Decadancetheatre opens at Joyce SoHo tomorrow evening (Jul 15), and if I wasn’t excited enough by the all-female Brooklyn-based hip-hop troupe with live DJs, it came to my attention that Artistic Director Jennifer Weber has teamed up with multimedia artist Holly Daggers on integrating 3-D video into all of their performances. I sat down with Ms. Daggers yesterday to talk about this exciting collaboration in the Joyce SoHo conference room.
As the audience walks into Joyce SoHo this weekend, they will be handed 3D glasses to wear at their discretion throughout the show. Throughout the performance, video will be projected on the back wall that is enhanced by wearing the glasses, though they’re not necessary. The 3-D technology being utilized in the video for this performance is different from what you see in an IMAX movie theater – while it operates on the same principle that red images jump forward and blue images jump back, you still will see sharp, colorful graphics even when you take your glasses off.
This is the first collaboration between Ms. Weber and Ms. Daggers, who were introduced through a mutual friend. Jennifer Weber used to work with turning classic narrative works into hip-hop works – for example, she has adapted Firebird and different works by Shakespeare. For this concert, she’s stepping away from narrative and moving into the thematic, presenting an evening entitled When the Sky Breaks. Ms. Daggers has enjoyed the challenge of updating the distinct imagery of hip-hop to be utilized in this evening of hip-hop concert dance. The results are sure to be thrilling.
