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Education - What?: A Choreographic Evolution

What? Interactive

Introduction

Here is to life and generations dancing!
M.G.

This project was a huge undertaking of trying to update old tapes and photographs so
that they could be published. We started with old videos on Beta tape that were
recorded almost twenty years ago. We had to find a Beta deck on E-Bay. The recordings
were dark and grainy and I discovered they were loosing magnetic pieces off the tape.
They were rescued just in the nick of time.

The process of dubbing the old Beta and VHS tapes onto DVCPRO tape, a digital format,
started in 1999. During 2000-2001 I learned how to use digital editing programs and
graphics programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator as well as trained in Spruce
Technologies' DVD Maestro.

In the midst of all this Jimmy and I took a yearlong break to work on another video
project called Creative Passings. I started working on the old photographs in 2000.
These photos needed a lot of work because the chemical processes were starting to fail.
I took some of the photographs and worked on creating some digital image designs. This
process took between 2000-2002.

Beginning in June of 2002 I began capturing the dance clips into Final Cut Pro 2.0. As I
began the editing process it became apparent that most of the clips were too dark. I learned
how to apply video filters to help enhance most of the recordings. Applying filters requires
hours of rendering time and used a total of 27 gigabytes of space on my media drive. By the
end of the project I had only 4 gigabytes of space left. Which left no room to write out the
movie into quicktime or real media until I got a larger disk. Even with my best efforts there
are various sound and visual problems.

Many thanks to Jimmy for all his technical input and help when I got stuck. His expertise has
been a valuable resource and I would not have been able to complete this project without his
help. Also, special thanks to the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah
for donating the use of valuable equipment.

This project has been a journey of history. My history, about a work that had choreography
that I care deeply about and that I loved to perform. It was physically demanding and cathartic.
When I was performing the work I always wondered if I was going to make to through to the end
of the dance. I remember setting the movement on Esther Burchinal and Susie McGee-Lowdermilk as
if it were yesterday. They were incredible dancers who at that moment in time went with me on a
journey to create this most unusual piece of choreography.

Documentation of artistic work is so important, because it helps us to look back and see what
was happening at a particular point time. Documentation, also, helps us realize how far we have
improved technically from those early days. I'm glad we took steps to record rehearsals and
performances. Watching the tapes brings back so many memories, from each dancer I worked with to
each performance.

The purpose of What? Interactive is to have a resource for the analysis of the progress
of a dance, as well as, the analysis of choreography and dancers during a particular point in time.
I hope that this project is a valuable resource for today's dance teachers and students of dance.

Beth Ann Miklavcic