Creating a dance work to be shown on a 360-degree dome has required some creative thinking from choreographer Daniel Belton and his technical team. They tell Rebecca Fox about the challenge.
Put together ballet dancers, couture, experimental music and 360-degree film-making and you have AXIS - anatomy of space, Dunedin choreographer Daniel Belton's latest work.
No stranger to innovative works, Belton is always looking to take things a step further so when he heard Otago Museum was building a planetarium he was straight on the phone.
''I've always wanted to make a piece for a 360-degree dome. I'm not aware of anyone else doing a dance for a dome.''
With the museum on board, Belton started to think about what could be done.
''Even though at that point we did not know how it would work, he could see the potential and has come up with a beautiful end product,'' Otago Museum marketing and development director Caroline Cook said. ''We're really excited to be part of it.''
When an opportunity for Creative New Zealand funding for projects between New Zealand and Asia came up, Belton thought of Singaporean-based composers Joyce Beetuan Koh and Permagnus Lindburg.
''We brainstormed some ideas. We had a nice dialogue to-ing and fro-ing and then the concept for the work arrived,'' Belton said.
He also got former Dunedin and now Auckland-based fashion designer Tanya Carlson on board to design the costumes.
The pair had worked together many years ago on different projects so with this one they just fell into creative step, Carlson said.
Designing for one of Belton's works is quite liberating as there is a lot of freedom to create and design the garments.
For inspiration Carlson visited the Biennale of Sydney and was particularly taken by Joyce Campbell's Flightdream HD video and Lauren Brincat's Salt Lines: Play It As It Sounds.
''It's an incredible work. I immersed myself in other forms of art and then came back and let it sit.''
Next came the drawings and fabrics before meeting the dancers and watching how they worked so she could design costumes which allowed for their range of movement.
''When I first started I had ideas ... of plasticy raincoats and all sorts, but once I saw the dancers move ...''
She presented 10 different drawings to Belton who picked six which were ''right on the mark'', he said.
Carlson and Belton met at the Royal New Zealand Ballet's (RNZB) headquarters in Wellington and with assistance from the wardrobe masters there began to create the costumes.
''It's all about making shapes and keeping viewers focused and enjoying watching the forms move,'' Carlson said.
The pleating in the costumes has also been reflected in some of Carlson's latest design work, including the wool coat featuring in the iD campaign.
''The film will be a revelation; I'm looking forward to it.''
RNZB artistic director Francesco Ventriglia said it was a great new creative experience for eight of the company's dancers involved in this film project.
''Our wardrobe department was happy to lend their expertise to the project and bring to life Tanya Carlson's designs.''
The company had worked with Belton on Satellites and Allegro, so it was nice to be able to extend its relationship with him and collaborate in other ways, he said.
Koh and Lindburg, from The Arts House in Singapore, first met Belton in 2013 at a stage design festival and were keen to collaborate on the project.
Lindburg, an interactive sound designer/programmer, said after seeing some of the images he felt it suited the human voice so recorded the Singapore Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts choir singing to go with the electro acoustic composition.
''But there is balance with other synthetic elements, computer-made from algorithms and then the third element is nature recordings.
''It's quite a lot but we have gone with the overall minimalistic aesthetics.''
They also had to account for the 360-degree dome rather than a flat projection, he said.
''We've brought in a couple of elements that could not work in an audio flat format two channel stereo, but can only work in a surround [sounds] situation.''
Making it work and pulling it all together was Jac Grenfell, who has been working with Belton since 2003.
It was hard to know what to expect from the dome when it was not being used it for its usual purpose, he said.
''Although it's film, it is a completely different format to one projected on to a flat surface. The main challenge for us has been to get our heads around a surface that wraps around half a ball.''
As a result, the content had to be very different to a two-dimensional film and the dancers treated as if they were in space.
''There were some limitations to the format, some things we would normally have done that we couldn't but we decided to embrace those things and incorporate them.''
Belton said the dancers from the RNZB were filmed ''essentially in a black box using the black space as a kind of transparency and the figures really look like they float''.
As most of the costumes were white or silvery there is quite a strong monochrome ''spacy look'' to the figures.
When they recorded the dancers they did not yet have the music so they just discussed ideas and movements.
''There is an interesting tension in the dome that we are playing with.''
Belton, Grenfell and Lindburg came together in Dunedin recently to put all the pieces together with the technical help of museum staff.
Having had that chance to see it projected the group described it as being like ''in a cockpit of a spaceship'' or as Lindburg says simply ''its magic''.
''It really shifts your perception of space and time,'' Belton says.
After its premier as part of iD, the film will be shown in Singapore and then at a festival in Columbia before returning to New Zealand to be shown in Auckland as part of Matariki.
To see
AXIS — anatomy of space, Otago Museum Perpetual Guardian Planetarium March 22, 7.30pm, Saturday and Sunday March 25 and 26 5.30pm and 6.30pm.
