Projects
MUSICAL COLLABORATIONS:CONTACT
Comissioned by the King's Place Festival, Contact is a collaboration between composer Philip Venables and dance artist Lucia Tong.
Contact developed from a desire to look at how we can use the human body to create music leading to the development of a revolutionary contact dance floor. Its touch sensitve surface reponds to movements on the floor, creating music samples made from amplified sounds of movement and voice creating a unique and fascinating fusion of music and movement. The floor has been programmed with lots of samples from Vivaldi to Oliver Knussen to Girls Aloud to Tori Amos to some death metal and also draws from natural sounds including sounds of swarms of bees, thunderstorms, childrens songs, crickets, music boxes, clocks and the weather. With this amazing new musical 'instrument', audience members can "perform" a new piece everytime they move, by "playing" the floor with their body.
Along with the interactive installation, Philip and Lucia developed a solo dance piece using the interactive contact floor looking at changes of seasons as related to the progression of life from childhood to old age.
Audience young and old making music on the contact dance floor
photos: Lucia Tong
Tipping Point at Brighton Soundwaves Festival
Tipping Point at Brighton Soundwaves Festival
MUSICAL COLLABORATIONS:TIPPING POINT
Tipping Point is the product of a unique collaboration between musician and dancer. From two of the consistently most inventive and genre defying artists currently hanging out in the hinterland of the avant garde.
Working together for the first time musician Leafcutter John and dance artist Lucia Tong will produce a piece examining balance.
"I was watching the terrible footage of the Japanese tsunami, looking at the way the wave changed the arrangement of man made objects. Suddenly order had be eradicated by chaos, and my ideas about composition were forever changed" Leafcutter John.
Commissioned by MOVE! an evening of music, movement and dance at Soundwaves Festival, Brighton
photos: Roger Hamar