About
In the ANIMAL, conversion of awareness into action is instantaneous. To fight or flee, to strut or pause, to synchronize, camouflage or attack: these are not decisions, but immediate and visceral responses held deep in the muscles of the body of the animal. ANIMAL: Archaeologies of Instinct is a collaboration that places a choreographic exploration of instinctual response, spatial awareness, and pack behavior within an electroacoustic reinvention of pre-verbal, pre-musical utterances and sonic environments, resulting in an immersive sound piece for seven dancers, live electronics, and video.
Sound artists Sean Clute and Otto Muller create a parallel collaborative and place-based process for devising sound. Working from narrative description, Clute records relevant field recordings across Vermont, while Muller builds primitive abstractions of orchestral instruments: fiddles built of nails and rough-cut lumber, cigar-box viols, horns pieced together out of hose and conduit. Then through a series of improvisations employing live sampling, FFT analysis, and granular resynthesis, Clute and Muller build these raw utterances in cohesive multichannel compositions that can be spatialized and tailored to the acoustics of a performance space.
The music is influenced and created for Hanna Satterlee’s choreography. Satterlee has investigated instinctual somatics over two years through Authentic Movement exercises, research into the physiology of non-human bodies, and a series of “draft” performances in varied spaces and including the swamps and snowy fields of Vermont, that are followed by public dialog. The choreography is set against a backdrop of environmental video work by Lukas Huffman, a film director who captures the kinetics of natural spaces, moving seamlessly between the miniscule and meteorological scales. The object of this project is not to present a series of representations, but to excavate and abstract these dynamics in ways that evoke an embodied experience of the dancers’ movement and focus within the audience.
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ANIMAL (Full quality .aif files and .pdf | 749.1 MB)