Mehr als nur

Some­times, we feel like we are car­ry­ing the weight of what every­one else expects us to be. We want­ed to find a way to cre­ate a direct link between the phys­i­cal body and a room filled with light and sound. The goal was to reflect the inter­nal strug­gle of the dancer in the sur­round­ing space.

We devel­oped “Mehr als nur” 2023 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences St. Pöl­ten for the media tech­nol­o­gy pro­gram.

The per­for­mance is built around a poem that asks tough ques­tions about the self. To bring these words to life, we used spe­cial motion sen­sors. The dancer wears these small devices on their wrists and ankles. As she moves through the dif­fer­ent emo­tions of the poem—from the heavy, drag­ging thoughts to feel­ing float­ing­ly light and firm­ly grounded—the sen­sors track her every move and send the data to a com­put­er. This allowed us to make the dancer’s body inter­act with the entire room.

The project involved build­ing an instal­la­tion with sev­er­al pro­jec­tors and speak­ers. We used spe­cial­ized soft­ware to cre­ate the visu­als and sound. Instead of the dancer per­form­ing to a pre-record­ed track, the video and audio are pro­duced in real-time. The shapes on the walls and the sounds in the air change based on how fast or how high the dancer reach­es or kicks.

The final result was a live per­for­mance where the dancer was essen­tial­ly “play­ing” the room like an instru­ment. We set this up in the lob­by of a vacant the­ater and used mul­ti­ple cam­eras to film the event.

Contributors

Art direc­tor: Johan­na Das­er

Tech­ni­cal direc­tor: Elias van Gils

Pro­duc­er: Vik­to­ria Schnei­der

Pro­duc­er: Nao­mi Had­er

Dancer: Joy Ogboi

Voice: Katha­ri­na Set­tele

Visu­als: Ange­li­ka Duf­fek

Sound: Clara Köberl

DOP: Stephan Wet­z­ka

Graph­ic design: Anna Alt­mann

Thanks

Markus Win­ters­berg­er

Otto Wag­n­er Are­al