Summary

Well of Pearls is an interactive media performance exploring the boundaries we place on ourselves and the possibility of more limitless identities.

Project Team

André M. Zachary, Visiting Artist

Collaborators
Charles Vincent Burwell, Composer

Ohio State University Collaborators
Norah Zuniga-Shaw, Producer, ACCAD/Dance
Oded Huberman, ACCAD/Dance
Alex Oliszewski, ACCAD/Theater
Jazelynn Goudy, MFA Student, Dance

Project Description:

Over the course of the 2018 autumn semester, choreographer and performer André M. Zachary created Well of Pearls, an interactive media performance that explores the boundaries we place on ourselves and the possibility of more limitless identities. In collaboration with composer Charles Vincent Burwell, Zachary immerses the audience in video projections and sound intermixed with live performers. This project was part of a Livable Futures co-sponsored residency in the Motion Lab performance research space at ACCAD. Working with students from the Department of Dance, producer Norah Zuniga Shaw, and a team of ACCAD faculty and staff, Zachary explored all the possibilities of the incredible intermedia technologies on hand in the Motion Lab.

Zachary says, “Well of Pearls is an example of a space that literally is shifting. The projection surfaces are moving all around you. The narratives in the performer's bodies, some of them are built from themselves—from the work and narratives that they have written. It's for me, trying to amplify their voices and then allowing them to really affect the space and allowing the space to affect the viewer, allowing the viewers to really be close and personal to performance in a way that they never would have seen before.”

Zachary and his collaborators at ACCAD designed the interactive projected media to be revealed on and through the hanging scrims and be responsive to any movement in the space. Because it is impossible to take everything in all at once, viewers are invited to move around and see the performance from different perspectives.

Zachary says, “we are not trying to lock your imagination into a fixed state where you sit in your seat; watch that, receive this. We're saying, enter this space and be prepared to be turned upside down. And, I think, that in this type of creative environment, we’re able to communicate this. And the performers are able to have literally, a new experience every time they do the work.”