| ARTS - Dancing With Yourself - Katrina McPherson Interview |
| Written by Laura Parker | |
| Monday, 12 May 2008 | |
 Appealing to the ever-steady audience fascination with photo booths, award-winning Scottish dance screen artists Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes have created a touring installation that allows the average Joe to create his own short dance film. 3D’s Laura Parker speaks with McPherson to discuss the Move-Me-Com booth at the upcoming ReelDance festival.Inspired by the convenience and immediacy of the familiar photo booth, the Move-Me-Com booth is part of the Sydney ReelDance International Dance on Screen Festival. The user steps inside the booth, pulls the curtain and then proceeds to select their choice of choreographer. Once they’ve done this, the choreographer will talk the booth’s occupant through a set of movements, which they can see themselves doing on camera. They can then rehearse their routine, play it back and when they’re happy with it, record it to be uploaded to the move-me.com website, on the ever-growing collection of video dances created in the Move-Me-Com booth all around the world. Where and when did the idea for Move-Me come along? The Move-Me booth was inspired by the idea of a photo booth and the context of a private space within a public arena. The idea is you go into the booth and there’s a kind of an ATM screen in front of you where you can select which choreographer you want to work with and then that choreographer’s voice is heard and they guide you through a set of instructions, so you listen to that and then create your dance – you perform it in the booth, it’s recorded on a small video camera and then that’s uploaded to a specially designed website which you can then go and watch. Anybody can visit and watch the videos which have been created in the booth. What was the turning point for this idea? We came up with the idea and we then went through Ricochet Dance Productions, which is a London-based dance company with whom we had collaborated a few times. We ran the idea past them and they also liked it very much, so we joined forces and started fundraising and we were very surprised by how quickly the funding came in for the booth. It was quite ambitious as we’d never done anything like that nor seen anything like it before. The Move-Me booth is obviously very familiar and accessible to audiences. Why you think it is a good way for audiences to interact with dance? I think this is a good idea because the thread that’s always gone through our work – the idea of putting the audience at the heart of the work. The booth doesn’t allow you to just stand back and observe, it really moves into the heart of the action so that you feel like you’re part of the dance. The next stage in our work has been the interactive web-based work where the user is able to effectively re-edit the work. We realised that with our work, our edits were a series of choices that we’d made and that other people would make different choices. The Move-Me booth was the next step – if the audience actually created the performance themselves, that would be really something. So we thought about how we could make it happen, and how we could film it, and that’s when the idea for the booth came up. WHAT: ReelDance International Dance on Screen Festival WHERE: Carriageworks WHEN: 11 – 18 May MORE: reeldance.org.au |
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