FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
The Elektrik Zoo performs at NOCCA
New Orleans, LA – April 26, 2009 – The Elektrik Zoo Creative Partnership performed their latest collaborative creation “Amused” at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) this weekend. “Amused” is their second collaboration with local Choreographer and NOCCA Dance Instructor Chard Gonzalez and was performed as part of the NOCCA Spring Dance Concert.
“We really liked working with Chard on ‘Atawii’ and were quite keen to collaborate with him again,” said Daneeta Jackson, co-founder of the Elektrik Zoo. “Chard created the piece with nine dancers representing the nine muses. He had seen our music video “Little Baby Eyes” and really liked what we had done with light. So, expanding on that idea, we decided to incorporate the dancers into the projection. We wired them up with lights and shot them using a stills camera on a slow shutter speed. The result is a dance of light that we then animated through Final Cut Pro.
The music Chard chose was Rajaton’s ‘Dobbin’s Flowery Vale,’ which is this amazing a capella, and we wanted the projection to react to the music. We brought everything into Isadora, where we could cause the video to react to the highs and lows of the music. I think the result became something almost other-worldly.”
Gonzales and the Elektrik Zoo are now expanding “Atawii” from five to 20 minutes and from one to five dancers. It will be performed during the summer in New Orleans.
Screen shot from “Amused” projection.
The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts is a regional, pre-professional arts training center that offers secondary school-age children intensive instruction in dance, media arts, music (classical, jazz, vocal), theatre arts (drama, musical theatre, theatre design) , visual arts, and creative writing, while demanding simultaneous excellence.
