed in purple light; at other times it's part of an elaborate ensemble of virtual dancers. It may be 20 ft. tall and amber, or tiny, white and barely there. Its "body" morphs from a hand-drawn squiggle to an array of dots to a mesmerizing blur. When it's visible, you study its interplay with the live dancers. When it vanishes, you wonder when it will return. At times, the audience gasped.

This "moving decor," as Cunningham calls it, was painstakingly created by digital artists Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser. Employing the techniques used to create such video-game characters and animations as Tomb Raider's Lara Croft and the dancing baby Ally McBeal, Eshkar and Kaiser fine-tuned the process to capture precise dance steps. To start, they used motion-capture technology to record the movements of a live dancer with digital video cameras. They then used 3-D animation software called Character Studio and 3D Studio Max to map the movements onto their own digital drawings and render the final, ghostlike images. The finished video is projected onto a 28-ft.-tall, meshlike gauze draped in front of the stage. It's reflective enough for the projections to appear vibrant, yet porous enough to leave the live dancers, in their shimmering silver unitards, simultaneously visible to the audience.

The effect fools the senses. In one sequence, a virtual dancer moves among a series of multicolored, vertical poles that seem to extend toward the back of the stage. The figure looks tiny as it steps into the background, huge in the foreground. Once you're accustomed to this exaggerated virtual space, the digitized dancers disappear, leaving only the virtual poles. Then live dancers appear onstage and traverse the same space. "You stop thinking of space as being one set construction, but rather as a myriad of possibilities," says Eshkar.

In another sequence, several virtual dancers appear to be walking on shorter, angled poles suspended in space just above the live dancers' heads. In the viewer's mind, the poles become a kind of shoreline and the virtual dancers luminous reflections in a lake. "The projections are conditioning you to see different aspects of the choreography, like rhythm, group dynamics and the body," says Eshkar.

Cunningham, 80, whose innovative choreography has been expanding audiences' expectations about dance for more than 50 years, is reticent about connecting the dots. "The only relationship between the virtual and real dancers is the one you make for yourself," he says, comparing the experience of watching Biped to channel surfing. But that may be precisely the point, according to Roger Copeland, author of an upcoming book on the choreographer. Copeland believes that Biped, like much of Cunningham's recent work, is about how to focus your attention in a world full of distractions. "It's a model for a very progressive society, where different components are able to exist side by side without encroaching on one another." That may sound like a pipe dream, but in Cunningham's inspired rendition, it's an irresistible one.