www.livedesignonline.com: Distilling the essence of Alvin Ailey for the 60th Anniversary of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) was a challenging task for Bob Bonniol, Caryl Glaab, and Pablo N. Molina of MODE Studios, who created a video tribute that includes rarely seen photos, videos, and audio interviews with the late Alvin Ailey. The result is “Becoming Ailey,” a five-minute multimedia piece that ran at the opening of each performance during the company’s fall 2018 New York City season.
2 comments:
This show must be extremely complicated for the media team. I am on the “Its in the Bag” crew as the media board operator, and watch close up as the designer and engineers work to do different shapes in different areas of the stage with masks. They do a lot just getting the shape to look normal, and makes me want to see how the team at Mode Studios dealt with so many different locations on set. I was also very interested in the lighting, and wish there were more images to aid the text. I understand there is integrity for the show as well as advertisement to bring in an audience, but it would still nice to see more snapshots of key moments to help really show what the mood of the show is. The article describes the show to be quite poignant, and I am curious to how that would be if the show is reflecting on a group of real people whom the audience didn’t know personally.
I have seen different video clips of “Becoming Ailey” and the designs look absolutely incredible. First of all, I think it is incredibly unique that the company was able to come together and review the archives of Ailey’s work and interviews, because when you watch the work he is done and hear how he talks about dance and his creations, it is truly incredible. But secondary, it is even more incredible to see how a team of media designers and engineers were able to record and map to different portions of the stage and theatrical space. I think it was incredibly smart of them to choose to layer in other color fields behind as well- because it pulls away from the poor quality of video (since it was recorded so long ago) and allows it to live a new life and be seen in another an better way.. The soundscape of Ailey seems similarly intriguing, and I can only imagine what the experience of watching “Becoming Ailey” is like when you are actually in the seats, waiting to see some of the incredible work that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is going to put on.
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