ImageMovementSound may be one of
Rochester’s best-kept secrets. Most residents don’t even know it exists. But
outsiders seem to know. Kelly Ferris, a first-year SUNY Brockport grad student
from Tennessee says, “One of the reasons I came here to Rochester was to be a
part of this festival.”
In its ninth consecutive year,
ImageMovementSound 2005 (IMS) is an experimental event that combines three
schools and three mediums: the School of Film and Animation at RIT, the
Department of Dance at SUNY Brockport, and the University of Rochester’s Eastman
School of Music. There are 12 projects slated to premier this year.
What to expect? Just one of the
projects is Accoucher: To Bring Forth,
a “screen-dance” that combines a ladder, a hundred-foot rope, and the idea that
a film can be like a haiku. To capture it, IMS co-founder Susannah Newman wore
a video-camera contraption on her forehead that she claims to have invented.
“It looks kind of silly, but it allows me to go inside the dance.”
The 11 other projects explore
disparate themes — from jealousy to supermarkets — but they all hope to
achieve a similar goal. Ferris, who contributes to the piece Wrapped Inside,
says, “I’m looking to unite film, music, and dance, I didn’t want any one
medium to predominate.”
Thus the amalgam, ImageMovementSound,
which is an attempt to create a word for something the artists are still trying
to define. Festival co-director Stephanie Maxwell describes some projects as,
“image-music compositions.” She says, “The two are highly intertwined and
interwoven. They excite each other… We feel these are new art forms.”
The recruitment process of IMS is
unique. The festival directors orchestrate a “call meeting” in the fall for
artists to convene. “You get five minutes to say, ‘these are the things I’m
interested in,'” says Newman. It’s a marathon of ideas — up to 30 artists from
different backgrounds present ideas all day. A reception follows. Artists
mingle, looking for a match. It’s kind of like a speed-dating event for lonely,
single artists.
So how does this white-knuckled
approach to fine art actually work? Abby Aresty, a senior music composition
major at Eastman explains, “At the meeting I saw some of [RIT animator] Hyun
Ju’s works and I was very inspired by their aesthetic beauty and by the mixture
of a real and virtual world that was present. I asked her and another RIT
artist if they would be interested in collaborating on a project. We met a few
times to discuss ideas, and in the end just Hyun Ju and I decided to work
together. At one point Hyun Ju mentioned that she was interested in working
with a choreographer, so I emailed Sarah McCormick from SUNY Brockport asking
if there were any choreographers still in search of a composer. Missy Pfohl
Smith contacted me, and that’s how Hyun Ju and I came to work on a project
together with Missy.”
“The idea is to start with a blank
page,” explains Newman, “then you build the idea together.” This is the exact opposite of how most festivals
approach; most look for finished projects rather than stimulate original works.
The festival works on a shoestring, but artists are allotted small budgets,
usually under the range of a thousand dollars, “sometimes very under a thousand,” Newman says.
Artists make their proposals before a
committee, and if approved, they’ve got about six months to pull off something
worth exhibiting to the public. Not every proposal pans out. Projects get
dropped; groups disband.
“We encourage people to do things
they’ve never done before,” says Susannah Newman. “The idea is to not repeat yourself and take yourself
out on a limb somewhere… and if you fall off, so be it, you fall off.”
Often, projects are changing right up
until the last second. One, called Rigors,
is advertised on the IMS webpage as “a work for 18 dancers.” Clarification by
Maxwell swelled the number to 60, further re-clarification by Newman shrunk the
number back to eight or nine. So who knows at this point? You’ll just have to
go to see how many dancers show.
Is this festival for everyone?
“Sure,” says Maxwell. “It’s open to everybody: kids, the elderly. Last year we
had a group of senior citizens come. I sat behind this older guy who, after
seeing a performance, stood up and, pulling up his pants, said, ‘I don’t what
that was about, but I really liked it.'”
ImageMovementSound
2005 is on Saturday, April 2, in the Hartwell Theatre, on the SUNY
Brockport campus, at 8 p.m. Screen works and cinematic versions of a selection
of the performances will be shown on Saturday, April 9, at the Little Theatre,
240 East Avenue, at 12 p.m. Tickets are $5 for either event. Info: 229-2491, imsrochester.org
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2005.
