Wally Cardona
Intervention #2: Dr. Heidi Jo Newberg
October 2, 2010 @ EMPAC, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Dr. Heidi Jo Newberg is an astronomer and physicist.
Each Intervention is a five-day collaboration between dancer/choreographer Wally Cardona and an expert in a field other than dance. They enter the studio as strangers and through their intimate encounter they generate a new work. Each public performance provides the imperative.
HOW IT WORKS:
“I look to each expert to come in and initiate a disturbance — to my process, way of thinking, patterns of decision-making, and aesthetic stance. We begin as strangers and get acquainted through a weeklong working process. On Day One, I perform my ‘empty solo’ for each collaborator as a starting point and form of introduction. I present each expert with the same solo. Only the expert ever sees this ‘empty solo’, designed to bend to his/her interpretation, opinion, desire, or aesthetics. I try very hard to succumb. What I am most interested in is what each expert might want to see even though he/she might not yet know how to make it manifest; how to do this is discovered, together, in the studio. There is no system to the week and how it unfolds; it is unique to each expert. What we know is that a public performance is the final result, which the expert cannot make without me, and for which I am reliant on the expert's opinion. The expert is asked to play a part in all decision-making leading to the performance, including content, lighting, costume and any accoutrements related to the production.”
- Wally Cardona
Intervention is an adaptation of Paris-based choreographer Jennifer Lacey’s project, My First Time with a Dramaturge. Each project exists independent of the identity of “research” and results in its own choreographed objects. Working apart for the past year, holding these tandem projects in the U.S. and France, respectively, Cardona and Lacey have treated their artistic positions to the constant reassessment, opinions and desires of an “outsider”. It enables them to begin their upcoming collaboration - Tool Is Loot - in a similar state of aesthetic disorientation.
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Intervention is a production of WCV, Inc. Intervention #2 is commissioned in Part By EMPAC Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY”
Special thanks to Hélène Lesterlin and everyone at EMPAC.
