Greetings ADA people!

- - - 

121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance begins this Wednesday, 5 December, 
with a retrospective programme entitled "Walking Backwards into the Future."

Proverbs from many cultures express the concept of "walking backwards into the 
future" (in Maori, "ka mura, ka muri"), to learn from those who have gone 
before us as we forge new paths; it is also a quote from media theorist 
Marshall McLuhan. In this spirit, the first part of the 121212 UpStage Festival 
seeks to acknowledge and celebrate the body of cyberformance work that has been 
created since the first UpStage festival in 2007.

- - 

Walking Backwards into the Future takes place from 5-11 December, and is 
followed by a programme of new works, Testing 1 2, 1 2, 1 2, over 27 hours on 
Wednesday 12 December (with a bit on the 11th and 13th, depending on your time 
zome).

Opening the festival is Come and Go by Avatar Body Collision, the cyberformance 
troupe who initiated UpStage in 2003. In this cyberformance the group 
faithfully represent's Samuel Beckett's short play Come and Go in the online 
environment. The avatars' words and actions adhere strictly to the script, 
under the watchful eye of a tyrannical director and with comments from Beckett 
himself.

Other highlights from 070707 are: Baba Yaga, incorporating shadow puppet 
techniques into a beautiful cyberformance: Freeze Flight or Fight, which 
invites audiences to share their experiences of dealing with rejection; Learn 
to Hear Through the Lies of Your Eyes: The Cyberforming Hybridization of 
Tuxedomoon, which "addresses the position of the contemporary musician in a 
relation to predominantly scopophilic regime of the Artworld based on 
information technology"; and Interface, a playful face-to-face meeting on the 
surface of the interface.

From the 080808 UpStage Festival, there is: Calling Home: The Big Get-Together, 
the show which spawned the cyberformance troupe Activelayers; RxEgo-go, 
exploring the role of medi(c)ation in a symptomatized, technologized society; 
Mysterious Mali's Drawings, a super-hero tale by children in Brisbane; and 
Veni! ????! Dodji! to the Zapata Private/Pirate Birthday Party. And, Vice Versa 
… a cyberformance celebration of the birthday of Mexican revolutionary Emilio 
Zapata.

A "kitchen of the future" is the setting for The Dish, originally presented at 
the 090909 festival. From 101010, MASS-MESS explores the meaning of symbols in 
a world of mass production, and S/Zports: A Training for the Possible Wor(l)ds 
applies the vocabulary of sports to alternative social relations. And from last 
year's festival, 11:11:11, we have Flat Earth - a poetic journey on the source 
of ideas - and Magfalda Meets the World in Pieces - a journey of discovery. All 
of the performances are accessible to online audiences via a standard web 
browser: visit www.upstage.org.nz to find live links to the stages at the 
performance time.

On Thursday 6 December there will be a "node" - screening of performances at a 
physical venue - at Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark, from 4pm-6pm CET.

The 121212 UpStage Festival of Cyberformance is organised by Festival 
Architects Helen Varley Jamieson and Vicki Smith, with a team of dedicated 
volunteers and the talented artists. It is the sixth annual festival of 
cyberformance - live online interactive events created and presented for online 
audiences.

- - - 

kia ora ra
helen & vicki ")
UpStage festival Architects

[email protected]
www.upstage.org.nz





_______________________________________________
Ada_list mailing list
[email protected]
http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/

Reply via email to