THE CIRCUS ARTS IN FIRE TOGETHER

OSCILLATIONS, Facebook-Oculus, and Universal Music Group collaborated to bring "Fire Together" to life, offering a vision of hope and beauty for the 21st century.

#art #beauty #dance #collaboration #meaning #communication #innovation #humanism #totalart #gesamtkunstwerk #ballet #lyrical #hiphop #contemporary #contemporarydance #breakdance #martialarts #technology #virtualreality #augmentedreality #vr #ar #braincomputerinterfaces #bci #artificialintelligence #neuroscience #cognitivepsychology

--------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT
--------------------------------------------

Brendan: So, when you see the thing that we made, when you go into virtual reality and you watch the first oscillations performance, you might wonder why these particular forms of movement arts, why did we bring these particular artists together for this project? Well, I think the artists that we selected and the movement, art forms that they represent, offer a peek into the cross cultural collaborations that are happening right now. The circus arts make a big appearance in this piece. That's the world that I come from. I spent about five or six years training to become a circus artist and a competitive aerialist, Joris and Elena. We're kind of a circus experiment, maybe a circus first.

Elena: My name is Elena brocade. I'm from Los Angeles originally, but I began my circus career 15 years ago here in Chicago.

Joris: My name is Joris. I live in Belgium, but I'm from France. I live in Brussels. I do circus arts and dance

Brendan: The Spanish web is basically a rope that hangs from the ceiling. It's got a loop at the top, and you wrap yourself up you tumble down. But what's really interesting about it is that you have another person at the bottom called the setter, and they're holding on to the rope and they're spinning it and creates this beautiful effect for the aerialist. Now, Elena and I wanted to know what it would be like if the setter wasn't just this element that you're supposed to forget. What if the setter was also dancing? What if they were doing this kind of floor work and acrobatics? That's more common to Joris's routines. And what if we mixed even a little bit of capoeira in their contemporary dance, and that's where the circus piece evolved. And we nailed it. Joris and Elena were absolutely incredible in terms of how quickly they put it together. how quickly they took this concept ran with it perfected it,

Joris: D’accord au début, j'étais un petit peu. J'étais un peu frustré parce que je devais garder cette rotation. Je devais garder à la faire tourner tout le temps en même temps. On m'avait demandé qu'il fallait que je bouge. Donc je savais. Je ne savais pas trop comment garder cette rotation et bouger en même temps. À chaque fois que j'essayais de bouger sa caisse à casser le truc. Ça ne marchait pas. Donc, on en a. Finalement, on a réussi un peu à l'imiter et à trouver les mouvements qui vont dans cette rotation. Donc, il faut aussi que je tourne dans le même sens, qu'elle change vraiment, etc. Etc. C'est une histoire de feeling. En fait, il faut juste sentir. Il faut toujours se reconnecter avec elle. Et là, maintenant, on est connectés et ça marche.

Elena: The three or four days going before it then I was like really? Like constantly like, Am I being crazy have I like said I could create this thing that really isn't possible. And then I'd have to remind myself, no, you understand how this works. You know how your body works, it'll work. And then I would again, backtrack and be like, oh, maybe it's not gonna work. what it was, is that I didn't have somebody to do it. And Brendan basically facilitated he, like, went back and forth with me over the idea and has been so supportive about it. And then it's facilitated this opportunity to work with people who are capable of like, just doing it and trying new things, and that's pretty awesome.

Brendan: It started to look like at first maybe this wasn't gonna work out. But after about a week, they really got into a rhythm and they hammered it out in a couple of days. And the results are astonishing.