Parallax
PDF: Parallax Media Release 2019
Electrify your senses with this daring dance and digital technology experience by one of Australia’s most innovative performance artists. ‘Parallax’ is a triple bill of contemporary dance that integrates human movement, animation and 3D illusions. In ‘Parallax’, experience the intersection of 3D imaginary worlds with live performance.
The live contemporary dance and animation performance is set within virtual computer generated 3D environments. The audience puts on 3D glasses to view the 3D imagery that appears to come out of the wall and dance with the performer. The audience also feels like they can reach out and touch the images.
‘Parallax’, has been created by Melbourne based choreographer and animator Dr. Megan Beckwith. A trained professional dance artist, Beckwith has been developing hybrid works that integrate live performance and projected animation since 2004. ‘Parallax’ will include 3D stereoscopic projection, representing the latest development in Beckwith’s ongoing exploration of the creative potential of integrating live dance with computer animation.
Described by the Melbourne Age as ‘a trailblazer’, her work has also been featured on the uber-cool UK based blog Prosthetic Knowledge, and picked up by the Tumblr Radar. The computer game culture magazine KILLSCREEN noted that her work ‘opens a rabbit hole of accelerating conceptual possibilities’. In 2016 she won the Australia Post Art Prize for the animated dance, Torso and in 2017 the Gasworks Arts Park awarded her the Small Gem’s commission to further develop “Parallax”.
Show Synopsis
Be transported to different worlds
A woman drinks a green drink and enters an illusionary world in which she is transported through a series of fabstract spaces. The hallway she is standing in becomes a portal to new digital worlds. Each world she enters is different, sometimes dangerous though sometimes not. The environments she enters contain fragments of the past rendered as 3D objects such as, Leonardo de Vinci’s spheres, Charles Wheatstone’s cubes, Euclid’s Greek columns. These 3D objects are representative of the historical and philosophical shifts in the notions of visual perspective. Each object she encounters creates different physical and emotional problem the woman needs to negotiate. In each world she sees herself from different perspectives, creating an effect of parallax.
Quotes
that leap into the audience.”
game-style navigation for her digital world”