Shen Wei Dance Arts

Fake Love

I was the lead technical director and creative technologist for a number of productions that Fake Love executed for Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2011 and 2012. We worked directly with world renowned choreographer Shen Wei to help realize his creative vision for a number of new works that sought to incorporate multimedia, experience design, and dance.

Fake Love's first collaboration with Shen Wei was for a piece called Collective Measures (aka Limited States) that premiered in Summer 2011 at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina. I worked on the projection design, live visual elements, pre-rendered visuals, interactive hardware, and performed the video elements live during a multi-night run.

Undivided Divided was the second piece and it premiered at NYC's Park Avenue Armory in November 2011 and then became part of their touring repetory. The work also featured lighting design from Jennifer Tipton, and music from So Percussion. This piece involved 12 projectors, projection mapping onto specific stage elements, and a number of playback devices all running in sync

Technical Approach

Since these were both for largescale stage performances, the technical approach required a lot of careful consideration around how video would be handled in a stage environment, while also thinking about tight timelines and up to the minute changes.

Collective Measures required 3 projectors and playback from a single laptop. We used a combination of Jitter for visuals creation, and then VDMX for the live performance and queuing system. We captured a bunch of source footage of the dances and then used the live visuals software to quickly iterate on different looks and effects that could bring the works to life while making collaboration fast and easy with Shen Wei. We also incorporated a live wireless camera onto the dancer for part of the performance - something that was not particularly easy in 2011.

Undivided Divided was a signficant jump up in terms of scale and ambition. The entire performance covered roughly 200x100ft of stage in the Park Avenue Armory and had to be synchronized with lighting design and other elements. Due to production constraints and 2011 tech limitations, this show had to be run across 4 different computers (running 3 projectors each) with a 5th computer as the showrunner. It utilized a communications tool to sync OSC messages across all computers for different cues and allowed for a main view on the main playback computer.