ballet electrònic

Artistic residency at El Graner: Centre de creació de dansa i arts vives (Barcelona) as part of the Postgraduate degree in technology applied to scene of Institut del Teatre (2025).

The piece consists of four diminute ballerina figures rotating on their vertical axis, lit from above by a spotlight and accompanied by the sound of a music box. As the audience tries to get closer to them, they stop dancing, the light gets dimmer and the music slows down progressively. This creates a counterintuitive dialog between the audience and the piece, in which the ballerinas have to be observed from far away, making them harder to see. The whole process was recorded using a wide-angled webcam to convey the contrast in scales that we were playing with.

The ballerinas are mounted on a servo motor each, which remains hidden under a spotlight iris piece. The servo motors are controlled by an Arduino Uno and driven by an ultrasound proximity sensor. The Arduino sends serial info to a laptop with a Processing sketch in which the light is controlled via DMX and the music is regulated.