Dancing goes digital

Picture six modern dance professionals leaping and jumping high into the air with 45 light-reflecting dots covering their bodies. While they dance, cameras around them film their movements while transforming them into animated 3-D images. These images will be part of an abstract projection shown during the final performance. \nIf that's not enough to make the audience dizzy, the animated dancing image on the computer screen shifts angles in an infinite number of ways. This is only phase one.\nNew York-based choreographer Ben Munisteri of Ben Munisteri Dance Projects has brought six dancers from his company to IU for the creation of a revolutionary dance project using motion-capture technology, something that is a first for a mid-level dance company like his, Munisteri said.\nThe dancers, along with Munisteri, have worked every day for the past three weeks on the project using the same kind of technology seen in movies such as "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Polar Express", Munisteri said. \nThe dancers put about 45 infrared light-sensitive dots on their bodies while dancing, Munisteri said. The markers are automatically read by infrared cameras and translated onto a computer that fashions the animated figure represented by dots, he said. This projection will mirror the live performance, called "Terra Nova" which means "New World" in Latin. "Terra Nova" will premiere in April at the University of California, Santa Cruz. \n"This is really the first time anyone has done a project like this," dancer Hope Davis said. "It's exciting. It's kind of fun."\nThe most unique part of the project is that the video will allow audience members to see the images from a multitude of angles, Munisteri said.\n"I can rotate the dance at any speed in any direction and show it on a video projection," he said. "That just fits with the way I choreograph ... It's a different experience. It fits the way I make dances very well."\nMunisteri is still undecided on the relationship between the project on the screen and the live performance that will be going on. He does know the video projection will be abstract and the dancers will mirror what is going on behind them.\n"We're thinking of using the motion-capture data to put the dance inside moving organic forms like a lava flow," he said. "And it'll be perceptible, but it won't be literal."\nWith 12 cameras, infinite points of view are available, Munisteri said. The culmination of the company's three week residency is a preview of the group's work at an open house 2 p.m. Friday in HPER 161.\nAfter meeting IU Contemporary Dance Coordinator, Liz Shea, at the National Dance Education Organization where both Munisteri and Shea presented lectures on dance and technology, they decided to combine efforts using IU's technology and Munisteri's talents.\n"It's just very rare that a project on this scale comes together so quickly and so completely," Munisteri said. "I would definitely say motion-capture equipment is not commonplace."\nThe new Ergonomics Laboratory has a 3-D video motion analysis system that contains eight high-speed, digital cameras that can record ground reaction forces, according to a media release. \nThough the equipment has been used in the past to study injury and skill acquisition, this is the first time it's been used at IU for a dance project, Shea said. \nMunisteri tried to imagine the finished product onstage and mustered up what he hopes it will become.\n"If you can imagine like a dancer is a virtual paintbrush, so when she moves on stage and travels across the stage, she leaves behind in her wake a stroke of moving colors and images where the dance she just danced is embedded in the images," he said. "I hope it works out that way"