Art, Production Design, Experiential, Creative Services

This project was a collaborative project between myself in the Arts-Tech program, Jared Hutchinson of NYU and UWM Film Department, and dancers Elise Jumes, Emma Call and sculptor-gone-dancer Marissa Waraksa of the UWM Peck Arts Dance Department. AV aid from musician and Geophysicist, Miles Harbury of UWM Geology Department. 

In this installation we focused on the theme of water; an entombment with associations of drowning, suffocating, and cathartic womb-like peace, as well as water as fluid, dancing, undulating; a playful, viscus form yet powerful in nature, always seeking to reach balance. The dancers expressed these ideas of water in a fluid, stream-of-consciousness fashion to emulate water's ephemeral nature entirely with their bodies through the conduit of their minds. Prior to the performance each of us had recited a short story about our intimate experiences with water while laying in a plexiglass box of water made by Marissa Waraksa, and video recorded it. Afterwords through post-production our recitations were transformed into a collection of dark, underworld entities projected onto the walls. The adjacent wall's projection was found footage of children swimming underwater as well as our own footage of our dark forms doing the same. 

My primary role was fabrication of physical and spatial objects used in the installation. All together our surreal, dark and grotesque space became akin to a man-made simulacra of the lowest layer of Hell as in Dante's Inferno by Dante Alighieri, where onlookers immersed themselves with drinks in hand at the Art Museum party down into the lowest layer of The Pit. Thus it evolved into Club Dante; a fluxus inspired space. 

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