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Tidal Traces

Tidal Traces is a collaborative research project with film maker Nancy Lee, dancers Lexi Vajda, Zhara Shahab and Rianne Švelnis and composer Kiran Bhumber.

Through a year long residency at the Dance Centre 2016- 2017 we explored choreographic possibilities of VR 360 Dance Film. We pitched the project to the National Film Board and they produced the final version that was filmed in the summer of 2017. 

Captured offshore on intertidal mudflats near Vancouver, Tidal Traces is a 360-video VR dance piece that places viewers in the centre of the performance. In it, three characters explore a new and uncertain world—moving between tranquility and ominousness, beauty and peril. Entangled in this tension, the viewer becomes the fourth character, directly composing the dance through their gaze.

WHY VR + DANCE?

Virtual reality is an immersive environment that takes over your senses through vision and sound. When putting on a virtual reality headset, you are transported to another world where you can look around by moving your head, and the spacial sound design reinforces the illusion that you are inside the scene. This induces feelings of empathy as the immersion of senses is the ultimate way of experiencing embodiment from the character’s point of view. 
By using dance as the storytelling medium we want to increase these sensorial and empathetic stimuli. Through a movement activated space there will be more possibilities for the audience to explore and a direct body to body experience. 


VR dance film is a new and yet to be explored medium. What we feel VR can offer to dance presentation is placing the audience/viewer where it would not usually be possible for it to go. In a traditional stage presentation of dance, audience’s senses are involved in a very conventional, limited way that is visually flat. Dance films however, allow for a closer, visually more dynamic experience of movement, as well as possibilities of breaking continuity, time and space. However there is a divide between the viewer and the performers, the piece has happened in a different time and space from when it is watched. This instigates less physical empathy and immersion of senses comparing to watching live dance. There is also a selection, or framing that happens in the process of creating the film through choosing the angle, distance and editing choices. VR surpasses that limitation and brings back some of those choices to the audience through interactivity. It also opens the possibility of experiencing adventurous points of view, such as placing the viewer in a scene of aerial dance, dance on moving platforms or in remote locations or extreme conditions.
 

Credits:


Produced by the National Film Board of Canada

By Nancy Lee, Emmalena Fredriksson and the NFB Digital Studio

Dancers: Zahra Shahab, Rianne Svelnis and Lexi Vajda

Technical Director: Olivier Leroux

Picture Editor: Nancy Lee

Sound Designer: Kiran Bhumber

Music “Submergence”
Composed by Kiran Bhumber

Title Design: Eli Muro

Costume Designer: Adam-Lin Bungag

Hair and Make-up Artist: Min-Jee Mowat

Production Assistant: Richard Wilson

Producers: Nicholas Klassen and Robert McLaughlin

Creative Technologist: Vincent McCurley

Executive Producer: Robert McLaughlin

Project Manager: Laura Mitchell

Production Coordinator: Jasmine Pullukatt

Studio Administrator: Carla Jones

Marketing Manager: Tammy Peddle

Publicist: Katja De Bock

Web Marketing: Kathryn Ruscito

 


Press Relations: 
Katja De Bock
Vancouver
Work:  604-666-8585
Cellular:  778-628-4890
K.DeBock@nfb.ca

@NFB_Katja

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