Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Dancers, Musicians, and Network Engineers Prepare for a Multi-Site Performance By FLORENCE OLSEN "It's all about bandwidth, baby," says Danial Shapiro, a Minneapolis choreographer who on Thursday will help stage two multi-site "networked" performances that he says are without precedent. Mr. Shapiro, a founder and artistic director of the Shapiro & Smith Dance company, is working with three dozen student and professional dancers in three cities who will perform works together. A week of rehearsals and high-speed-network tests will culminate in two dance performances on Thursday for a live audience at the SuperComputing 2001 conference in Denver. The dancers -- with help from musicians and network engineers also at distant sites -- are using DVD-quality streaming video and other Internet2 technologies to choreograph and stage their experimental art. One set of dancers, who will dress in red, will be at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. Dancers in blue will join them from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, in Minneapolis. A third group of dancers, in white, will be in Denver at the supercomputing conference. Mr. Shapiro, who will be in Denver during the performances, will select shots from high-resolution video feeds carried over high-speed U.S. and international research networks. The images will be displayed for the Denver audiences on three 10-by-10-foot projection screens. The dancers in Denver will perform in front of the screens. Live music for the dancers will be provided by percussionists at the University of Campinas near São Paulo, Brazil, and by Welson Tremura, a classical guitarist who is a visiting assistant professor of Latin American music at the University of Florida. Transposing dance from real space on a stage into "virtual space" raises interesting questions for dancers, Mr. Shapiro says. "In such a physical art form," he asks, "what elements of physical presence can you do without?" Mr. Shapiro, who describes himself as "sort of a nerd," says he is intrigued by the high-quality video, which he says gives artists an inexpensive way to be seen and to distribute their work. "This opens up a whole new medium for us," Mr. Shapiro says. "I liken it to the way artists move into neighborhoods before other people do and start taking over the loft spaces," he adds. "Right now, with Internet2, there's no hot or cold water, the plumbing is balky, but we're all going to move in here." Dancers at the Minneapolis campus will perform in the Barbara Barker Center for Dance. The center was wired to accommodate advanced network performances and may be "the only dance-studio theater in the United States that has an access-grid node and an Internet2 hub," Mr. Shapiro says. Access-grid nodes are places where computers, video cameras, microphones, video projectors, and high-bandwidth Internet2 connections can be used for simultaneous, or "multicast," videoconferences among several remote locations. Viewers who are not at the conference or who do not have an access-grid node at their location can use the commercial Internet and an online media player to see low-resolution, streaming-video versions of rehearsals and the event itself. The first of two 10-minute dance performances begins Thursday at 12:30 p.m. Mountain time (2:30 Eastern time). The performances, titled "Dancing Beyond Boundaries," are a production of the University of Florida's Digital Worlds Institute. The institute is run by the Colleges of Engineering and Fine Arts to promote collaboration among artists and computer and network engineers. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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