Vital Spark - Seed, Cloud, Hyacinth, Bird
Seed, Cloud, Hyacinth, Bird
Vital Spark Performance Group
Stone Valley Arts – Poultney, Vermont
West Rutland Town Hall – West Rutland, Vermont
October 18-19, 2024
- Concept and Direction : Erika Schmidt
- Collaborating Ensemble: Melisa Clark, Lina Cloffe, Val Geisey, Lea Reill, Alex Welych-Miller, Molly Winslow-Hanson, Ulyiana Schkel
- A/V Design: Toby Kaufmann-Buhler
- Original music: Toby Kaufmann-Buhler, Nick Turner, Gary Schmidt
Project description by Erika Schmidt:
Seed, cloud, hyacinth, bird is a live art media performance created through integration of dance, theater, audio/visual design, set /costume design, live music and original soundscape.The project observes human behavior within the individual and the group through which a circular narrative is developed by the ensemble and where patterns and unpredictable shifts occur. The project has been created through collaboration between ten extraordinary artists that have come together from diverse visual and performing art media backgrounds. The collaboration is significant to expressing both personal and collective experience to life in the here and now. The project reflects on ways that the technosphere has begun to penetrate our ecosphere and questions the effects of virtual reality on our experience of and relationship to each other and the natural world. Throughout the performance, video and soundscape create perceptible alterations in feeling, rhythm and mode. Through layered intensification and then gradual diminishment of media stimuli there is a return to a particular clarity seen through the dance. Dance as illumination to what movement is, and to what it can be. Dance that is integral to the workings of our mind and sprit and consciousness.
Video documentation excerpt from the work featuring video & saw performance (also in photos below), from West Rutland Town Hall performance:
