John Jesurun's Firefall at DTW.
http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/performance/firefall-organic-web-robotic-people/671/
Firefall, John Jesurun’s new work that recently ran at Dance Theater Workshop (with an emphasis on theater), does not lack for either verbal or visual content. In fact there is so much information flying through the air in the work’s 55-minute length that it feels twice that long—at times too dense for normal, somewhat fatigued brains and eyes to process properly.
The work certainly fits well in this theater, which normally can be exaggeratedly wide for many dance productions (although one function it favors is locating a musician’s table in a corner, as is so often the case these days). (See DTW’s Artistic Director Carla Peterson discuss the work here.) Three long tables sit center stage, at which seven actors sit with laptops. On the cyc is a matrix of the closed circuit feed from the laptops, plus some other larger-scale video footage on occasion. While the effect is sinister in a “constant and all-seeing surveillance” kind of way, it is also somewhat quaint in feel, like the concept of the control room at NASA ten years ago, or the set of 24.
The projections monopolize attention, and evoke the large computer desktop of someone with ADD (ahem). The feed ranged from politics to pop culture to sports, and seemed pre-selected. It began with scripted takes of two women discussing a death from different points of view—one experiencing it firsthand; the other an artist perhaps mining the situation for subject material. (Video clip below.) The montage included clips of a boy singing in the style of Maurice Chevalier, Reagan’s inauguration, Nadal and Federer accepting their Australian Open trophies (an unfortunate reminder of how much emotional impact real life, albeit sports, can make).