A vivid, kinetic examination of an accidental drowning, the Chamecki-Lerner Dance Company's "Antonio Caido," has recently begun a second, digital life as an immersive Web space. This first monthly installment of Dance Online's QuickTime VR project, the (.Mov)ement Series, plants users in the center of the stage at New York's PS 122, where dancers are variously engaged in entering a glowing aquarium, embracing on a clear operating table, and seeming to dive into the floor.
Dance Online launched its VR series last week, with the idea of shifting the dancer/audience perspective. Its creators hope to give online audiences a chance to explore dance from its point of origin: the stage. Clickable hotspots within the 360-degree space link to a review, an image gallery, and a clip of a film shown during the actual performance.
Andrea Sferes of Dance Online says the site looks to panoramic imagery to "cross-reference the live stage environment with the Web" using visual space as an interface for deeper information. "These are all static images, but the next thing that we'll do is very intensive. We're going to make an object movie of the dancer, so you can hotspot the dancer and move all around their body. We'd also like to be able to click on a dancer and see the streaming film of the movement."
Sferes and Rosanne Chamecki co-founded Dance Online in February 1995, when a friend donated server space for them to move their AOL bulletin board onto the Internet. First known as Dancing on a Line, Dance Online compensated for dissatisfying print coverage of dance with weekly reviews and listings of dance events, interviews with choreographers, and a photo section. A recently-added Dance News area reports on events such as the Portuguese festival Dancas na Cidade; while Dance Talk publicizes career opportunities and provides a forum for such pressing issues as: "How Do Dancers Make Money?"
This issue is core to Dance Online. Besides a preoccupation with the physical over the virtual, a near vow of poverty is one primary factor making dance one of the least wired of all artistic disciplines.
"The dance community in New York is not online, because they use all their resources to dance," says Sferes. "They rarely have enough money and time to investigate new technology. When the price of hardware falls low enough, I think my peers [in America] will catch up with what's going on in Holland and Germany." To that end, Dance Online has joined with an Internet host to offer discount email and Web hosting to dance companies and artists, bringing new grace and body awareness to the Web.
The second part of the (.Mov)ement Series will allow viewers to visit Earthdance, a Massachusetts "dance oasis" complete with hand-made sauna, spacious dance barn, and readily-available mountainscapes. Dance Online is also proposing to develop a Web-based dance archiving system with streaming video, and The Body Imperfect, a multimedia project depicting images of anatomy, dancers' drawings of their own injuries, and the highly personalized hodgepodge of traditional and alternative medicine used by dancers.
"It's going to get more elaborate as we go," Sferes says. "We'll basically do everything we can within QuickTime VR. After that, it's up to [QuickTime-maker] Apple."
